new, scientific view of history in the 18" Century, once observed approvingly, “The Egyptians reduced all preceding world time to three ages, namely, the age of the gods, the age of the heroes and the age of men,” he wrote. “During these three ages, three languages had been spoken....Namely the hieroglyphic language, the symbolic language and the vulgar language of men.” It’s hard not to feel the new age now arrives with its own baffling and incomprehensible modes of communication. A whole freshly demanded language. In all of human history only a few languages ever evolve to become honestly global in reach and influence - English now, French in the European centuries or Chinese in the Asian imperial era. But why English? Why not more decades of French? German? “Why a language becomes a global language has little to do with the number of people who speak it,” the British linguist and historian David Crystal has written. “It is much more to do with who those speakers are.” What made Latina global influential language wasn’t that millions of people spoke it, rather it was who did: The elites at the very peak of 1,000 years of European power. What Latin had, in a sense, was the ears and tongues of some of history’s most influential men.1®3 The private, technical language that connects the New Caste to their machines, to each other and to us is one of the sources of their power. Their code marks, like a trail, the path to the cores of a vast and modern power apparatus. You could, if you wanted, compare the New Caste a bit to an earlier generation of empire-deciding figures: Ocean explorers. Columbus, de Gama, Magellan. Backed by a primitive version of venture capital, the “risk finance” of trading houses, these discovery captains had a hunger to test their certain masteries - navigation, sailing, trade - against the uncertanties of geography, weather and luck. There was as much sheer nerve in these adventures as there was real knowledge. What lay five weeks’ sailing time