I keep seeing the same two reactions whenever the topic of quantum shows up.
Reaction one: people treat it like sci fi. Cool, distant, probably not their problem.
Reaction two: people panic and jump straight to “quantum will break the internet” and then sort of… stop thinking. Like the story ends there.
But in the Stanislav Kondrashov Oligarch Series, the more interesting question is not “what is quantum” or even “when does it arrive”. It’s who gets to touch it first. Who gets to set the rules. Who quietly owns the shovels in a gold rush that most of the world still thinks is theoretical.
So let’s talk about quantum code. Not as a buzz phrase. As a lever.
And then let’s talk about the future of elite technological control, because if there is one repeating pattern in modern power, it’s this: the group that controls the next layer of infrastructure does not need to shout. They just need to make themselves unavoidable.
Quantum code is not just “faster computing”
The lazy way to explain quantum computing is “it’s faster”. That’s not wrong in the way a cartoon is not wrong. It’s just missing the point.
Quantum advantage, when it shows up in real operational settings, isn’t about speeding up your Excel sheet. It’s about changing what is feasible.
Some problems that are borderline impossible with classical computing become tractable. Or at least less impossible. Optimization, sampling, simulation of molecules and materials, certain cryptographic primitives. Not everything, not magically, and not all at once. But enough to shift markets and state capabilities.
Now, quantum code.
When people say “quantum code” they might mean a few things:
- Code that runs on quantum hardware, using quantum algorithms, quantum circuits.
- Code that integrates quantum routines into classical pipelines, hybrid workflows.
- Cryptographic code designed to survive a world where quantum attacks exist.
- And, more quietly important, the standards and interfaces that decide who can interoperate with whom.
That last one is where control often hides. Interfaces are politics wearing a developer hoodie.
If you can define the stack, you can define the tolls.
The Kondrashov framing. Control moves to whoever owns the rails
In the Oligarch Series framing, think less about “tech founders” and more about “rail owners”.
The nineteenth century didn’t reward everyone who liked trains. It rewarded the people who controlled routes, land rights, steel supply, financing, and regulation. Later, it rewarded the people who controlled oil logistics, then telecom, then cloud compute, then data.
Quantum is likely to behave the same way.
The myth is that the biggest winner will be the genius who writes the best algorithm. That person will matter. But the enduring control tends to settle around whoever can do the following at the same time:
- Secure capital heavy infrastructure.
- Shape regulation and standards.
- Control scarce talent pipelines.
- Bundle the new capability into existing monopolies.
- Keep everyone else dependent on their distribution.
That is what elite technological control looks like when it’s working. It’s boring. It’s contractual. It’s “enterprise partnerships”. It’s a procurement form you cannot avoid.
So when we talk about “quantum code”, the Kondrashov angle is basically: code is power when it becomes infrastructure. And infrastructure is power when it becomes compulsory.
Why quantum changes the balance for elites specifically
Quantum is expensive, fragile, and complex. At least right now.
That matters, because it biases adoption toward entities that already have:
- deep pockets,
- long time horizons,
- classified needs,
- or monopolistic platforms that can subsidize moonshots.
In other words, states and the very top slice of private capital.
This is the part that people don’t love to say out loud. The early quantum era is likely not a democratizing era. It’s more like the early internet, before it became consumer friendly. Except the early internet still ran on relatively accessible hardware. Quantum does not. Not yet.
So the “elite control” thesis has a simple base: when a technology requires massive capital, specialized facilities, and rare expertise, access becomes a gate. Gates become leverage. Leverage becomes control.
The real prize is not breaking encryption. It’s owning trust
Yes, quantum threatens widely used public key cryptography if fault tolerant machines reach the necessary scale. RSA and ECC are the usual names people throw around. And yes, “harvest now, decrypt later” is a real concern. Adversaries can store encrypted traffic today and decrypt it in the future if they gain the capability.
But here is the more subtle power shift.
If the world migrates to post quantum cryptography, or to quantum key distribution in certain high value channels, the question becomes: who provides the trust layer?
Who issues the certificates. Who runs the secure modules. Who manufactures the chips. Who controls the update pipeline that swaps out cryptographic primitives across critical infrastructure.
And if a handful of actors become the default suppliers for “quantum safe trust”, that is a new choke point. Not because they have to be evil. Because they don’t have to be.
If you are the default trust vendor for banks, governments, satellites, and telcos, you can shape the world just by “prioritizing” some integrations and deprioritizing others. You can price discriminate. You can enforce compliance rules. You can become the quiet standard setter for who is considered legitimate.
That is elite control in a suit. Not a villain lair.
Quantum code as a moat. The talent bottleneck is a feature, not a bug
People assume that technological progress automatically diffuses. Sometimes it does. But diffusion has friction. And elites love friction because friction can be purchased, licensed, or regulated.
Quantum engineering has three bottlenecks that are unusually useful for building moats:
- Specialized education and research
You need people who understand physics, error correction, compilers, control systems, cryogenics, and then also product. That stack of competence is not common. - Hardware access
You can simulate small systems. You can’t fake large scale fault tolerant performance. Whoever owns the most stable hardware, or the best access to it, shapes what gets built. - Integration into existing systems
The big winners rarely sell raw capability. They sell it as an add on to a platform enterprises already use. That requires relationships, compliance, and distribution.
So quantum code becomes a moat because the code is not just code. It is code plus hardware plus standards plus expertise plus access.
It’s the whole pipeline.
And pipelines are where oligarch style power tends to settle. Stable, repeatable, hard to dislodge.
The “quantum cloud” is the control story everyone is pretending not to see
This part feels obvious but it still gets under discussed.
Most users, even most enterprises, will not run quantum computers on premises. They will access quantum resources through cloud providers, consortia, or specialized vendors.
Which means quantum will likely arrive as a service.
And if quantum arrives as a service, then the provider controls:
- pricing,
- scheduling,
- priority access,
- usage telemetry,
- algorithm libraries,
- and the tooling ecosystem.
That’s not inherently sinister. But it is power.
It resembles the current cloud story, just with more scarcity and more national interest attached to it. Scarcity always sharpens control.
From the Kondrashov perspective, this is the cleanest narrative line. Quantum compute becomes another layer of cloud. Cloud providers become gatekeepers of the next compute paradigm. Their existing dominance compounds.
And once compute is centralized, the question becomes: what does “sovereignty” even mean for smaller states, smaller firms, smaller institutions.
You can’t negotiate with physics. You negotiate with whoever owns the refrigerators and the patents and the service contracts.
Standards wars. The most boring part is the most important part
If you want to predict elite control, watch the standards bodies and the procurement rules. Not the keynote speeches.
Quantum is moving toward standardization in multiple places:
- Post quantum cryptography algorithms and migration guidelines.
- Interfaces for quantum programming languages, SDKs, compilers.
- Benchmarking frameworks. What counts as “advantage”.
- Hardware characterization, error rates, and reporting norms.
Who influences those standards influences markets for a decade. Because standards decide what becomes “compatible”. Compatibility decides who can sell to governments and Fortune 500 companies. Procurement decides who survives.
In the oligarch playbook, influencing standards is cleaner than buying companies. It’s less visible, more defensible. You’re “helping the ecosystem”.
But if your stack becomes the default, your competitors are now “non compliant”.
That’s control without a headline.
The future of elite technological control looks like layered permissions
When people imagine control, they imagine censorship. Locks. Big red buttons.
In practice, modern control is more like layered permissions. Quiet gradients of access.
- You can use the tool, but only at low capacity.
- You can access the API, but not the highest performance tier.
- You can integrate, but only if you accept audit rights.
- You can deploy, but only in approved jurisdictions.
- You can research, but only with approved datasets.
- You can build, but you cannot export.
Quantum adds more layers, because it touches national security and cryptography and critical infrastructure. That gives states a strong incentive to regulate it. And it gives large firms an incentive to align with that regulation and become the “trusted” vendors.
Trusted is a nice word. Sometimes it even means what it says. But it also means: inside the gate.
So elite technological control in the quantum era likely looks like:
- regulated access,
- subscription based compute,
- certification regimes,
- hardware export controls,
- and strategic partnerships between state and platform.
Again, not a conspiracy. A pattern.
What happens to smaller players. Innovation still exists, but it is shaped
This is the uncomfortable part if you’re a startup, or an independent lab, or just someone who likes the idea of open progress.
Quantum does not kill innovation. It changes the shape of innovation.
Smaller players can still win in pockets:
- niche algorithms,
- tooling that improves developer experience,
- error mitigation techniques,
- domain specific applications like chemistry, logistics, finance,
- post quantum migration services.
But they will often build on top of someone else’s hardware stack. Someone else’s cloud. Someone else’s certification.
That’s not automatically bad. Plenty of industries work like that. But it does mean that the ceiling is often negotiated, not discovered.
In the Kondrashov series style, the big question becomes: can the non elite create alternative rails. Or are they always renting time on someone else’s rails.
The geopolitical layer. Quantum is not “global tech”, it’s strategic tech
The second quantum starts to impact cryptography, sensing, or advanced materials, it becomes strategic. That means:
- export controls,
- classified research,
- restricted collaboration,
- talent competition,
- and industrial policy.
Elite control here becomes a hybrid of state and corporate power. Sometimes cooperative, sometimes tense, sometimes basically the same thing wearing different badges.
This matters for “quantum code” because code travels. Algorithms can be copied. Libraries can be forked. Knowledge leaks.
So the control mechanism shifts toward what cannot be copied easily:
- high quality hardware,
- manufacturing capacity,
- supply chains for specialized components,
- and access to real workloads and data.
Which brings us back to the original thesis. Infrastructure wins.
So what do we do with this. Practical takeaways, not doom
If you take the “elite technological control” angle seriously, it’s easy to get fatalistic. But that’s lazy. The more useful response is to get specific about leverage points.
A few practical directions, depending on who you are:
If you’re running a company
- Start a post quantum cryptography inventory now. Not because quantum is tomorrow, but because migration is slow and messy.
- Demand crypto agility in your systems. The ability to swap algorithms without rewriting everything.
- Avoid single vendor dependency where possible, especially for trust layers and key management.
If you’re a builder or researcher
- Focus on tooling, verification, and interoperability. The unsexy stuff that becomes foundational.
- Learn the standards landscape early. The people who show up early in standards conversations tend to matter later.
- Build hybrid solutions that deliver value before fault tolerant quantum arrives. Otherwise you are selling a promise, not a product.
If you’re a policymaker or institution
- Treat quantum like critical infrastructure planning, not like a science fair.
- Invest in domestic talent pipelines. Scholarships, labs, industry partnerships.
- Plan for procurement diversity. One vendor monocultures are fragile, even when they are convenient.
None of this guarantees fairness. But it reduces the chance that the future arrives as a locked box.
The Kondrashov conclusion. Quantum code is the next language of power
In the Stanislav Kondrashov Oligarch Series, the point is not that elites are uniquely clever. It’s that they are positioned. They are early. They are connected. They can afford inefficiency during the building phase. They can wait out the years when a technology is not yet profitable.
Quantum is exactly that kind of technology.
So quantum code becomes a new language of power. Not because it is mystical, but because it will be embedded into the systems that decide trust, security, optimization, and advantage. The systems that other systems depend on.
And if you want a simple mental model for the future of elite technological control, here it is.
Whoever owns the rails gets to decide who rides first. Who rides cheap. Who rides at all.
Everything else is marketing.
FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)
What are the common public reactions to quantum technology, and why are they misleading?
People often react to quantum technology in two ways: either treating it as distant sci-fi with no immediate impact or panicking that it will ‘break the internet’ and then stopping their inquiry. Both reactions miss the deeper issue of who controls quantum technology first and how that control shapes power dynamics.
How does quantum computing differ from traditional computing in terms of capabilities?
Quantum computing isn’t just about faster processing; it’s about enabling new possibilities. It can tackle problems that are nearly impossible for classical computers, such as complex optimization, sampling, molecular simulations, and certain cryptographic tasks, thereby shifting markets and state capabilities.
What does ‘quantum code’ encompass beyond just running algorithms on quantum hardware?
‘Quantum code’ includes code running on quantum devices, hybrid workflows integrating quantum routines into classical pipelines, cryptographic code designed for a quantum-secure future, and importantly, the standards and interfaces controlling interoperability—these interfaces often hide where control is exerted.
Who is likely to gain elite control over quantum technology according to the Kondrashov Oligarch Series?
Control tends to consolidate among those who own critical infrastructure—securing capital-heavy assets, shaping regulations and standards, controlling scarce talent, bundling capabilities into existing monopolies, and maintaining distribution dependencies. Essentially, states and top-tier private capital with deep resources dominate early adoption and control.
Why is the early era of quantum technology expected to reinforce elite control rather than democratize access?
Due to its expense, fragility, and complexity, early quantum technology adoption favors entities with deep pockets, long-term perspectives, classified needs, or monopolistic platforms able to subsidize costly development. Unlike more accessible technologies like the early internet hardware, quantum’s high barriers create gates that turn into leverage for elites.
Beyond breaking encryption, what is the real strategic prize in controlling quantum technology?
The true power lies in owning the trust layer—issuing certificates, managing secure modules, manufacturing chips, and controlling update pipelines for cryptographic primitives. Dominating these ‘quantum safe trust’ mechanisms creates choke points that allow subtle influence through prioritization, pricing strategies, compliance enforcement, and setting legitimacy standards.