financial systems. Fresh AI designs. Protocols and platforms for secure communication. Maybe one million people can write object-oriented code at a high level. A hundred thousand of them can shape that code into some sort of innovative data structure. A few thousand might be able to use it to access and manage a large data center. But get down to the couple of dozen who know how Google or Intel or bitcoin really work, the group who can make machines seem to think, who know and use backdoors at that atomic level of hacking - well, then you have a tight, powerful elite. They are called system designers, algorithmic traders, growth hackers or any of a dozen hazy and somewhat unnamable lines of work that fuse network mastery with economic, political or social power. If connection changes the nature of an object it also elevates, to a level of rare power and influence, those who control that connection.
Through the networks and black boxes they control, the group of transcendent talents working on search algorithms, data management and machine learning touch, at any one instant, more parts of our lives than any group of elites ever has. That many of them are billionaires as a result should hardly be a surprise. This is a caste marked by constant one upsmanship, by endless and compulsive innovation, by a cold and ceaseless fear of obsolescence. They are marked, of course, by a full expression of the Seventh Sense. Their every instinct for starting, financing, growing and using new firms or technologies or data-spinning biological tools reflects complete confidence in network power. If the leading figures of the Enlightenment shared a certainty near to faith that reason would unlock nearly any puzzle of mind or politics, the New Caste shares a certainty too, that connection can produce a new, better order. This caste battles with each other. They struggle for dominance over markets and - more profoundly - for control of the lucrative systems they have built.
My point in this chapter is simple. It is to introduce this new and powerful caste and see what their successes and failures might tell us about the world we now all share. Even now, however, I think we can make this sobering judgment: Whatever nation cultivates and trains legions of this New Caste best will rule the future. Think of the legendary Xerox PARC research lab, which in the 1970s produced not just some of the best early members of the New Caste - like Alan Kay or John Seeley Brown- but also a series of fundamental inventions that generated trillions of dollars of value?®!. The mouse. Laser printing. A graphical user interface. PARC was arguably the most economically significant small group in human history, an entire Renaissance packed into a couple of dozen offices. Just as the nations that produced the finest mariners once dominated global commerce and decided political questions, so countries (or really any group - even terrorists or criminals or bankers) that can breed, train and equip and deploy members of this New Caste will possess a really unusual power. Calling them a “caste” is not accidental: There’s a way in which we are all now tied to the virtual spaces they control, much as serfs were once bound to the land by feudal lords. The Italian historian Giambattista Vico, in developing his
161 Think of the legendary Xerox PARC: Chunka Mui, “The Lesson that Market Leaders are Failing to Learn from Xerox PARC”; Forbes Leadership Blog / Alan Kay
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