For four months, I join the Bilderberg swirl. I cannot turn around without shaking hands with a billionaire or a head of state. Would I care to come to [insert broken country here] and institute a new economic plan? Perhaps an island off the coast for my personal paradise would help me to decide? I can taste the power in my incidental acquaintances, in the carpets I walk on between meetings. I need to get to Mumbai, and normally I’d just get my credit card company to sort out a package, car and first-class ticket, top hotel, a standard thing I wouldn’t have to think about. But not now. Now my phone rings, and it’s Ben Teasdale, the Arizona technologist who owns half the fibre-optic cable in the U.S. and supplies connectivity to the whole of Asia. He’s a transhumanist, famously: when he dies he will try to squirt his consciousness into a computer, then freeze his brain in case there’s any of himself left inside. He funds research into weird technologies: man–machine interfaces and artificial telepathy. He holds patents in things which will probably drive the next hundred years of economic growth.