Stronger as One

Networks, network effects, and the education they can empower.

This piece was inspired by Joshua Cooper Ramo’s The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks, Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, The Atlantic’s War Goes Viral, and a vibrant conversation with a next-generation network leader, my friend, Niraj Pant.

Motif

You awoke at 4 AM with no alarm nor warning, prepared for the plentiful day before you. You teeter past your younger kin and flick on your handheld lantern. You dress as the plain people should — a cotton garment lays over your shoulders and suspenders drape down your torso to support your loosely-fit black broad-falls. You button your handsewn deep blue over-shirt and lay a straw cap on your head. You gather for a plentiful breakfast before the daily tend—to the left, your father, to the right, your elder brothers. They tend to the livestock, and you scout the soy field, searching for any sign of disease or crop die off. This is your duty, and your daily, until harvest.

When you left school in the spring, you had finished the 8th grade. It was your last year of schooling. You had spent the eight years prior preparing for this life before you — you learned the propers of the English language, and the history of your elder-whispered Dutch tongue; you learned of the arithmetic needed to tend to your accounting and harvest books; you learned of faith, sin, and your modest place within the discipline; and most importantly, you learned of the importance of family and community. This life is all you have ever known, and it is your wish to be baptized into it — to be baptized into the Amish church.

Sect

Today, the Amish are 250,000 strong, and are growing at a rate that quintuples that of the English, the Americans. They live a segregated life, hidden from much of the public eye. Their lives are from an unaccustomed era, a time that has largely been forgotten, and overshadowed by the Industrial Revolution, and our Information Age. To much of the world, the Amish do not exist — they are unreported, and unheard, and that has largely been their wish. The Amish are fundamentalist Christians that descended from Southern Germany and Switzerland. In the 18th century, they fled religious persecution and sought the tolerance of the new world, the West: the Quaker-governed territory of Pennsylvania. Today, their communities are clustered across the Northeastern United States, with the highest populations in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, followed by Ohio, and Indiana.

As the modern world developed, the Amish did not — their tradition, order, and practice is frozen in time. They are a living representation of a bygone era, intermingled with the complex connected world. Plastered amongst the concrete, commercialized world, they almost don’t seem real. The Amish could likely be mistaken for an art project: people of the 17th century clipped into the wild fictitious we ignore. But, that isn’t the case: they are very real, and they have fascinated me for much of my life. To most, the Amish are a tourist attraction, but to me, they were misunderstood neighbors.

Coexistence

I grew up outside of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and was a regular visitor into their world. We shared Farmers Markets and Walmart — they parked in the stable, and I parked in the lot. This coexistence is the normal. The Amish don’t live outside of the modern world, they just don’t take ownership of that world, and won’t bring it into their homes. The Amish are cautious people: they do not fear technology, nor ideology, but rather, they fear the worldly influence it might bring to their lives. They choose not to bring electricity, plumbing, and connectivity into their homes: they believe that public utility ties them too close to the outside world, and the values it represents. The Amish fear reliance and luxury: attacks of their Christian values.

But, their outside suppression does not dictate isolation. The Amish are friendly, peaceful, welcoming people that strongly practice and embrace community. They are a stark contrast to the western ideologies of individuality and difference — they flourish through sameness. See, the Amish thrive together, not in isolation. Their communities are small nation-states of their own, governed by Amish elders — their people are backed by the safety net of, not money, but people. When a family is suffering, the collective community aids in their revival. When a barn collapses into disrepair, or is swept away by storm or fire, the community builds a new barn — a barn raising. The network of the Amish has allowed the Amish to thrive in separation.

When they arrived in rural Pennsylvania in the 18th century, the Amish weren’t all that different from the other sects seeking religious sanctum. They, like everyone at that time, were simple people — the world was simple. They took to the agrarian life of self-sufficiency, as most. As the colonies declared independence from the British Empire, the Amish did not. An America was formed through the collective of those too deeply taxed and belittled; the Amish abstained. They were victims of the tyrannous system, but paid their dues in silence, with love and respect for the enemy. The Amish sought peace and reconciliation — those united absorbed their difference, in success. Hysterical strength and resilience propelled the inception of America, and the Amish were along for the ride.

Silence

Silence, heard around the world: 5:20 PM EST, January 27th, 2011. Shortly after midnight in Cairo, Egypt, virtually all internet traffic originating from the country vanished. Egypt disappeared from the outside world within minutes, a task once thought impossible. A country of 86 million suddenly, without warning, went back in time. This monumental moment was unprecedented: never had so many people become so rapidly disconnected, and in all likelihood, never would they again. This blackout was not the fault of disaster, war, nor fatal flaw — it was the will of a leader.

عيد الشرطة

It started on Police Day, 2 days earlier: January 25th, 2011. The national holiday, officially established 2 years earlier in 2009, commemorates the 1952 massacre of Egyptian police, a pivotal moment in the collapse of the Egyptian monarchy. Fifty police officers were killed, with greater numbers wounded, when Ismaïlia Police refused British military demands to execute anti-British protestors and to turn over weapons, and thus, relinquish power. The day turned violent and became a watershed moment that paved way for the people’s revolution six months later: the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, the overthrow of the Egyptian monarchy, and the rise of the modern Republic of Egypt.

Egypt’s then President, Hosni Mubarak, declared the long-celebrated holiday an official day of celebration and remembrance in 2009. It was intended to “recognize the efforts of Egyptian police to maintain security and stability in Egypt and acknowledge their sacrifices.” But, the day represented much more — it represented an increasingly powerful, brutal police state, and a growing separation of people and power. Egypt’s powerful police force became the enforcement arm of Mubarak’s corrupt regime, and the holiday became nothing more than a demonstration of power. The Egyptian police drifted from their duty of protecting the people of Egypt, and became an anti-opposition force: humiliating those who opposed Mubarak’s regime.

Connected

Police Day, 2011, was the day change would begin. Youth groups all around Egypt joined forces, organized, planned: on January 25th, 2011, they would demonstrate against Egypt’s increasing police brutality and corruption under Mubarak. The ideological inception of this demonstration was something new: the protests were not created, and then spread, from gathering places, universities, churches, places of work or worship — they were created among groups, groups on the internet. Egypt’s youth had become increasingly connected. By 2011, 29.47% of Egypt’s population was penetrated with personal internet connectivity. In contrast, 69.7% of the United States was connected at that time. However, Egypt’s year-over-year change displayed a 21% growth in connectedness from the previous year, which outpaced population growth ten-fold.

Despite the lack of personal connectivity for nearly 75% of Egypt’s population, mobile subscriptions reached a penetration of 90.44%. This meant that despite many Egyptian users lacking direct internet access, nearly all of them had access to rapid word of mouth through mobile phone calls and text messages. This enabled internet trickle down — as users learned of protests and demonstrations on the internet, they could rapidly spread that information to their unconnected network through SMS. The rapid onset of connectedness in Egypt would become an asset that played out on a world stage—the power it wielded was bigger than Egypt itself.

Spread

1,600 miles to the west, a month earlier, a familiar fervor was boiling. November 28, 2010: Wikileaks released a series of diplomatic cables written by the United States Embassy in Tunis, Tunisia. The cables, written between January, 2006 and June, 2009, painted an uncertain future for Tunisia: unemployment amongst the educated was growing, food prices were rapidly rising, inflation was growing each year, all while Tunisia’s President, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, grew more corrupt and further out of touch with the Tunisian people each day. Tunisia was depicted as a troubled country, growing weaker every single day, governed by a rampant regime with no clear successor. The western exposure struck a chord within the country, confirming long standing suspicions and propelling the charge for change. The cables were quickly translated and spread amongst websites and social networks within the country, reaching every corner, and person.

Tunisia was known to the world as stable police state, home to the second strongest economy in Africa, only after South Africa. Since coming to power in 1987, Ben Ali drastically increased the capability of the Tunisia’s universities, enabling one-third of all Tunisians to pursue higher education. However, job creation had not kept pace, and the unemployment rate of educated youth rose to 30%. There was a mismatch between growth in education and growth in the economy. On December 18th, 2011, Mohamed Bouazizi, an unemployed, college-educated citizen took to the streets to sell fruits and vegetables. Police quickly confiscated his produce because he was without a permit — hours later, he doused himself in gasoline and ignited himself out of desperation and protest. A day later, in demonstrations against unemployment and Bouazizi’s attempted suicide, a man chanting “no for misery, no for unemployment” threw himself on to electric lines, and was electrocuted to death.

These horrific events rapidly spread to Tunisia’s internet: the country was one of the most connected in the world, having the highest number of Facebook users per capita. The events grew outrage, and riots quickly encompassed the connected country. It would become the country’s worst unrest in a decade. The protests quickly grew violent, and Ben Ali vowed to further punish rioters—but, protests did not stop. Dissent grew stronger, and the people of the historically repressive regime sought greater political and social freedoms. Within weeks, Ben Ali fled Tunisia and sought asylum in Saudi Arabia — the people of Tunisia had undergone a revolution in 28 days. The anger of regime brutality, and the excitement of a new Tunisian era, remained fresh and vibrant across social media. The outside world peeked into the Facebook posts and videos, the raw tweets, and the live streams.

Peek, Poke: Parallel

The connected revolution enabled the outside world to peek into a revolution. Social media not only propelled gripe internally, but also broadcast it externally. Some, in English, much, in Arabic, most, in powerful images of chanting crowds, brutal police inflicted injuries, and buildings burning. Portrayals captured energy — never had the world undergone so much change, while so connected. It demonstrated a new era: an era where ideologies strengthened with connection. An era where everyone was a journalist. An era where change was without border.

In the days following, Egypt’s youth joined forces across Facebook and Twitter. Facebook Groups were formed to plan in secret, while the Newsfeed and Twitter were used to spread information in the open. The people of Egypt watched Tunisia’s Sidi Bouzid Revolt from the sidelines: they watched the revolution unfold as if it were their own. The common language brought down borders, and the energy, the anger, was mutual, shared. The people of Egypt became the people of Tunisia. Millions flocked to the streets in Cairo — hundreds of thousands stood ground in Tahir Square. As if in replay, Hosni Mubarak’s house of cards began to fall.

Then, silence.

Power, in black

Egypt went black. For years, Mubarak’s repressive regime sought censorship: telecoms lived at notice, ready to wind it all down. That was the nature of business in Egypt, and with a few phone calls, it proved just. Mubarak understood the powers he faced: they were not of civilian force, nor ideologies, they were networks. Networks enabled coordination, ideological influence. As pro-Mubarak supporters witnessed the violent betrayal of their opposite, they turned. It was mind war, on the people of Egypt, on the regime, and on the world. The outside influence on Egypt propelled the revolution in Egypt — seeing the possible, enabled the possible. As they say: it could not be done, until it was. In silence, the Egyptian people lost their worldly stage, their purpose became that of their own, not of the inevitable. Crowds sulked, minds nearly defeated—but, the protest, continued.

Clashes with state grew further violent. They did not stop. The outside world grew more intrigued, angered. As one network went offline, and one group of people were silenced, another grew stronger. Social media did not cease to exist, it merely was inaccessible by the Egyptian people. Their recorded voices, their tweets, their images: very, very visible. The exterior pressure grew; western power, forceful. The global network strengthened around a disconnected node—it adapted. Worlds apart, diplomatic pressure declared atrocity, intervention, an end. In pressure, Mubarak found an out: his search for punishment became that of the end of term. The internet, reignited. A peaceful transition, in time, he demanded—the people, louder. Soon, the inevitable, he resigned. This revolution: 18 days. Egyptians were now free: they sought to elect a leader. The country, now under military takeover — a new government, a new leader, would be established in time.

This rapid unfolding of democracy would come to be known as the Arab Spring. From Tunisia, and then Egypt, it spread to Libya, Yemen, Syria and Iraq. Demonstrations took place all throughout Northern Africa and the Middle East: Morocco, Bahrain, Algeria, Iran, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman and Sudan, Djibouti, Mauritania, the Palestinian National Authority, Saudi Arabia, and Somalia. The tools, eerily similar: Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and social media at large. The tools: networks. The greatest tool— one that became more powerful with each regime topple.

Rise

Shenzhen, Guangdong, China, the modern technology capital of the East, has undergone tremendous change and growth over the last three decades. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Shenzhen was one of the fastest growing cities in the world. Shenzhen’s population in 1987 was 750 thousand; today, the population is 18 million. China as whole, during the same period, has undergone tremendous, unprecedented change. Through world globalization, economic reform, and industrial growth, China has brought more people out of poverty than anywhere else in the world — an estimated 500M between 1981 and 2012, from an 88% poverty rate per capital to a mere 6.5%. This tremendous economic resettlement fueled China’s social and infrastructure growth, paving way for a highly educated, hungry middle class. These economic conditions brought Shenzhen to a world stage — along with China’s sister Tier I cities: Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou.

Today, Shenzhen is known as the hardware capital of the world. It is home to the largest Foxconn factories, and the greatest number of electronic manufacturing facilities. A large percentage of the electronics is use around the world right now were assembled and manufactured in Shenzhen. Nearly every Apple product in use today is inscribed with “Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China.” But, truthfully, Apple means to say: “Designed by Apple in California. Manufactured in Shenzhen.” The manufacturing capability has brought prosper to the city, and brought wealth that was previously unbeknownst to China. It, however, is brought with negative attention — to much of the world, China is known as the copycat country. If it is made in China, it is copied in China too—that is the belief.

The people of China have a word for this behavior: they call it shanzhai. The word literally translates to “mountain stronghold,” referring to “mountain stockades of regional warlords or bandits, far away from official control.” It is used to describe both infringing counterfeits and lookalikes, and their creators. In recent years, shanzhai has given rise to a new definition: parodied goods, a new type of innovation, one that is difficult to understand with western perspective. The economic conditions that brought shanzhai into limelight, that transformed China, are alive, well, and stronger than ever. The conditions that are shaping this revolution, this vastly new ideology, the unfamiliar force, are deeply rooted in history. I aim to lay out this history, and to build the foundation on which these ideologies are seated. I aim to teach you how to see shanzhai through a new perspective, and how to understand the invisible forces that have given it power.

Roots

Beginning during the Han dynasty over two thousand years ago, the Chinese imperialist Zhang Qian expanded exploration and trade in the region, and laid a grand vision of a vast trade network: the Silk Road. Two thousand years prior to Qian’s tenure, ancient civilizations had discovered the Eurasian Steppe. They had gave formation to the Steppe route, and handily exploited the endowed, unique path. It would be the Steppe route that breathed life into the Neolithic Stone Age, and catalyzed, then accelerated, the Bronze age. Silk, horses, furs, weapons, musical instruments, precious stone, and jewels all became commoditized through the Eurasian Steppe, through the Steppe route.

The tempered passage stretched 6,200 miles across Eurasia — breathing life into new civilizations wherever it caressed. The Steppe route had suddenly connected the two continents — it brought connection to the humans of two worlds that developed apart. It brought war, trade, culture, and accessibility of a worldly stage. It is estimated that the world population in 10200 BCE was a mere two million people. Humans had evolved over a period of 2.5 million years through the first Stone Age, the Paleolithic Period — we had learned to draw and to communicate, powerful new skills. This crucial period in human history ended with the close of the last Ice Age — the glaciers receded, the climate resettled, and new grasslands and biomes emerged upon a new planet. We were new, and our world was new — we learned to survive in a torturous world that we would never need to battle again, and the world was ours.

Sprout

The Neolithic Age ignited with fervor, and it brought rise to civilization, to civilizations. By 8000 BCE, we had grown to 5 million strong; by 6000 BCE, 11 million strong. A millennia later, 18 million, then: 28 million, 45 million, and 72 million. By 2000 BCE, the Bronze Age had swept through Europe, the Near East, South Asia, and had reached China. It was around this time, in 2200 BCE, when the Eurasian Steppe route emerged. Inspired by previous routes, the Steppe had begun to connect — to connect people, cities, and civilizations. We, our civilizations, suddenly became more powerful, together. Humanity, life, became easier, together. Qian had witnessed this power, how it had shaped his home in China, and how it continued to reshape China (in physicality, and culture). Through missions and exploration, he, with the Han dynasty, expanded the Central Asian sections of the Steppe route: giving birth to the Silk Road.

The Silk Road continued to expand, absorbing the breadth of the ancient Steppe route that had come before, and breaking ground on new aisle, all the way to the Pacific. It connected the East and the West: from the Korean peninsula and Japan, to the Mediterranean Sea. It was both terrestrial and maritime. It grew so crucial to the Chinese economy that it was in great interest to protect it: much of the Great Wall of China was constructed as a result. The Great Wall grew to protect the route, China’s lifeblood, as it had become so vital to everyday life, and imperial success. The route, the hive, granted far more than the trade of goods, however. Like the Steppe route that had come before, the Silk Road brought rise to the trade and exchange of ideas: of religions, of philosophies, of technologies. It was a cultural route as much as an economic and commoditization route.

It, too, brought the spread of plague, and political wrath — civilization connectedness hurried conversations, hurried negotiations, and brought more knowledge, and disagreement, into light. It enabled, and fastened, wars, and death. The Silk Road placed expansion on the horizon, and fixed the world within reach of tyrannous leaders. The world grew, albeit less quickly, but grew, nonetheless. What had become clear was that the world’s pace had quickened — the world had begun to move, change, evolve far more quickly. Imperial borders shifting: faster. The rise and fall of civilizations: faster. Disease, death, and massacre: faster. But, this connectedness was China’s greatest asset: an asset worth protecting.

Echos

Modern day China is yet again pursuing the Silk Road, a second installment: the new Silk Road, a modern, and far more complex parallel. President Xi Jinping recently announced China’s vision to strengthen their place in the world. They wish to grow outside influence, and to kickstart and strengthen China’s rank within the next wave of globalization. Xi calls the new Silk Road the “project of the century,” and it very well could be. World leaders have raced to diminish China’s ownership, and power, fearing its global impacts home, and abroad.

But, within China, there is similar force, a power grip, that is unfolding under little attention — a modern Silk Road that is flourishing, both in physicality, and digital sanctum. As the world has globalized over the last few decades, the rapid industrialization and eager workforce has sought the eyes of western conglomerates. Many have off-shored labor, migrated manufacturing, and shifted growth efforts to the East. Yum! Brands, the epitome of the western diet, and parent company of KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell, initially entered China seeking their next billion customers. Quickly, they were faced with the troubling, difficult, Chinese market. McDonalds, Coca Cola, and Walmart have faced similar battles. Today’s China is a highly bureaucratic, regulation-less market where competitors appear overnight, and nationalism brings the dollar home.

The prosperity Uber sought was the driving force to their rapid expansion into China. In the West, Uber wields the greatest market share of the ride hailing market: the market they created. Seemingly overnight, Uber built a transportation empire — the fastest growing startup of all time. They leveraged increasingly powerful mobile GPS, cellular bandwidth, and software to solve the greatest logistics problems in transportation. With a connected device, a smartphone, you could hail a taxi in minutes, at half the price of the traditional taxi industry. With reduced wait times, fewer costs, and an overall better experience, it was obvious that Uber would utterly destroy the taxi industry: and they did. China, on appearance, appeared ripe, and ready, for Uber — just as San Francisco, New York, and London had.

The company launched in the country in 2013, but swiftly exited a few short years later, selling their Chinese business to their largest competitor in the country: Didi Chuxing. They battled savvy Chinese users abusing first-time offers, local and federal regulation, and highly targeted competitors appearing every other day. Business schools will study this failure for years: how could a company with far better technology and a far better experience lose to a local copycat? It’s a difficult conundrum, but I will strive to explain the forces at play.

People

For Apple and Foxconn (a Taiwanese company), China offered quite a few enticing advantages that would increase their production capacities. The most important factor, for Foxconn, was people, and their labor costs. As China’s citizens were brought out of poverty, they quickly became some of the most educated in the world. The country around them industrialized, and infrastructure grew: the country quickly adopted western education, and invested heavily in teachers and schools. This created a class of skilled youth, fit for the technical workplace. Decades prior, China’s urban “lost generation” grew highly educated, and intellectual, generating fear within the capital. At the cusp of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, communism was spread through the country with the elimination of any capitalist, feudalistic and cultural elements. The educated urban youth of China were expelled to the countryside, to lives of farming, and hard labor.

Maoism, as it is now referred, deprived an entire generation of education, impact, and fulfilling lives — dubbed, the lost generation. Today’s China casts shadow over these mistakes and a living generation tries to forget. From embedded communism, fear, and the outlaw of capitalism, China has greatly transformed in a few short decades. Today’s China is hungry with capitalism—academics try to classify China as State capitalism, as most success stories are deeply rooted in state. The people, communist and nationalistic — but, now, educated. China learned from the mistakes of Maoism, and now participates in the contrary: farm-to-city migrations. As China’s economy booms, new infrastructure blooms each day.

In striving to catalyze the strongest cities in the world, state infrastructure development is readily underway in China. The country increasingly understands that its period of industrialization is coming to a close, paving the way for other industrialization efforts in Western Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. As a result, the state is actively building cities to accelerate farm-to-city migrations, giving class rise to a greater number of citizens each year. These accelerant and catalyst developments aren’t new — they have proved successful in China’s Tier 1 cities, like Shenzhen. This state-sponsored catalyzation of culture and class was the driving force behind Shenzhen’s savvy, educated population. Too, with modern housing, streets, and factories, came bandwidth — modern internet infrastructure. More on that later.

Gravity

Given the rapid onset of educated, savvy laborers, Shenzhen was a hot-bed for Foxconn. Population resettlement enabled an affordable workforce large enough to build the millions of products Apple users, and alike, sought after. But also, the rapid industrialization of China, and its proximity within the East, enabled another, more pervasive, factor: supply chain. China, today, has the precursor for China’s second Silk Road — the modern day Steppe equivalent. See, because nearly all of technological manufacturing today occurs in Asia, it was obvious for the supply chain to follow. It, of course, would not make sense to send raw materials or manufactured pieces to Asia, when they could very well be built there—for cheaper.

Globalization, as a result, has shifted to Asiaization. Raw materials, components, and assembled products are all coming out Asia, and China, at cheaper prices than anywhere else in the world. Because the entire material-to-good chain has shifted to Asia, and China, it has become a manufacturing vacuum. Not only can products not be cheaply manufactured elsewhere, but the costs to shift the Chinese grip, are quickly becoming too great. This, here, is why Xi has promised to heavily invest in the new Silk Road projects — not only will they strengthen China’s slowing economy, but they will also propel China to multi-century success, just as the United States’ war-less churn did in the late 19th century.

Shenzhen landed in the cross-hairs of this once-a-century period. Foxconn and alike further trained and skilled millions of technical workers — they learned how to produce, test, and even develop, intricate circuits, panels, and components. The people of China are on average, very loyal, but urbanization has given rise to culture shifts and evolutions. Over the last few years, Foxconn has churned workforce, while many young, middle-class Chinese have exited university at the same time. Shenzhen’s people: highly skilled for the industry that surrounds them. As a result, Shenzhen has given rise to not just assemblers, but makers, creators. Surrounded by world-class factories, rapidly evolving technical industry, and second-tier component markets: Shenzhen is a technical utopia.

Huaqiangbei, the world’s largest technology marketplace, has become the center of Shenzhen’s ecosystem. There is no place in the world like it: it is a technological hub, with spokes to each niche component and manufacturer. Many of the world’s devices make their way back to Shenzhen when they are broken, water damaged, or discarded — in Huaqiangbei, they are fixed, then resold on the global and domestic markets. Entering Huaqiangbei with purpose, nearly everything can be fixed within hours. If an iPhone screen is shattered, a replaced glass panel, and a technician to re-adhere the devices screen to glass, can be accomplished within the hour. In the West, we would likely replace the entire screen assembly. In Huaqiangbei, nothing is wasted — money is preserved, and know-how is pervasive.

Evolution

With such technological abundance, Shenzhen built the shanzhai market. In the West, our small business era is bygone — large conglomerates with cheaper prices squeezed customer loyalty from the marketplace. Our local stores have been replaced by Walmarts and Targets. Our local grocers, replaced by Whole Foods and Wegmans — and soon, Amazon’s drones. In China, quite the opposite is occurring, in unsuspecting sectors. Because of the abundance of technical resources, and talent, in Shenzhen: shanzhai goods have rapidly appeared. China’s next generation values individuality far more than any before, so in the increasingly connected world, smartphones have become one of their many attributes. Every component that encompasses a modern smartphone can be sourced in a square-block of Shenzhen, enabling the creation of whole devices.

Frankenstein gadgets, as I like to call them, can be uniquely built and sourced within Huaqiangbei. As such, small businesses have appeared, each with focus on a different market niche — some build unique iPhones with personally colored backings, or Android devices with larger batteries, faster processors, or an extra memory-card slot. In the United States, these type of businesses would never exist, largely, for two reasons: 1) copyright 2) lack of suppliers. Where as in China, the government’s priorities, and scope, has been externalized, and focused, enabling shanzhai innovation. The shanzhai economy, too, has propelled home-grown technology designers, like Huawei, on to the world stage. Some of their products, today, outpace Apple and Samsung in specification and design appeal. Tomorrow, they could be much more, spiraling off into western brands.

Shenzhen’s hold on hardware also extends far past mobile devices. The leading startup industries appeared first in Shenzhen. Dà-Jiāng Innovations (DJI), the world’s largest, and most advanced, manufacturer of consumer drones is headquartered there. The drones, designed and manufactured in Shenzhen, broadcast to world appeal. Too, incumbent startup categories are rapidly exploding there, before anywhere else in the world. Didi Chuxing accelerated the country’s adoption of ride hailing, and ride sharing. With it, brought the sharing economy, something that appeared first in the West. The idea of the sharing economy can be simplified as such: peer-to-peer sharing of goods and services. This is a concept that has existed for a long time, but was rapidly catalyzed and enabled by growing consumer internet adoption.

Formerly, a vast logistics network of middle-men were required to enable this rapid transaction network. Think: stock and mortgage brokering, travel agencies, and car dealerships. Teams of people, hierarchies, necessary. But connectedness and the software cloud eliminated this need, these jobs. Suddenly, protocols could be implemented once, and then scaled to millions of people in minutes. This allowance created Airbnb, the sharing economies first true, scaled foothold — opening empty bedrooms and apartments to traveling guests seeking off-the-path tourism, with less luxury, and fewer cold experiences. Combined with mobile accessibility, this effect helped build Uber too — as we discussed earlier. Today, in Shenzhen, the vibrant generation of tech-embroiled are taking it one step further: bikes, umbrellas, clothing, and goods.

Culture

China’s people: eager, enthralled. Bike sharing, alone, has become the world’s fastest growing investment vehicle. Dozens of bike sharing startups around China, stemming from Shenzhen, are striving to solve the last-mile problem. They are striving to make sharing more pervasive — and they might just win. There are a few reasons as to why this sharing economy has become so pervasive, and so plausible, with many reasons we cannot yet understand. The first being: culture. In the West, we have long been embedded with manifest destiny. Ownership has shaped our culture, and our society, and it shapes our children, and us, from the first years of our lives. Our dreams are to own a home bigger than our needs, one with a white picket fence, a vibrant grass lawn, and a two car garage — ready to fill with our expensive luxury cars, and our 2.4 children.

We are our things, and our things are what we strive for — and that has been a result of our success, and our industrialized, consumerized luxury. While we prospered for decades, a century, China did not — it struggled, poverty ran rampant, with culture belittled, then narrowly accepted. But, the industrialized network and supply chain that is shaping China today has begun to enable the world we have long known. The middle class continues to grow, and spending rises each year — the people of China look to the West, striving for the lives we live, and broadcast. China’s culture is westernizing, rapidly. Though, unpredicted forces have risen, and they are beginning to shift China’s westernization towards sharing. In the West, we often hear of China’s smog and pollution, reviled by the projection on to our own world.

In China, too, the people are actively reviled, and scared. Pollution does not affect few, it effects all. The carbon-dense air from coal plants and industry has begun to sicken children, youth, and the elderly. That force, when spread, is reshaping China, right now. State coal projects have been put on hold, the electric vehicle market has grown larger than anywhere else in the world, and multi-megawatt solar projects are underway all over of the country. When the people of China witnessed illness, their priorities changed — just as America’s had in the turn of the 19th century, paving way for our national parks, and clean water acts. The growing pollution concern that is pivoting China’s reshaping culture is a backing force in the growth of the sharing economy, and the sectors within it, like bike sharing.

Connectivity

There is a second reason, however, that has enabled China’s rapid onset of sharing: connectedness. As China built cities, it built modern cities—like Shenzhen. Broadband, coaxial, fiber, all concerns, and all features of the modern cities. Cellular projects and telecoms too embraced modern development, and planed projects, with civil engineering in mind. China’s connectivity was built alongside cities, not atop of them. This enabled fast rollouts of utility, with the internet being one. The people largely leap-frogged the days of the telephone, and landed in the internet era. Along with Shenzhen’s technical talent, connectivity and internet access enabled the internetization of business. Brick-and-mortar, and internet, were no different.

Shenzhen birthed a Silicon Valley of its own, with vibrant technology companies, and the connectivity to power them. The vast availability of hardware, and mobile devices, brought rapid adoption. China’s citizens: ripe for the Information Age, the era of software. Android, Google’s operating system, skyrocketed past Apple’s iOS because of China — an entire population, eager, and in need of smartphones. Many citizens skipped the personal computer all together: their first taste of the internet was through the smartphones they now owned. They, too, skipped the mobile text message era — phones were not communication devices, they were internet enablers. This birthed Tencent’s QQ, the largest communication platform of all time.

Think of QQ like AOL’s instant messenger from the early 2000s. Its successor, WeChat, created paradigms that the rest of the world had never seen before. If QQ was shanzhai, WeChat was not. Tencent learned from QQ, and learned of the power of communication, of connectedness. At its core, communication enabled everything else — something I will discuss soon. With this hindsight, WeChat built protocols, vectors, that made software accessible. If you think back to the early iPhone era, the cool-factor of the iPhone was apps. Until the App Store launch in 2008, the iPhone was just a futuristic, highly-advanced, confusing phone — it was a great phone, but not far greater than others, until apps. Apps gave the iPhone purpose.

In the same regard, apps gave WeChat purpose. Although built atop Android, and even iOS, WeChat itself began to act like an operating system. From the personal computer era, we, in the West, learned to install, to launch, to utilize software through an operating system. The operating system was the necessary window into this world — hence Windows. Our iPhone was just a miniaturized personal computer that enabled the software paradigms we came to expect, albeit in a more friendly, human way. But, WeChat approached this problem differently: communication lived at its core, and software lived secondary. Rather than accessing and opening software through a launcher, or a home screen, much of the software-driven interactions in WeChat occurred via conversation, and search. WeChat didn’t come bundled with a web browser, WeChat was the web browser — the app, and service, browser.

For example, Nike created Nike+ Run Club for WeChat, an app that allowed you to track your fitness activity to reach your goals. If you, for example, wanted to train for a marathon in six weeks, the app would create a schedule for you, and allow you to track each training installment. Using your device’s location, vast statistics of your runs would be generated, and Nike+ Run Club made that information accessible to you. This is something we, in the West, have come to expect — Nike, in parallel, built a very similar app for iOS and Android, but it lacked one key, crucial enablement of WeChat. WeChat apps, or Mini Programs, as they are called, were inherently social, connected.

In western markets, we have come to expect apps asking us to Login with Facebook, or to connect our Twitter and Pinterest accounts. By providing access to social media, applications like Nike+ Run Club could automatically share your progress to Facebook, Twitter, or whatever you desired. Facebook Login let you access apps without needing to remember another email and password combination. Facebook’s product allowed you to store information across a number of cloud services without having to really keep track of that information — information would always be accessible with Facebook, and that is something you could expect, and trust. This, truthfully, was the value of Facebook: in enabled an ecosystem. Tencent learned from these expectations and made them core to their WeChat product.

The App Store and Facebook worked in tandem to enable rapid adoption of new apps and services. Propelling the app ecosystem gave Facebook power, just as China’s manufacturing supply chain gave the country power — both became more powerful as their reach grew, and the ease-to-which you could leave the ecosystem became greater each day. Apple quickly saw the power this enabled Facebook, and swiftly, and quietly, banned applications from their App Store that did not give users a choice. If an application could only be accessed through Login with Facebook, that application violated Apple’s guidelines, and the engineers behind each violating product would need to add additional options like an email and password combination.

However, WeChat’s ecosystem did not need to live by these rules. WeChat was the end-all-be-all: the one account for everything. Mini Programs built for WeChat didn’t need logins, and didn’t need to branch outside of the ecosystem. They surely did not require Facebook — as Facebook is blocked in the country; more on that soon. They also did not require email authentication, largely because China’s citizens skipped over the days of email, right to messaging with QQ. As a result, WeChat, an inherently social communication platform, became the most valuable asset in the country. Google is valuable because it made search incredibly accessible, fast, and free, and became even more so when it launched Gmail, bringing the same benefits to email. One Google account enabled the world, a Google ecosystem where everything worked well together. The same could be said for WeChat.

The most valuable use case for a smartphone in China was, without a doubt, WeChat. That is why Nike built their Nike+ Run Club for the platform. It became incredibly accessible to users — if it was the best, users in China could rapidly start using it, without barriers. Too, initial success was propelled by the inherit social nature and inertia of the WeChat ecosystem. When you began a run, your WeChat connections (your true friends and family) would be notified and could meet you at your finish line: they could welcome you with water, and encourage you to continue meeting your running goals. The personal network accessibility that Nike utilizes with Nike+ Run Club was made possible because of WeChat — in the West, the same could only be made possible with a number of various services like SMS, Facebook, and the App Store.

WeChat, at the center of your life, also enabled finance. When Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, David Sacks, Reid Hoffman, and the PayPal mafia set out to build PayPal at the dawn of the Internet Age: finance was the obvious next step. Information had reached the internet, news had reached the internet, as did entertainment, sports, and education. But, the internet lacked something so crucial: currency. Banks and the finance industry did not adopt the internet as quickly as they should have, and the industry was ripe for disruption. The internet had only reached high-level traders, and local networks were few and far between — at that time, quants and high-frequency trading were not yet a discussion. Musk and Thiel saw the power of the protocol, and added money: it not only enabled person-to-person transactions, but it enabled business on the internet.

WeChat did the same: they added their platform’s obvious next step, finance. At the dawn of the internet, openness allowed credit processing companies to soon catch up to PayPal, and enabled self-serve credit card transactions on the internet. Credit powers almost all of our online transactions today, and PayPal’s mismanagement has let it float into near obscurity. However, WeChat’s platform is not open: it is their platform, their proprietary protocol. Likewise, Android and iOS are not open, they are Google’s and Apple’s respective walled gardens. Finance has become theirs with Google Pay and Apple Pay, and no third-party could possibly build stronger integrations because they control the rules. This is a playbook that is shaping much of the technology industry, and it started with WeChat.

For much of the Chinese, WeChat has become as crucial as a bank account. China’s communist culture frowns on credit, so very few of their citizens have credit cards. Transactions had occurred with bank-to-bank transactions, until WeChat. Just like when China had leap-frogged the telephone, they had leap-frogged the credit industry, and WeChat saw this void as their opportunity. WeChat today acts in two ways: 1) a finance middleman 2) a store of value. PayPal simplified bank wires as the middleman, while also allowing users to store money with them — they were no different than any other bank, just utilizing technology at their core. WeChat has paralleled: they have become the true Bank of China. Users store money in WeChat, while also using it to withdraw and deposit money with other, traditional, bank accounts.

WeChat’s second-tier bank has made them instrumental to the economy. In the West, it would be untypical for us to pay bills with PayPal or to buy a car with a credit card — both are now common in China through WeChat. In the same way that WeChat has opened your network, WeChat has opened your money — you can buy and sell goods, you can order food delivery, and you can send money to friends and businesses, using WeChat. As I am writing this, 80% of all transactions in China occur via mobile, using products like WeChat, and their competitors like Alibaba’s Alipay. The mobile payment sector in China trumps the rest of the world, and grows stronger each and every day.

Proliferation

Further to the west, in India, mobile payments exploded late last year when their then President Pranab Mukherjee announced the deprecation of much of their physical currency. Literally overnight, Paytm, a modern mobile-first PayPal targeted at India’s markets, exploded. Today, it is a juggernaut in the country, and like WeChat, is accounting for the rapid adoption of online transaction. The company has gained tremendous power within the country, and seeks more — they have since announced the rollout of messaging, eerily similar to that of WeChat’s reign. In India, Facebook’s WhatsApp is racing for the same feat, from the messaging angle: trying to quickly rollout finance functionality.

Farther to the west, Google and Apple are trying to strengthen their half-a-century foothold: Apple, this past June, announced a pier-to-pier transaction system, with an accompanying store of value, built into their iMessage platform. At the same time last year, Apple rolled out iMessage Apps, enabling software atop iMessage. iMessage Apps, as you can imagine, closely resemble the likes of WeChat’s Mini Programs. Apple is betting their operating system on messaging, and it becomes clearer each day. This connectivity-first, messaging-first shift is something I covered in a speaking engagement last year, and stand by my predictions.

WeChat was first, and its power is something we cannot yet understand — a power that resembles that of the internet, but proprietary, owned. It is no accident that Facebook, Apple, Google, and many more technology conglomerates are racing towards this capitalistic oracle. It is this force, with WeChat, that is powering the booming startup economy in China, in Shenzhen. Through WeChat, you can rent a bike, call a taxi, share your routes with your friends and family, send messages, updates, and stickers to your boss, and co-workers — you can live your life through WeChat. Not only can you, but many, most, do. WeChat is everything in China — the country revolves around WeChat. WeChat is propelling the sharing economy to success, will power China’s environmental revolution, and will strengthen China’s grip on world power.

But, how has this happened?
How did Tencent get this so right?
Why were they first?

Isolation

I’ve explained much of how this has happened, and the impacts it has had, but have carefully avoided the largest factor: isolation. See, China’s strengthening economy, and fast-paced global growth, has only strengthened their nationalism. As I have laid out, China’s culture is changing, but what continues to ring true: China respects the West, they respect America. Inside China, however, this is a very different story. During America’s industrialization period, we were not the melting pot we know of today — racism and bigotry were far more rampant, and life for the immigrant, or the foreign business, was hard. This eerily parallels the China we see today.

China has grown strongly nationalistic for a number of reasons. For one, China’s success and social latter has generated tremendous loyalty. Without the state, much of China would still be riddled with poverty — they are not and every day are less so, and that literal life allowance is paid back through nationalism. The Chinese love their country, just as Americans had for two centuries, and that love, that force, continues to propel industry. Now, too, the environmental clean-up indicators that are slowly trickling into the news-cycle are a resultant of strengthened nationalism. Secondly, the communist safety-net continues to protect, and lift, the people of China each day. Those who had lived outside the rural farmland of Shenzhen three decades ago were allotted a place in the booming Shenzhen metropolis that we witness today. Thirdly, with communism came propaganda and censorship. Albeit not a radical, tyrannous, regime, like their neighbor to the east, China is riddled with censorship.

The state controls the media and the internet. The state’s grip on media and face is slowly evolving and weakening through cultural progress within the country. However, the state’s grip on the outside world, is not. In the late 1990s, as the internet began to spread around the world, the leaders of China witnessed the power it wielded. They saw the possible: the effect we saw in the Arab Spring, they had predicted. The internet was a force of outside influence that must be controlled. This led to the Golden Shield Project. Its sister projects, dubbed, the Golden Projects, cover crucial infrastructure like bridges, water, agriculture, and government handed responsibilities like taxation, customs, and finance. From the Golden Projects inception, digital security was crucial. The Golden Shield Project is responsible for the development and maintenance of information systems that track criminal history, traffic, tourism, and visa holders — protecting the country through a vast network of information systems.

The most controversial sub-project of the Golden Shield has become the Great Firewall of China. Constructed at the turn of the millennia, it enables the Chinese government to control the influx of information to and from the country. In the same way that the country controls borders, they control their digital borders using the tools and infrastructure designated from this project. Just as Hosni Mubarak took Egypt offline, China could do the same: and they have, and are doing so right now. If the people of China were to someday riot, and new leadership would become a demand, the state would almost certainly bring down the internet first—far before military and police could reach the streets. Silencing information and voices, first. We have not yet witnessed signals that this will occur in China, but the indicators appearing right now are similar, with effects far different.

Earlier we spoke about the western fear of Copycat China. How when companies like Coca Cola, McDonalds, Apple, or Uber enter the market, their products and offerings are quickly replicated, and then they often lose to Chinese nationalism. But, why does this happen? There are, of course, many, many factors, but the largest is regulation. It’s not the same regulation we would see in the West: it’s not about anticompetitiveness, or monopolies, but instead, it’s about voice. China’s state wants ownership of and access to data, and they want companies to be on-shored and willing to provide that access. This is why conglomerates form Chinese sects, like Uber China. Their Chinese installments are tasked with meeting the needs of the Chinese consumer, while also meeting the needs of the state.

Uber, for example, wields the greatest traffic camera of them all, and that data would be very valuable to China’s Golden Shield. Google, before suspending their Chinese operations, worked with China to censor search results that China claimed defamatory, controversial, or of negative impact — the Great Firewall of China wielded this control. Google eventually had come to a wits’ end as China’s grip strengthened and more, and more, of their products were censored. Google joined the ranks of the rest of the American technology industry: Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon. Some, by will, and others, by blockade. The Great Firewall project proactively blocks western influence, giving rise to hyper-focused Chinese alternatives. Before Google and China formed a relationship, Baidu, a Google counterpart, emerged in the country. As the Great Firewall wielded greater control, Baidu gained stronger.

As Twitter became censored, a Chinese alternative, a mix of Facebook’s Newsfeed and Twitter’s Timeline, emerged: Weibu. The same could be said for Amazon: Alibaba gave rise to Taobao and Tmall in the country. This isn’t rare: this is the normal. As ideas are crafted in the West, they become inaccessible to China, thus giving rise to Chinese-born alternatives. They are not copycats, as so much as appreciations. Where inaccessible, the Chinese build. The forced hand of censorship, in a way, enabled the strong technology sector in China — just as the technically trained workforce churn had. The Baidus, Alibabas, and Tencents have started to out-pace the West, in certain ways, as they are allotted internal protection, while also protected from external forces. Alibaba does not face global competition in their space, which has enabled them to thrive internally, and begin expansion externally.

The focus enabled by the Great Firewall of China is why WeChat was first. Thinking back to the Silk Road, the original Great Wall was purposed with protecting the vast trade network that breathed life into the country. The Chinese internet has quietly become today’s Silk Road in China, and the Great Firewall, whether by design or accident, protects more than face. The global canals, outposts, and trade networks that Xi’s envisions as a project of the century, the next Silk Road, are merely the physical representations of something bigger, more powerful. China’s digital half, their technology industry and digital manifestation, represent something new, something we have yet to see. Digital networks will greatly represent, and enforce, China’s equitable power balance. WeChat, and Tencent, will play a significant roll in this new world order. Facebook’s Messenger, Tencent’s WeChat, Apple’s iMessage, and more, are merely manifestations of a shift I like to call: from nation to platform.

Literacy of Forces

In planning this piece, and striving to undercover these powerful, invisible, forces, I reached out to my friend Niraj Pant. Niraj, more than anyone I know, represents Silicon Valley’s next generation of leaders. Like me, the connected era is all he has ever known. He studies Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, while also having his foot in the door in many of Silicon Valley’s most prominent venture capital firms, and exciting startups. He is a Campus Ambassador at Sequoia Capital, the world’s leading venture capital firm with a $1.4 trillion market valued portfolio, having backed: Apple, Google, Oracle, PayPal, Stripe, YouTube, Instagram, Yahoo!, WhatsApp, and many, many, more. He formerly was a member of Binary Capital’s Student Advisory Board, driving deal-flow from young, driven founders. Binary was an early investor in Tinder, Snapchat, and Instagram.

Niraj is currently an intern at Ripple Labs, Silicon Valley’s most recent Bitcoin darling: a company bringing Bitcoin’s decentralized blockchain technology to global finance. Ripple is at the forefront of a decentralization revolution, one that has propelled cryptocurrency valuations, and has ignited Ethereum’s ecosystem explosion, propelling thousands of talented minds to build and explore atop new world protocols. Niraj is also a researcher in the Decentralized Systems Lab at UIUC, his university. He previously worked at Skycatch, a startup building drone-powered 3D mapping tools for enterprise, and Lookout, a company protecting and mitigating mobile device attacks. I could not think of a better person to help me bring clarity to these new world forces than Niraj — he is world class.

Patterns

In the above examples, a pattern should have emerged: the abundance of networks, and the power of the network effects they wield. At the beginning of this piece, I described the life of the Amish — I described the abundance, and the importance, of community in the Amish church. I described their isolation from the outside world, and how it has made them increasing prosperous. How their formation of community, networks, has allowed them to prosper — but, their network isolation, has driven their civil foothold. China’s nationalism, and isolation from much of the outside internet, has allowed their technology sector to thrive, without global competition — just as the Amish have thrived without the impacts of war, and modern utility.

I described how the power of social media, and connectedness, propelled Tunisia’s regime collapse, and Egypt’s overthrow, and how those powers shifts were ignited, in part because of, networks, and accelerated as a result of, network effects. I described how network power brought fear upon regime, and state, with Egypt’s internet blackout, and China’s Great Firewall. I described the increasingly powerful platform, WeChat, and its ever-present grip on China’s economy, the rapid ideological expansion to the West, the new internet Tencent controls, and how that internet is powered by communication, messaging, and the pre-existing networks that sit atop this world. I described the rapid onset of world globalization, and the power wielded by networked supply chain, and the digital parallels emerging. I described ancient trade routes and their impacts on humanity’s emergence, and how they shaped the world as we know it, and why they were worth protecting.

I described networks, how they shape every aspect of our lives, and how technological manifestations are enabling their ever power expansion through network effects.

Networks

The single most important takeaway from this piece is the value, and importance, of networks. I will later talk about the history of networks, and the physical and metaphorical infrastructure that sits beneath this concept, but in this section, I strive to define networks. Networks, by definition, are “a group or system of interconnected people or things.” If you have been carefully reading this piece, you have begun to see networks all around you. The Steppe Route, and the Silk Road built atop its history, were networks — they were well-known paths that connected places. The ancient trade routes that built our world were the manifestation of networks, with physical paths traveling across continents and grasslands to bring civilizations together. See, networks can be physical, but it is their philosophical representation that wields power.

Networks are found in our biological systems and our social structures. Last year, Suzanne Simard presented her breakthrough research about symbiotic networks in forests at TED. In her riveting talk, Simard describes a vast forestal coexistence where fungus and divergent breeds of trees work in unison to prosper together. Beneath the soil, vast biomes of fungus bridge the gaps between root systems. The fungus connects trees in the same way that the internet connects people. When one tree thrives, CO2 and nutrients are broadcast to trees within their network. Stresses and evolutions are spread amongst trees, as if they educate each other on environmental circumstances. As young trees sprout into a new ecosystem, and connect into the network of trees around them, elder trees pass down wisdom: they pass down blueprints that enable prosper in the environment around them.

In Network theory, these network representations are defined in the terms of Graph theory. That is, structures built by the edge connections of vertices (nodes). Graph theory allots us the tools to begin to understand and to design networks. In networks, graphs are undirected: each edge is a two-way street. If a network is properly optimized, each vertice should be accessible from every other, with as few steps as possible. To understand this concept, let’s think of a group of people. Everyone in the group knows each other, and are thus reachable, and known, by everyone else. However, each person in the group brings their own network — their friends, family, or coworkers. From the group, a member’s brother would be accessible in two steps, or hops. Likewise, the member’s brother could reach another member’s sister in three hops. This is a social network, and that social network is represented by vertices and edges that form a graph.

Metalless

I am a technologist by trade and have studied Computer Science for much of my life, and my definition of networks is a little different. Networks, to me, are the infrastructure that connects machines, computers. In Computer Science, we study computation, but not in the mathematical sense: we study the ways in which we can teach computers to compute. The beauty of a computer is that it simply computes — it linearly follows procedures, and stops when there are no more. Computers do exactly what you tell them to do, and nothing more. Computer programs are merely the culmination of millions, billions, of small and simple tasks. Computers are procedural: they follow steps in an orderly fashion, one after the other. In Computer Science, we study how to maximize this capability — to make hard problems procedural, and to make them implementable.

We design algorithms that take input, and compute expected output. The most simple algorithm you can think of is a mathematic function: 1+x, for example. The input being x, and the output being the resultant solution. A computer is great at solving this exact problem, and we engineer computers to become better at it each day. But, in Computer Science, we strive to make hard problems easy with hierarchies. One function calls ten more, resulting in cascading computation. Our problems are simplified by scope, and this was made possible because of tooling. We design languages and tools that allow us to more simply teach a computer how to solve a problem. Through layers of tooling, we generate procedural programs, which are the resultant of many layers of isolated scope. With each layer, problems grow simpler.

As computers have grown more powerful, they have also grown smaller, and more efficient. Within the silicon of computer chips is a vast network of electron pathways, or circuits. Circuits are no different than a light switch — the laws of physics draw electricity, like water, from public utility to light bulb. When a light switch is switched off, a circuit is broken, so the inertia of electricity ceases, and the light bulb on the other end losses illumination. This simple concept powers computation: millions, and billions, of circuits join together to form something as a whole, which is greater than its parts. In the same way that procedural algorithms are limited in scope, circuits are limited in scope. Each circuit mimics that of a function, and systems of circuits do the same. Computation is built atop a vast layer of circuits.

At the core are transistors: the breakthrough invention that enabled Alan Turing’s work. Vacuums tubes, as they were at that time, resembled light switches that were controlled with current—they opened, or closed, depending on the flow of current. This enabled electron propagation, opening and closing circuits down the chain as electricity flowed from the source. In other words, it enabled computation. Transistors were the fundamental limiting factor of computers, as they were large, and drew a lot of power. As transistors shrank, computers did as well. Transistors continued to shrink, and in 1965, Gordon Moore proclaimed that the amount of transistors in one square inch of an integrated circuit would double every year for the foreseeable future. He was right — in fact, the computation industry outpaced what we now know of as Moore’s Law.

Until Moore’s Law ended in 2016, that is. Transistors have not stopped shrinking, but the rate of Moore’s Law has slowed—the density of transistors is not doubling each year anymore. We are expecting to see the smallest possible transistors appear in 2021. As I have laid out, computers are not magical: they are machines built atop complex webs of circuitry. Through time, that circuitry has grown small, but there continue to be fundamental, atomic, limits. In 2021, we will likely see integrated circuits packed with transistors that have reached the boundaries of physics, that are nearly atomic scale. But, frankly, it will not matter. As circuits grow smaller and more compact, they are faster, and require less electricity. Electricity itself is not “used” but merely converted — wasteful systems have greater heat loss. Integrated circuits dissipate heat. As circuits shrink, they become more efficient, since electricity can complete a loop in less time while having less time to convert to heat offset.

The circuits we will see in 2021 will be much faster, and they will also use far less energy. But, the limits that exist today are not exactly computational. Sure, our smartphones will have a longer battery life, and apps will be able to utilize artificial intelligence and augmented reality in more meaningful ways. But, the limitations of our computers are not that of computation, because atomic reaching computers will not be revolutionary fast — they will just be faster. The true limitations we face are in our networks. Like China’s immense supply chain, the technology industry has given rise to immense computational power. All of our devices are faster, and as a result, data centers are faster too. Companies like Google and Amazon have invested heavily in this area to make their services that much faster for their end users.

You would think that Google, Amazon, Facebook, and every other internet giant could build massive data center projects in barren wastelands. But, the problem is that their data centers need to be near their users, because as it turns out, light is slow. Light travels at the speed of 186,282 miles per second, and that is very fast — but not fast enough. In the context of Earth, light can only travel the planet’s circumference 7.5 times in a second. The speed of light is not the only important factor, however. Data must be converted to light and handed off by numerous systems before it can reach an end user, and in all likelihood, the end user would not receive light directly. Internet giants have built hundreds of data centers around the world for this reason — they want to enable the fastest possible response times for their users.

Their data centers form a global network, with each having their own subsequent local, continental networks. If you imagine data centers to be like civilizations, they are connected by Silk Roads. In the case of the Internet Age, the Silk Road consists not of gravel paths, but of massive bundles of fiberoptic cables physically laid beneath our oceans and under our roads. As you send a tweet or like a post, data is propagated across vast distances to keep data centers in consensus — in the same way that biological systems propagate oxygen to cells. Your body’s weakness is not your oxygenating lungs, but rather, the circulatory system that propagates that oxygen. Healthy lungs are not faced with limitation, but a healthy circulatory system is riddled with points of failure: the heart, arteries, veins, and the diseases and infections they carry.

As Amazon and Google built their empires, they built worldly infrastructure. They dominated their markets because they could better serve their markets. Other companies failed to scale — they could not keep up with the technical and logistical demands before them. Amazon and Google could, and in the fast paced world we live in, the faster companies won. In building these empires, they accomplished incredible technical feats: they built incomprehensible technical infrastructure that outpaced their needs. Just as Moore’s Law projected transistor density, and thus computational capability, economies of scale drove abundance, thus dissolving computational cost. Others could not serve their customers like Amazon and Google had, and thus, a business model was born. Google and Amazon opened their infrastructure to customers — companies that could utilize their vast computational networks.

Seemingly overnight, Google and Amazon absorbed computation. Suddenly, scaling was not an issue. Their products were a dawn of a new era, and beneath them lives great complexity. Cloud providers have not defied the laws of physics, nor invented faster computers, they have just built networks that utilize their resources and capabilities of computers far more efficiently. In the traditional computing industry, computation occurred only when provoked, and necessary. Much of the capabilities of a computer were never reached: they lived idle. In the new era, networks of computers worked in symphony, each reaching their maximum potential while working together to solve bigger problems.

Because of cloud providers, computation became a utility — it became accessible at cost, not plausibility. This liquid shift has enabled the startup era: it allows companies like Uber, Airbnb, and others to rapidly grow to millions of users without metal, without physical infrastructure. Startups join the public cloud, and now only need to worry about their software, and their implementations, not the computers that run them. Too, this shift has creeped into conglomerates themselves. Teams within Google, within Amazon, and others with private clouds like Facebook, now have the resource allocations to run vast computations. Facebook, for example, has grown incredibly rapidly, and their resource utilization has grown exponentially so.

For every user request Facebook receives, hundreds or thousands of requests have enabled the information returned. For example, when you post a new status to your Facebook profile, that request is broadcast to hundreds of systems. It reaches the closest Facebook data center to your proximity, and then is broken apart and broadcast amongst multiple compute systems and data stores. The information is broadcast to other continents, and other data centers. At each, a vast array of systems and algorithms work in symphony to compute the best order in which your friends’ Newsfeeds should display your post, if at all. The scale to which Facebook accomplishes these tasks has only been made possible because of network decentralization, because of the metalless nature of the cloud.

Because of decentralization, and because of connectivity, networks are the limitations of today, not computers. Augmented Reality and Artificial Intelligence won’t be held back by computers: they will be held back by networks. Data that propagates networks, and that is collected as a result of networks, is the true value, and the true enablement, of the time we live. Augmented Reality will only grow plausible as vast data centers of machines learn to interpret images and videos. True Artificial Intelligence will only grow possible when distributed system begin to understand the world’s knowledge. Data is today’s transistor problem, and networks sit at the forefront of solution.

Network Effects
As you are beginning to understand, networks are all around us, and are at the core of everything. But, it is network effects that accelerate the power that networks yield. Network effects are the “phenomenon whereby a product or service gains additional value as more people use it.” At the dawn of the internet, in 1980, Robert Metcalfe popularized a theory in networks, Metcalfe’s Law. The law stated that with every additional node added to a network, the value of the network grew exponentially: put simply, the value of a network is the number of nodes, N, squared, N². In recent years, however, this law has become challenged, as the world has grown connected with billions and billions of nodes. Metcalfe’s Law has not held up to the connected era, as it once had.

The most common network effect that we have come to know is the value of a social network. In the telephone era, as each business and household gained a telephone, the value of the network grew tremendously. Suddenly, every neighbor was reachable by phone, and every business was reachable by every resident. It connected the world, and shrunk distance. The telephone was a social network, just like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn. With more content, and with more nodes (people), the value of the network grew. As did the internet that underlies social media — as each computer came online, the value of the internet, the network, exploded. As more telephones and computers entered the home, it became harder to live without them. As more Facebook friends began sharing content on the network, it became harder to ignore, and to leave. Network effects propel the power of networks through a lock-in effect, strengthening the hold of a network.

Too, there are other types of network effects, like data network effects. This is a concept that Niraj details in a blog post. The two examples he gives are Palantir and Uber. Palantir, a Peter Thiel company, specializes in big data analysis, and much of their work occurs behind closed doors, but they are widely known to partner with governments, and specifically, our own. Palantir has access to a tremendous amount of data, and they collect more each day — they use this data to analyze and study patterns. For example, Palantir is thought to build tools that highlight potential foreign born and domestic terrorists that are perceived to be a threat to our country. By having access to more data than anyone else, given their relationship to our federal government, they are more powerful. Palantir can likely predict domestic threats more than any other company, solely because of data. Data enables an iterative feedback loop: more data means that they can more quickly uncover new patterns and teach their systems to highlight these new threats.

In the same ideology, Uber is more valuable because of the vast data they have collected over the last five years. Uber can predict ride fares, delays, and access better than any other ride sharing company because they have more data. With every ride, their datasets grow stronger, and their ride sharing strengths deepen. These insights allow Uber to reduce costs, increase availability, and grow consumer adoption. Because Uber is likely the cheapest ride hailing service, as a result of data, their lock-in is too deep to leave. Google, for example, also benefits from data network effects. Because Google has access to the world’s search history, they can better understand trends and improve search results. Google’s personalized search results are stronger than other search engines, as is their advertizement targeting, making it more difficult for users and advertizers alike to leave the platform.

Ecosystem Effects
In the context of networks, ecosystems are an important force to understand. In a post, Niraj writes:

The ecosystem effect is how to build unstoppable companies. As a company grows out from their initial product offering, they vertically and horizontally integrate (“move out”), to continue growing the company. It’s how big companies become big. Companies typically enter the level of the stack at the path of least resistance (easiest go-to market strategy). Build that piece well, monetize, and use money to build out long-term vision and strategy of company from there. Building out and owning more of the process create a scrabble “double points” effect — effectively, the sum of the parts are greater than the individual parts alone (1 + 1 = 3). Building out creates defensibility in a product. This is where the ecosystem effect comes in — it’s the “lock in effect”, because the experience of having all the software on platform is much better than piecing together multiple pieces of software. Creating a network of products has greater value than the products individually.

Niraj discusses Google’s roadmap, and the ecosystem effect that has accelerated their incredible valuation and growth. Google first built Search, and with Search, they collected a tremendous amount of data. With vast data, they accelerated past their competition in the search vertical, and enabled a durable business model: AdSense. Google expanded horizontally with Gmail, YouTube, Drive and Music, and brought the experiences together with a single sign-on. Google’s Search rapidly became much more as a result of the Ecosystem Effect: Google owned more of your time. Their products all worked well together, and spoke the same proprietary languages. Every company could use Google Apps to support their needs: email, scheduling, and advertizing. Most company needs could be accomplished under the Google umbrella.

Because of network effects, Google devised an ecosystem, and that ecosystem strengthened their place within the technology industry. With every day that you continue to use Google products, the more difficult it would become to live without them. Their products touch nearly everyone in the West, just as WeChat’s ecosystem does in China. The same ecosystem effect theory could be used to explain the conditions that enabled Shenzhen’s rapid onset and importance. It could too explain the organic network living beneath the forest biome: the ecosystem, literally, was strengthened with the addition of each tree, and the coexistence that brought them together. In connected biomes, it became harder for trees to die when they were connected.

The Seventh Sense

In Joshua Cooper Ramo’s The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks, Ramo describes the onset of a new age, the Network Age. His book aims to describe the new network forces that are defining this age — much of what we have discussed here. Ramo describes the sixth sense in the terms of the late German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: having the ability to understand the importance of a current period of time in the retrospect of history. Nietzsche’s sixth sense would enable someone to understand the butterfly effects that cascade from invention, or interruption. The sixth sense could enable one to retroactively realign the future by altering the importance of today. Ramo defines his seventh sense as the ability to understand the nature in which an object, or system, fundamentally changes with connectedness. He describes the importance of network strategy for business leaders, politicians, and youth who must battle, and embrace, these forces that are embedded all around us.

Joshua Cooper Ramo is managing director at Kissinger Associates, one of the world’s leading geostrategic advisory firms. Before entering the advisory business, Ramo was foreign editor and assistant managing editor of Time magazine. He divides his time between Beijing and New York, and served as China analyst for NBC during the 2008 Olympics. Ramo cochaired the Santa Fe Institute’s first working group on Complexity and International Affairs and was a Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute, a founder of the U.S.-China Young Leaders Program, and a Global Leader for Tomorrow of the World Economic Forum. Trained as an economist, he holds degrees from the University of Chicago and New York University. He is an active board member of both Starbucks and FedEx. Ramo serves as an advisor to some of the largest companies and investors in the world.

In his latest book, Ramo articulates this new shift of power, and portrays it as a period of equal significance to Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. In this 300 year period, organizations architected for popes and alchemists did not survive the onset of secular science and choice. In the blip of human existence, nearly every single organization and institution was erased, and the biggest wars in human history tour apart the world. Ramo proposes that existing institutions who do not quickly evolve to meet the demands of the network age will crumble under the weight of this new era, just as those who had not progressed towards Enlightenment or the industrial age. The shift in power, as he describes it, is already manifesting in political, economic, and security threats, and reshaping the world before our eyes.

Companies and governments are not ready for these forces, and the upheaval they will bring. The companies of tremendous value, and respect, that sit atop our stock markets and livelihood, today, are under 20 years old. Over the last 20 years, the world has witnessed incredible onsets of change, and onsets of networks. Technology has pervaded every facet of our lives, and our world. Yet, our greatest fears are no longer war and geopolitical tension, and the destruction they can lead to, but instead, networks. As a network visionary, Ramo consults governmental advisors on national security and foreign policy. The fears that Ramo articulates and instills in policy leaders are not that of regime, but rather, the lack of one. See, regimes are built atop people, and infrastructure: fear and naivety concentrate power.

In the American news cycle, as of late, the threat of nuclear war brought upon by a nuclear arms race and a country’s pervasive charge to gain worldly influence has seeped into daily headlines. Diplomatic conflict and vacant threats are broadcast to a world stage. But, these are the threats that do not concern Ramo — he sees greater threats all around us. In our era, wars are no longer fought, they are ended. If the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea were to overstep their bounds, they would suddenly cease to exist — this is the lethal future we live in. Yet, Kim Jong-un’s power is only made possible because of presence: North Korea has armies, and they have weapons, and those weapons sit within concrete-riddled bunkers and barracks. North Korea’s threats are complacent because they exist in physicality, and can be physically altered through military intervention.

However, there are new threats boiling, greater threats — threats that do not manifest in arms, or bunkers, but in ideology. The greatest threats that face the world today are in radicalization, and decentralized terrorism. Middle Eastern instability and regime collapse, some of which we discussed earlier, has created the conditions in which fundamentalism thrives. The people of Egypt watched as the Tunisian regime fell to protest. The world watched as the Arab Spring brought change to an autocratic region. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant watched as poverty spread and anguish ignited — and they recruited from it. The group has declared itself a worldwide caliphate, and has sought to reclaim the ancient Levant region, which now includes: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine.

For decades, western democracies have fought the onset of brutal Islamic extremists. They, we, have invaded Middle Eastern countries and have backed frail governments with weapons and rations. In the late 1980s, Al-Qaeda, a decentralized terror organization, had risen to foreign policy notoriety through a series of diplomatic attacks and bombings. Yet, it was in 2001 where they became powerful: fear gave them power, and made them famous. The 43rd President of the United States launched a multiyear, multi-trillion dollar War on Terror, declaring: “our enemy is a radical network of terrorists and every government that supports them.” For the first time, a war had been declared on a tactic, an ideology, not a country. Al-Qaeda did not resonate a homeland, they resonated from uniformity: ingrained in military, in government, in cities, and markets, Al-Qaeda was the greatest invisible enemy.

Al-Qaeda proved undefeatable. But, the Arab Spring gave parallel extremism a more powerful voice. Risen from ruin, ISIL embraced the network age at its core — ISIL was highly tuned for the age of social media and connectivity. ISIL spiraled to notoriety because of visible extremism. The War on Terror was fought thousands of miles away in deserts and poppy fields, and victory, or loss, was announced in insurgence reports and briefings. ISIL made war accessible — ISIL brought fear and radicalized ideology to people, not governments. ISIL operates a network of websites and robot driven social media handles. They share state-like propaganda reels that resonate with troubled sympathizers. They share brutal beheadings that are edited for mass appeal — they take inspiration from first-person shooter video games like Call of Duty, and censor graphic visuals. ISIS tunes their messages, their beheadings, and their terrorism for mass consumption.

The social media era brought network expectation to every sector, including terrorism. Today’s millennials and youth, like me, use Tinder to meet new people, and to make new relationships. Tinder brought internet dating to mass appeal, and in doing so, has enabled flash dating, where profiles are tuned for swipes, and connections are made in agreement. Viewership is controlled with preferences and tuned for success. Profiles are made to be consumed, and designed for an audience: expectations are clear. The same can be said about ISIL: their content is designed to be broadcast. When ISIL’s vast network of new media editors collaborate on a new piece, like decentralized journalists, they follow peer review: they tweak length to the latest consumable metric and color correct for a better viewing experience. They transmit their content to a vast network of robots and sympathizers that broadcast it across social media, where media channels pick it up and air it to their millions of viewers.

ISIL casts a net and uses the world as their pawn. Ideology plants itself in the unstable and the resentful, and new sympathizers and fighters are born. As the battles of the Levant progress and ISIL’s physicality weakens, they trigger weaponized sympathizers to steer their vehicles into pedestrians, and to take to the public square with kitchen knives and ‎weaponized acid. ISIL is a living network, evolving, and puppeteering on a world stage. They traffic in fear, and sympathize in death. Yet, their ideologies continue to grow, and their resistance grows baffled. ISIL is a network age terrorist organization, and the world is not ready for the invisible wraths that lay before us, and the power they wield. ISIL’s decentralized leaders have the seventh sense, and their threats are what Ramo instills in his briefings.

Social

As you are starting to understand, at the root of networks lies the concept of social. Forests, in a way, are social — as are data centers, smartphones, and economies. Of course, now, we understand social in the context of social media, which itself is enabled by networks, and is a manifestation of networks. Objects, things, are connected — they talk to each other. Yet, we think of these concepts in terms of our definition. We project human traits upon inanimate objects and invisible networks to understand them. This, as it turns out, is why we have succeeded, why we dominate this planet: humans are inherently social, at our core.

Homo sapiens

Over a period of six million years, an ancient ape-like ancestor species transformed through evolution into us, humans. Four million years ago, we descended from the trees in Africa and gained bipedalism. In the four million years that followed, our ancestors grew more powerful: our brains enlarged, and we gained new complex abilities. We could run farther and faster than ever, with the motor skills to throw stones and objects precisely. In the past couple hundred thousand years, we gained the capacitiy for language — we could communicate far more effectively. Too, we could envision and create new tools and weapons. Our expression grew stronger, and we could carve art into cave walls, and pass down knowledge to our offspring.

In Yuval Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Harari describes human history through an evolutionary biology framework. Biology, to him, sets the limitations and possibilities of human activity, while culture shapes what is achieved. His book follows the path of archaic human ancestors in Africa through to the the 21st century, splitting it into four distinct periods. Within the Paleolithic period, the first Stone Age, sapiens entered the Cognitive Revolution in 17000 BCE. It was during this time when imagination was formed — when humans could envision a future. It was followed by the Agricultural Revolution in 12000 BCE with the development of farming. With the Bronze Age brought human unification, where humanity gradually consolidated power to one global empire. It was followed by the Scientific Revolution in 1500 CE with the emergence of objective science. The rapid encroachment of development was the result of the Cognitive Revolution, of imagination.

In the book, Harari stresses an important characteristic that has enabled cooperation. Although many other species exhibit social behavior, humans are exceptionally social. Our language capability combined with our imagination has enabled us to cooperate. Humans can plan ahead, and can work together in large numbers. Whereas, other species coexist, humans cooperate — we collaborate. Harari attributes our social cooperation to our ability to believe in entities that exist solely in imagination. For example, he discusses religions, political structures, trade networks, and legal institutions: all fiction, and based only in ideology.

Technology

Ideology and cooperation enabled us to form social hierarchies and communities. In working together, we could embrace specialization. We could explore our interests and decide our focusses. This started out with traditional gender roles: women tended to community and gathered, while men hunted and protected. But, as civilization developed, it expanded to metalworkers, pottery makers, artists, and academics. Social collaboration and community enabled us to create, and to enable those who did. Specialized workers did not need to hunt for food when expert hunters provided it for the entire village.

Because of the inherent social nature of humans, knowledge is decentralized and shared. Knowledge, like language, is passed down through ancestors. As humans grew in understanding, the rate at which change occurred accelerated. Communities enabled education, where the entire culmination of human knowledge could be passed down to the next generation. Human creation accelerated like a waterfall: one technology and creation led to another, and the pace quickened. Stone tools to metal forgery, and steam to combustion. Ideas and knowledge propagate the network of minds, just as Facebook posts propagate global networks of regional data centers. Neural pathways strengthen through ancestry, and innate ideas manifest in physicality — human creation reveals knowledge in atoms, and things.

As civilizations spread, and state grew powerful, knowledge and its spread became the ultimate protector. The world centered around knowledge, and people grew complacent in the trust of that knowledge. Faith and religion were a craft of the unexplainable, and peace grew from ideology — wills of gods empowered kings, castes, and popes. War was brought from ideology; from inexplainable difference. Battles were fought through knowledge — the faster network enabled faster maneuver, and faster overtake. As walls grew higher, and borders grew more strict, knowledge enabled war — and knowledge enabled its end. The faster horse, and the faster ship, enabled faster wars. Faster networks enabled greater success.

The colonialists in the American Revolution succeeded because of networks, because of faster spread of knowledge. Paul Revere’s famous midnight ride in 1776 warned colonial militia of the encroaching British forces — he gave them insight, warning. Because of early detection, and a faster network, Patriot fighters defeated the British in the battles of Lexington and Concord. The British relied upon network knowledge that was broadcast from their mainland, a continent away. Whereas, colonialists could rapidly iterate battleplans in a feedback loop, the British could not. Patriots won because horses were faster than ships. This, however, was not a new insight. For millennia, ancient Romans used mirrors and light to send signals across seas and vast distances. Early humans and natives spread signals through fire and smoke that billowed into the sky.

In the late 18th century, the semaphore line swept across Europe. It appeared in France, the Nordic, and Britain, enabling a rapid network of information transfer. It manifest in a few ways, but its core concept remained clear: visual telegraphs. In the same way that lighthouses broadcast light to warn captains of oceanic geography, visual telegraphs broadcast information through signals. The principle began with flags. At the source of information, ordered flags were raised and lowered. The next manned semaphore station would periodically glance at the previous station through telescopes, and would raise and lower their own flags to match the sequence. With this concept, flag coded information was propagated from a source, to a destination. Information could travel great distances.

Semaphore lines quickly evolved into the visual telegraphs — new signals and mechanisms were created to articulate more complex information, like alphabets. Whereas a series of flags could expel binary values, visual telegraphs expanded to human readable language. In few short decades, electricity was theorized and adapted to use. Hans Christian Ørsted and André-Marie Ampère devised the correlation of electricity and magnetic phenomena in 1819. Michael Faraday invented the electric motor by 1821. Georg Ohm mathematically analyzed the electrical circuit by 1827. By 1837, Samuel Morse devised the telegraph independently in the United States. The first telegram was sent across a two-mile distance in January of 1838, at unmatched speeds. In 1844, Morse sent the message “WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT” from the Capitol in Washington D.C. to Baltimore. In seven years, 40 miles of telegraph lines were laid between two geographically separate places, and teleportation of information grew near-instant.

By 1858, a transatlantic telegraph line connected North America and Europe. The east coast and west coast were connected via telegraph by 1861. Vast improvements in the speed of information transfer enabled more transfer of information. Both sects of America’s Civil War laid telegraph lines to the battlefield. Generals could manipulate armies from vast distances with more insight and understanding than ever before. The telegraph was faster than horses, and it encompassed war. World War I is believe to have been ignited because of the telegraph. Faster decisions and faster diplomatic negotiations enabled more rash decision making. Conversation transitioned to conflict in record time. Too, wars brought closure far faster; World War I only encompassed four years.

Because of the telegraph, and telegraph infrastructure, Alexander Graham Bell could invent the telephone. At first, the telephone of 1876 was a toy, just as the telegraph had been. But, the telephone was more human. Humans evolved speech as the fastest method of communication through millions of years. Literacy proved more so, but the rate at which literacy could be transferred, and interpreted, did not outpace that of language. As the telephone progressed, and grew stronger, the telephone blanketed the world faster than the telegraph had — largely because of the telegraph. The telegraph enabled the purchase and delivery of telephones — business absorbed logistical reliance upon telegrams.

The pace at which world knowledge accelerated grew because of the telegraph, and because of the telephone. The world grew smaller as each telegraph line blanketed cities from coast to coast. Telegraph lines sat atop the world, representing the philosophical connection of two places. Yet, telegraph lines also physically changed our world. Historically, cities were built on the fertile coasts of rivers. People were reliant upon the people of these regions. But, the telegraph and the telephone built vast logistical networks that enabled sprawl. Suddenly, people could disperse; people were not reliant on markets and rivers. The telephone enabled the transit of goods and foods — the telephone enabled the milk delivery driver, and the highway systems in which they traveled.

The telephone fundamentally reshaped community — it accelerated the pace of information, and made autonomy possible. Cities could be built in deserts, and people could dwell in remote mountains. The telephone defeated the need for human survival; communities protected community through the telephone. The western culture we have come to expect is a result of this behavioral shift — the American Dream is a result of the telephone. The internet, of course, reshaped this dynamic further. Faster communication enabled a faster logistics network. The internet, a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency creation, enabled a faster military, and enabled the Network Age that reshaped the global power dynamics of the Post-Cold War era.

Social Networks

The internet, too, enabled the infrastructure in which computers could slave to other computers; systems could communicate with systems on grandiose scale. It enabled network formation atop the true metal networks that shape our world. In 1997, Andrew Weinreich launched the first experiment in social media: SixDegrees. SixDegrees was the first manifestation of human networks (social hierarchies) on the internet. It allowed users to create a profile, to show a friends list, and to search other’s friends lists. SixDegrees was built atop the theory that every single person is connected by every other in under six graph hops — dubbed Six degrees of separation, theorized by Frigyes Karinthy in 1929. That is, you could be connected to any person through a person within your network, and their network, and so forth.

SixDegrees was a breakthrough experiment that landed far ahead of its time — it failed. By 2002, Friendster appeared: it allowed users to share videos, photos, messages and comments with other people and profiles. Jonathan Abrams’ Friendster was built atop the SixDegrees insight, and leveraged the rapid onset of consumer bandwidth to bring vast amounts of profile content to its users. It exploded among youth and pervaded its way into offline social networks — it reformed social culture. Yet, too, Friendster struggled. It grandfathered the concept of social media but could not scale to their viral onset of users — the cloud era did not yet exist. MySpace appeared, and then Facebook did too — they could scale, and learned from the rapid iteration of the former.

With SixDegrees, your social network began from the network that had already exist. On SixDegrees, you added the email addresses of your family and friends — you digitized a network that existed in your reality. In 2003, Reid Hoffman launched LinkedIn to digitize business relationships. SixDegrees and Friendster allowed you to communicate with your relationships that existed in the real world. LinkedIn took this a step further, recommending professional connections. By uploading user contact address books, LinkedIn could predict who you might want to connect to — they allowed you to create new connections in the digital realm. Friendster followed this phenomena, as did Myspace, and Facebook: internet relationships were born out of network growth accessibility.

These concepts rapidly broadcast around the connected world, and one new idea would lead to another new innovation. The technology era was built because of technology — it enabled iteration and progress at a rate than had never been seen before. At the core of this progress was the innate human ability of social interaction: our world was built atop a human trait, and a human need.

Universities

In discussing these forces with Niraj, we resonated around an enthralling concept: educational institutions must gain the seventh sense, and they must grow networked. Networks are not new, they have always existed — they exist in physics, biology, infrastructure, and ideology. Yet, university ecosystems have grown divergent from the network age. See, like American infrastructure and cities, connectivity lies atop a world of before; it lies atop of higher education. Higher education must be tuned for the network age; networks must become deeply rooted in education, and the ecosystems they create. Education must be designed for our inherent social nature, and it must utilize the living connectivity that powers our new world.

In a 2014 talk at Cornell University, Bill Gates discussed the future of higher education. He discussed some of the initiatives that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have backed to propel the future they envision. His ideologies were not disruptive nor radical: he believed that the future of higher education will mirror the institutions that exist today. Yet, education must grow in access and affordability, and technology can play a part in that enablement. He articulated the power of accessible lectures and knowledge, while also reinforcing the need for the social structures that propel the eagerness and will to learn. Gates envisions a world where education becomes life-long, and campuses grow virtual.

Today, the world is on the verge of a networked education revolution — the Knowledge Steppe, as I call it. Higher education will emerge digital, with community at its core. Classrooms, campuses, and systems will virtualize — they will grow proprietary, and powerful, just as WeChat has in China. The sense of belonging that enables student success will grow deeper — just as community has in the Amish church. Information will become more freely available and accessible, and education will become more pervasive. Social media sucked us into a virtualized world where barriers became buttons, and acceptance became a virtue. Social education will embrace the network age, and it will redefine higher education — and this will all happen sooner than we could ever predict.

Thank you for taking the time to read this piece. Writing it has been a month-long endeavor, and the ideas I have presented have been formed over the culmination of my career. They, of course, are largely not my own, but of the visionaries who have come before me. I hope I have opened your eyes to the network forces that are reshaping our world and architecting the next waves in higher education. During the day, I am building Dormillo with this thesis. I’m on Twitter, and can be reached via direct message. Let’s chat.