What the Network Forgot
Earlier last week, Zoe Scaman wrote The Networked World Order — a fierce, clear-eyed piece mapping the new shape of power as geopolitics collides with code. It’s a work of rare lucidity: terrifying, necessary, and impossible to unread.
I finished it with that familiar cocktail of awe and nausea — the sense that someone has said the quiet part out loud. Zoe has drawn a map of our times: one of data empires, algorithmic borders, and infrastructure as ideology.
And it made me wonder — not about what’s visible on her map, but what’s missing.
Because what Zoe mapped was the system.
What I keep searching for is the soul.
The intelligence without wisdom
We’ve built a world that’s dazzlingly intelligent and heartbreakingly unwise.
One that knows everything about us, yet understands nothing of us.
We’ve mistaken information for insight. Computation for comprehension. Connection for care.
Wisdom — that old matriarchal counterweight to intellect — asks us to hold consequences before taking action.
It’s the pause before the build, the breath before the decision, the question, “Who might this harm?” before the shiny promise of “What might this make?”
That kind of wisdom doesn’t trend well. It’s slow. It’s relational. It’s affectionate.
But without it, our cleverness corrodes.
Interdependence without affection
Zoe wrote that “interdependence doesn’t create peace — it creates complicity.”
And she’s right.
We’ve built a world woven together by fibre optics and trade agreements, but not by affection.
Our dependencies are transactional, not relational. They bind without belonging.
Affection, by contrast, is reciprocal. It asks for consent, care, and curiosity — it’s what makes interdependence humane.
When affection is absent, connection curdles into control.
And what we end up with is what Zoe so vividly describes: a system that’s efficient, extractive, and eerily indifferent to the people it governs.
The map of affection
In The Affection Advantage, I talk about five acts that help us move from empathy to action — from seeing to sustaining.
They’re not policy prescriptions; they’re human postures. Ways of orienting ourselves toward care, even inside complexity.
First, we see. We name the system clearly, as Zoe has done, without turning away when it’s uncomfortable.
Then we feel. We let the weight of what we see settle in our bodies instead of outsourcing it to despair or blame.
Then we care. Because affection isn’t passive — it’s the moment empathy stands up and says, “I’ll take responsibility for what I touch.”
Then we act. Not in panic, but in proportion — designing systems that centre wellbeing, not just throughput.
And finally, we sustain. Because care without endurance is performance. The real work of affection is maintenance — the daily tending of what we claim to value.
That, perhaps, is how we begin to redraw the map.
Not through more control, but through better care.
A matriarchal world order
Zoe’s essay shows us the architecture of patriarchy in its most modern form: linear, hierarchical, and obsessed with dominance disguised as efficiency.
A matriarchal world order would look different. It would move in circles, not pyramids.
It would understand that systems thrive the way ecosystems do — through diversity, reciprocity, and regeneration. Just ask Jane Evans.
It wouldn’t mistake authority for wisdom. It wouldn’t outsource compassion to algorithms.
It would remember that data belongs to people, and power to the collective good.
The matriarch doesn’t dominate the network — she tends it.
She holds the integrity of connection as sacred work.
The new intelligence
Maybe the next evolution of intelligence isn’t artificial at all.
Maybe it’s affective.
A kind of intelligence rooted in empathy, discernment, and trust — the qualities no machine can replicate because they require presence, not processing power.
Affection is the infrastructure of freedom.
It’s what allows systems to serve people, not the other way around.
What the network forgot
Zoe ended her piece by asking: What the fuck do we do about it?
Maybe we start here — by remembering that we are the infrastructure.
That affection isn’t the opposite of power. It’s how power becomes humane.
The network forgot that.
But we can remind it — quietly, insistently, one act of care at a time.
This article was written in response to Zoe Scaman’s The Networked World Order.
If her work mapped the system, I hope this piece sketches a companion map — one that remembers the heart still beating beneath it.
Author’s Note:
This piece was originally published here on The Story Maker.
It is available for republication, syndication, or editorial adaptation.
For commissions or licensing, please get in touch with Jet Swain.
