The computing programming technology that lingers inside most data centers now and that makes sense of the ceaselessly arriving bits - Here is information on a billion people. How many are named Bob? - is known as MapReduce. The name combines two well-know computer fuctions, Map and Reduce, and it is just the sort of program Janelle and Hillis would have dreamed up, had they ever met. MapReduce divides computation work among thousands of machines, just the sort of massive parallelism Hilli had in mind. What it implicitly does, however, is crunch what might have taken years into microseconds. If the charmed phrase of James’ stately Victorian elites more than a century ago was “Summer Afternoon,” ours might be “MapReduce”, a kind of magic two word code for a whole way of living and thinking. Be The most successful political and economic systems of the past, the ones that marked the winning “convergence” club of humanity’s last great leap, let people liberate themselves into a life of their dreams. Liberty meant tearing down old barriers to influence and security and knowledge; tipping over the Bastille, escaping colonialism. And it meant, too, providing a scaffolding of education, of social support, of laws and stability for citizens. The industrial, urban and rich countries that populate our world now evolved that way because their citizens made them so. They escaped the tyranny of the pre-modern, of a world where the small town you were born in and the pattern of your parents’ life were a kind of prision for your hopes. This was the whole trick of the Enlightenment, after all: What do you want to be? You decide! What do you want your nation to be? Decide that too. Dare to know! Look ahead now. The very best future political and economic arrangements will need to do something more than simply liberate us. They will have to enable and permit citizens to compress time. Just as the idea of a democracy was shocking once, this concept of a system tuned not merely for lib