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a Dodge. There is nowhere to go. Gatelands produce “winner take all” systems, but they also produce these “loser gets nothing” dynamics – and an absolutely chilly, fatal cost of separation from the winning system. A discipline of network science known as “queing theory” helps us understand why. In studies of massively connected systems, the more time machines spend on their main task – hunting prime numbers or DNA patterns, for instance – and the less time chattering with each other about how they will compute, the faster they run. Winning protocols avoid this terrible inefficiency of translation because it can be spread across so much connection. In fact, the great breakthrough of computer systems in recent years has been the ability to handle massive amounts of data all at once, to maintain versions of information in a concurrent state many places in the world. This is the essential technical leap that permits compression of time. And it depends entirely on careful and gated design.

To be inside a gated system is, then, really to be faster because of the slickness of communication that becomes possible. The very structure of the system accelerates that compression of time. This design feature of networks, in which winners take more and more, is why gates, and their careful use, will become the most dramatic lever for business, research or international politics in coming years. It also explains why our modern gates are different than older ones. Why it is so damn costly to leave them; why mastery of them is even more insanely lucrative than Cecil Rhodes’ gold mines. Think of the old industrial age power games for a moment: Britain and Germany tried to match each other with their industrial output during their fatal competitive sprint 150 years ago; but imagine if network effects obtained? If Britain’s initial head start in the industrial revolution had given them 90% global trade share? Germany would never have even tried to compete. They would have been the Friendster of the 20th Century: Isolated, slow-growing, powerless and finally consumed by the winning system.

5.

Networks crave gates. Once a billion people were connected together, of course there was going to be something like Facebook, a Gateland where they could link one to another in ever-thicker cascades of connection. Once everyone could record and watch and share videos, something like YouTube was inevitable. As we try to picture the world ahead of us, as we try to ask what tools of power we can acquire to twist this dangerous landscape into something we can manage and predict and control, we must ask of it: What does it want? The world wants a protocol for the fast exchange of money. It wants a basic language protocol. It wants a place to swap information about IT security holes. It wants instant translation systems to replace the need to learn to English or Chinese or Spanish so the world can move yet faster. I believe it wants certain sorts of alliances, a particular type of superpower and even craves a new form of politics. For any nation that controls these gates, there is a possibility to use that position to create still more gatekept platforms, to shape the protocols that tie platforms together in the way roads or jet planes link the physical world. This is the iron law of Gateland: Connectivity is power. Which means that gatekeeping is, at the end of the day, our most powerful point of a control.

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