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 Frien