The Internet of Kings

The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan was an impostor. J.L. Borges describes him as a masked avenger of unbearable beauty, but in actual fact the man whose name was Hakim, born in the land of Turkestan, a desert man, of voice so sweet for it contrasted with the gruesome mask, who once promised to reveal the face when every man on Earth professed the new law, turned out to be an ugly, cowardly, and defenseless surprise. The kind you squash quickly and vigorously, and immediately forget about. This might indeed be the case of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

The rise or emergence of “vertically-integrated global software companies used by millions” is used as a template for understanding what has become of the techno-economic paradigms of the early century. This novel arrangement of the prevailing order defies the use of old metaphors, this is what confronts any definition of actuality, what pits tribal federations against big cartels and if you look at it sideways you can see how it will be defined in the future, what it really is.

The Internet of Kings is a political regime formally structured and stratified on the basis of territorial tenure and the varieties thereof, built on top of and powered by the “accidental megastructure” of global communication networks.

Kings have dashboards. Their relationship to science is the same as that of government to economics. They…