advance, whether it is fingerprint recognition on your phone or some new auto- translation app, a set of careful, deterministic values and calculations linger. One feature that defines the New Caste is unadulterated, unquestioned faith in the continued network revolution, and that the values that underlie the best programs may be the values that should gird the world that depends on that same code. The danger here is clear enough. “Respect, understanding and love,” Weizenbaum wrote as he considered ELIZA’s effects, “are not technical problems.”
The biggest of the platforms controlled by the New Caste herd together, remember, billions of people, bind them with ever thickening cords. The revealing tics of every movement in the virtual and every step or drive in the real world are marked down, remembered and scored. To operate the strategic levers of such a force is, in all reality, no less significant than leading a nation. The distinction between a CEO ofa major connected firm and a head of state lies less in the depth and efficacy of their influence than in the questions of how they got such power, and how they might use it. The New Caste has an admirable conviction near to faith that their products are truly universal. They are absolute technological determinists. Watching their services and influence expand often has that strange aura of the irresistible force taking on an immovable object. They believe that their black boxes will bulldoze concerns of politics or history. And soon.
Historical ambition of this scale, the sort that touches really countless lives, has always blended a commercial and technical mastery -- the moves of the East India Company turned as much on better ship design, maps and navigation as on imperial objectives. But the aim of the New Caste is the same as it was for those three older castes - the merchants, soldiers and sages: To put the tools they’ve mastered and built in the service of still more dominance. The commercial calculations of the most powerful figures of the New Caste carry a sense of seeing many moves ahead, a very real kind of chess. Their billion dollar acquisitions, investment in moon-shot R&D ideas, the hundred million dollar payouts for great engineers — all of these mark the astonishing scale of what they have in mind: To have and control ever more essential cores of power. Are they seduced by having a billion users? Sure, but not because of the billion users, but rather because of the seductive allure of the black box, of what it means to control such a central point of connection.
4,
I remember sitting with a member of the New Caste the week the first batch of mimeographed and laser-scanned Snowden papers were released, as we both discovered that everyone we knew was devouring the documents. Like a novel. People were texting one another - “Have you seen this?!” - and you couldn’t get through a dinner without a debate over the technical merits of what was on display. The Snowden files were fascinating to the New Caste in a way few others might understand, in the way a room of ballplayers might examine Ted Williams’s swing mechanics. Let me try to explain it this way: When I was younger, people called our generation — those of us born between 1965 and 1980 more or less - a generation of slackers. Generation X. Generation Nothing. There was an argument to be had about
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