The jacked-in decade [Spectral Lines]

Connectedness is now a given. Smartphones offer us advice, the Internet carries our voices and video, the cloud archives our data, and e-readers pull it to Earth again. We share all this stuff and more via our social networks. Behind the scenes, brainy grids juggle power, and vast military networks stretch out to robotic planes equipped with devastating firepower above distant battlefields. Nothing seems to happen anymore without global resources coming into play.