The Seventh Sense

Ramo, a former Time editor who became a vice chairman at Kissinger Associates, argues that connection has become the dominant fact about power and that most leaders cannot see it. He borrows the framing from Nietzsche's remark about a sixth sense for history and proposes a seventh sense: the ability to look at any object or institution and see how being connected to a network changes it.

The substantive claims concern how networks redistribute power. Ramo argues that networks produce concentration rather than distribution, because network effects generate a small number of dominant platforms. He introduces the idea of gatelands, meaning the spaces controlled by whoever operates the gates of a network, and argues that the operators of those gates hold a new kind of sovereignty that states cannot easily reach. He argues that the correct response for nations and institutions is what he calls hard gatekeeping, meaning deliberate control over who and what connects, and he anticipates a world of walled networks rather than one open internet.

The evidence is drawn from interviews with technologists, financiers and officials, from network science, and from historical analogy. Ramo writes in a discursive style that mixes philosophy, reportage and speculation.

The book asserts more than it demonstrates. Network science supplies vocabulary rather than tested predictions here, and specialists in the field would find the treatment loose. Some forecasts have proved right, particularly about the splintering of the internet and the power of platform operators, and others have not developed as described. Readers who want the same territory with more rigour should look at network economics and platform strategy literature.