indefinable, opposite of loneliness.”2°” The early interface of Snapchat, where you had to leave your finger resting on the screen in order for the video to unspool, was a kind of metaphor for this unbreakable relationship between touch and connection. (As was, in a different way, the diffident “out of my life” left swipe of Tinder.) “Good theories of the mind,” Hillis’ mentory Marvin Minksy once observed, “must span at least three different scales of time: slow, for the billion years in which our brains have evolved; fast, for the fleeting weeks and months of infancy and childhood; and in between, the centuries of growth of our ideas through history.”2°8 What we face now is a new time scale to add to Minksy’s list: The instant. Super-fast networks are different than slower ones - even ones as “slow” as what we have today. The ideal network is one that hovers near zero latency, where the time between what you want (or what the machines want) and the effect is as short as possible. You click a button to watch a movie and it starts instantly. You want to shut down an enemy air force, you do it with a single switch. The fantasy of a really “zero latency” system is impossible of course because even electrons moving through copper are not instant, but near-zero? Light-speed? You've probably heard stories of high-frequency stock traders who move next door to exchanges so they can capture and profit on an extra sliver of a millisecond. That’s the quest for low latency. (And more proof of the profitable link between speed and money.) Our challenge will not be about being faster - the technology will make that inevitable - it will be about managing the insane, still unknown demands of a world of suddenness. “In a distributed system, it is sometimes impossible to say that one of two events occurred first,” computer engineer Leslie Lamport wrote at the start of his famous essay “Time, Clocks and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System” - a sort of technological parallel