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We might say the same about our New Caste, of their sense of the massive datascape on which we all sail and operate. They too head off to test their skills at coding, encryption, system design. They are almost all auto-didact - self taught as programmers or hackers or AI designers or investors. There is no established path to power for them, no route that has been marked before. No wonder the greatest figures of the era are college dropouts. This is a group that looks largely ahead: Their work demands constant upgrade. Every device is shipped imperfect. It’s not to say they are completely denuded of the Sixth Sense. That their feeling for history has been stripped. But if to be honestly in love with version 1.0 of your product and then to shred it for version 2,0 does demand a certain ahistoric distance. The New Caste explorers have a hunger for fresh worlds and landscapes. To get there they endure privations of long isolation - not so extreme as a long ship journey — but they burrow deeper and deeper into systems, construct new links and new gates, in closed rooms. “When building machine learning systems, making good decisions is a strategic skill,” the computer scientist Andrew Ng has said. “Every day you wake up and you are in some totally unique situation that no one in the planet has been in before. It’s not a fact, there’s no procedure.”16 This is our world now. No fact, yet. No procedure. A totally unique situation that demands a fresh instinct. We can follow Goethe into our own age: No one who has not seen and felt himself surrounded on all sides by networks can honestly understand. If that motto of the last great epochal shift was Dare to Know, it was certainly enacted by the sea captains. Discovery and risk were nothing but a nervy kind of scientific experiment, where the laboratory was the Earth’s surface and the tools of calculation were ships. And in our age? If we’re right that our historic mandate is Dare to Connect, well the New Caste is certainly doing that, furiously. They are working away at much that is hidden in our world, just like those old explorers. The billions of phones or sensors or Al-rooted sensor engines spilling out around our world are stripping away layer after layer of opacity. Pictures of far away places, traffic lessons learned from movement patterns recorded by GPS- enabled phones, medical treatments refined by constant measurement - these are all knotted, one after another, into the fishnet. If the ocean voyages of that older explorer caste mapped our world, the voyages of the New Caste are as much inward as out. They move inside the world of connected systems. Remember: Network power is defined by dynamic tension - the pull between center and periphery. The same dynamism is at work with the New Caste. While they are, firmly, in the business of going out and opening our eyes to the world with wider, faster connection, they are also draping huge, essential parts of our lives with an impenetrable fustian: The essential algorithms of search engines, the code of machine learning tools, the design of micro-targetted political influence campaign. The sources of New Caste power are wrapped inside layers of complex computer code, machine learning and data security protocols that few people can 165 “When building”: Andrew Ng, speech at GPU Technology Conference (March, 2015) 115 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018347