There is a lesson for us here, one that redounds onto Plato’s political question and our own: Who should rule? We feel overwhelmed by our age. So much to master: Fighting wars. Complex politics. Radically changing economics. New technologies replacing old ones before we can understand them. The mastery of each of these will not be achieved by dashing success in each. So we need to cultivate a single, essential instinct here. Anew temprament that I’ve called The Seventh Sense. And, with that done, to fight the wars, write the poems, make the civilizations to confront all that lies ahead. Our greatest hope in the race against the totalizing machines and those who control them; our finest insurance for liberty and prosperity instead of madness is not in technology. Our greatest weapon will not be our bombers our drones or our financial strength. It will be in our own humanity. We have to accept that we are going to be gated in all the ways we've seen: By speed, by Al, by the New Caste. We'll be torn apart by those new network dynamics, and placed on topologies we can hardly understand. Our future fight is not about if we are going to be enmeshed or not. It is about the terms of that enmeshment - and it is here that the great questions of politics will be decided. And where the protection of the things you love and care about will be braced against the crashing of an old order. Be Everything ahead of us will be political. We’ve established already: Connection changes the nature of an object. What’s true for a phone or a medical device, a weapon or an currency is true too for a vote. Or a citizen. The nature, the essence of an object changes as a result of connectivity. It takes that old Platonic notion of an “ideal” state and stretches it beyond what we're fully capable of understanding. Our puzzle is that while “we are what we are connected to,” it is also true that we don’t fully know or understand just what those links are yet. At certain moments it seems we're link