Watching A New Super Class Arise.

How three decades of tech got us here.

The Taj and the Gateway. Image: Creative Commons

In April, 2005,

I sat on the balcony of my room in the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, Mumbai. I was drinking Chateau d’Yquem, a rare and expensive wine. Through the heat, I looked at the Gateway of India set against the harbor and the night. Down the hallway and just past the elevators, 24 hours a day, a man in a tuxedo was ready to help me with whatever I needed.

I needed little. The week had been full. Six days earlier I had been sitting in my living room in Berkeley when the phone rang. It was the publisher of Forbes Magazine. At that time I was Forbes’ Silicon Valley bureau chief. Earlier that day, he said, he’d cracked a vertebrae in a dare devil dive during a sales offsite. Could I deliver a speech for him in India, leaving tomorrow?

Twenty-six hours later I had obtained a visa, transferred his ticket to my name, and was sitting in the First Class section of Singapore Airlines. Before takeoff, I gave the correct answer to the steward’s question, “Will that be the Cristal or the Dom Perignion?”¹ First Class also had a continuously replenished basket of jumbo-sized Snickers and Kit Kats. I thought that was pretty cool. Rich people, who knew?

Between the West Coast and the Far East I outlined a speech, which I test drove that Monday in Singapore, before flying on to India. It needed to be something technology-, finance-, and entrepreneur-oriented, in keeping with both the magazine’s brand, and what the sponsor of these talks, a big French securities company, was looking for.

We weren’t so far away from the millennium, so I decided to address a big question: “Will this be the century of America, Europe, or Asia?” My answer leaned into the emerging technology sensibility I was seeing in the Valley.

Larry didn’t want to pose. How’d that work out for him?

In 2003 I’d put a young company called Google on the cover of a major American Magazine for the first time. In 2004, at the first Web 2.0 conference, Tim O’Reilly pioneered the idea that the Web itself would be a platform of immense scope and scale, on which multitudes could sell goods and services, and innovate on entirely new things. Thus, my conclusion was, “None of those countries! It will be the century of the highly empowered individual, and the nation-state will have to learn how to cope.”

Not bad, right?

It played well in Singapore, which was encouraging. Still, by the time I got to Mumbai I was considerably disoriented. There was jet lag. There was the unexpected shift of locations, from quiet Berkeley to the sensory crush of Mumbai. It was my first time there. I always walk around new places, and I approached my evening’s dinner speech still processing the contrast of the quiet, orderly opulence of the Taj² with the frenzy of Mumbai’s crowds and markets, broken pavements and jammed flats, spices and decay, just beyond the Taj’s beautiful garden walls. So many contradictions to harmonize.

It was an exciting crowd that evening,

largely self-made people of great learning and charm. I met Anji Reddy, who was revolutionizing the production and export of cheap pharmaceuticals. Others had pioneered businesses in offshoring and outsourcing, the two big beneficiaries of all the telecommunications fiber bought and sunk during the dotcom/telecom bubble. Others were turning India into a software powerhouse. They were pleased to be there, confident about the future and happy to network with each other. They liked the talk about new technologies and force multipliers for individuals, who would be able to access knowledge and communicate with people, from anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world.

An acquired taste - and I do mean “acquired.”

What didn’t go over very well was the d’Yquem, a syrupy-sweet French dessert wine made from several grape varieties, infected “noble rot,” which concentrates the flavor. It is among the most expensive wines in the world. The French securities company had purchased an imperial, or 6-liter, bottle for the event, and easily half of it remained as the evening wound down. It wasn’t surprising; Western palates were also moving away from sweet dessert wines, even the ones that cost a bundle.

I spoke with the organizer. “You’re going to pour that out after this, aren’t you?” Yes, he acknowledged, ruefully. Even a $12,000 bottle of wine is basically worthless once the cork is pulled.

Anybody who likes it, I said, give them a free carafe to take home. Great PR, no real cost. He loved this, and cut me in on the largess.

Which was how I came to be drinking d’Yquem on this unexpected balcony, watching people mill around the glorious gate, erected in 1924 to commemorate George V’s 1911 coronation as Emperor of India, leader of the British Raj. That was a man who could appreciate some noble rot with his desserts.

But within two and a half decades the gate had become a relic of a collapsed world. George’s son lasted less than a year as king, choosing to marry an American divorcee. Ten months later they were hanging out with Adolph Hitler, to the chagrin of the new king, his brother. The Raj itself disappeared in 1947, after the British Empire exhausted its wealth and control in defeating the Nazis. In the establishment of India and Pakistan perhaps 2 million people died, while another 20 million were displaced.

Perhaps nation-states hadn't always delivered so well. Maybe the newly-empowered individuals could make a better go of things. I thought about the Indian millionaires, not wild about sauternes, but utterly at home in international travel and markets, eager for more world-changing technologies. They were of this place, India, but in important ways they were detaching from it, and networking into and changing the new global class of people that had emerged.

I’d first heard of the new class about a decade before,

when I was covering Japanese financial markets in Tokyo for The Wall Street Journal. Jim Stewart, the Page One editor, told me that he was interested in “a new class of people,” excessively compensated individuals living across the globe, always in luxury but never part of any particular culture. They were agents of the new Globalization, usually involved in finance and commodities, but also manufacturing, real estate, and the opening of new consumer markets everywhere.

These types met up in Hong Kong, say, where they might work for an international bank, and they’d make small talk about running into that person in advertising that they’d met while skiing in Geneva, or how’d they’d just seen the guy who worked in commodities back in London. Not Davos men, exactly; more like a king’s bishops, chancellors, and summoners.

I knew many such people in Tokyo, and had met their emergent prototypes years before in Singapore. I’d always lacked their wealth, sophistication, and above all, certainty. Perhaps their most distinguishing characteristic was that, wherever they were, they knew each other far better than they knew local people and customs, beyond what was necessary for their business. Maybe in that sense I was one of them, being a financial journalist, but I was not traveling at the same speed or certainty. After all, newspaper employment peaked in 1990.³

Sitting on my balcony, I thought about the quickly-rising millionaires of Mumbai, and from across India. They were connected into the world in different ways. The people I’d seen a dozen years earlier in Tokyo were largely profiting from imposing modern finance, construction, and consumerism in as many places as possible. This new wave was using technology to serve and change the developed world, as much as India. At the next stop on the speech tour, Delhi, I’d meet a man who’d made billions providing cellular phones across India; we talked about macro engineering agriculture and quick-frozen food, so India could feed Europe.

At the same time, these Indian entrepreneurs weren’t so different from the locally-detached globalizers I’d met in Tokyo. They understood their own cultures, and lived within them, true, but they were largely attuned to other transnational millionaires and billionaires, owning condos in Dubai and homes in Vancouver, and counting on an international pulse of increasingly digital activity to stoke many of their businesses. There was a human butler down the hall, but my room also had excellent bandwidth. What I was observing seemed more an addition and an evolution, rather than a change.

In 2014, midway between the Taj and today,

I was still in the Bay Area, covering tech. I was focused on how much it had moved into high gear. I was also finishing a decade of teaching the history of technology-influenced social and political changes at U.C. Berkeley. (On Sunday I’ll write more about this.)

By then the global financial shock of 2008-2010 had somewhat shaken up the transnational elite who’d caused it, while at the same time it devastated the locals in scores of countries. Donald Trump, a billionaire developer who’d taken his “money-first” luxury brand global, was starting to create MAGA by exploiting this gap, pointing out to ordinary Americans how badly they’d been screwed, and how he would be their avenging angel. The guy knew how to sell.

Tech had continued to make national boundaries since my speeches in India. Once nationally-sovereign things such as postage and telecommunications had disappeared into digital communications. Money, an even greater symbol of sovereignty, was under attack, at lest rhetorically, from bitcoin, which had been around for a few years. Migration and the process of becoming a full-fledged citizen of one’s new country was also changing, at both elite and ordinary levels. People could leave home physically, but remain there virtually, even watching the local soccer team from anywhere in the world.

In 2013, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and bitcoin fan went one further, writing about “Cloud Nations” distinct from any country. In a speech to Y Combinator, he said the Valley should “digitally exit” the United States.

Screenshot from the video. The youthful entrepreneurs crack up.

With this in mind, I began asking entrepreneurs I knew and liked, people originally from the U.S., Romania, Norway, the Czech Republic, and India, a series of questions:

-If I dropped five “good” passports (U.S., Australia, Germany, Singapore etc.) on the table, would you really care which one you picked up? Most said no.

-Do you do business in the U.S., Europe, where? Often they didn’t understand the question; they did business on the Internet, and dealt with local countries as necessary.

-Do you expect your children to do national service in the country where you grew up? I don’t recall a single person saying yes.

I wrote about this for a blog post at The New York Times, but I couldn’t get the editors interested in much more besides. They wanted juicer stuff about semiconductors, and scandals at social media companies. Who’s to say they were wrong? That’s what people read, not this science-fiction bullshit from apocalyptic tech millionaires, for whom contemporary America was going the way of the Raj.

Anyway, the fault is just as much mine. I didn’t know what to make of it, except that the new international class had become completely detached from the reality of the majority of people in the physical world. This was something different from the idle rich, or the jet setters and euro trash, the international cafe society of generations past. Those people played together around the world, but they were centered in one or another country.

As had been the international class of the nineties, who for the most part planned to retire back to where they came from, or someplace slightly nicer and still familiar. The same went for the entrepreneurs in India, as best I could tell. This new crowd, who came into their own in a fully online world, were not all Seasteders⁴, but they certainly knew quite a few of them, along with plenty of elites who’d gotten rich in America and on American-led technology, but who didn’t have a strong feeling for the place. If things got bad, they’d head to New Zealand, there to make new rules for the world on their tech-driven terms.

I still think about them, and what’s going on now.

Many of the people I interviewed 12 years ago are newly visible. They were in school when I was in Tokyo working among the emerging global class. They were getting going in the world during that emerging Web 2.0 world, when I talked to Indian millionaires about highly-empowered individuals, with no clue how much more empowered certain people would become.

Twelve years ago, while I asked them about passports, they were starting to think about building our personalized digital 24-hour valets, not down the hall but right at hand, thanks to the cloud, data, AI, and the triumphs of emerging social networking. At that time, when I asked about their relationship to the eclipse of the nation-state, and saw how they viewed it almost as an irrelevance, they had fully arrived .

I didn’t see what that meant. In my defense, I think the people they were then would be surprised to see themselves now so close to the power structure of a nation-state, and shaping it more than giving up on it. Some are senior advisors. Some are currying favor and toeing the line. Some, along with their young associates, are even engaging directly with the greatest and strongest country in history, moving fast and breaking things. There’s every chance those new kids have those First Class-style jumbo candy bars, too.

Hail and farewell.

But, as they say, here we are. I think about sitting on my elite balcony at the Taj twenty years ago, sipping the last of a once-admired bottle of wine that few wanted anymore. Like everyone before and since, I was there for some of the signs, but I didn’t have a clue about what the world held next. I was looking at the Gate of India, watching dozens of people milling around far below me. As quiet came they began to spread their mats and blankets on the sidewalks and the streets, bedding down for the long hot night, then another uncertain day ahead.

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1. The correct answer is, “I’ll start with the Cristal.”

2. This was before a horrific terrorist attack on the hotel in 2008. It’s still nice, but there’s lots of visible security.

3. At 458,000 people. Today it’s 106,000 and falling. Another fading empire.

4. In the Silicon Valley version, these were people who wanted to build big offshore facilities, and declare them sovereign of any government. An intriguing idea, likely put to a severe test the first time the toilet backs up and the help wants more pay.