the years as we waited for him was nothing less than whole new worlds, connected landscapes that emerged entirely from systems Apple was secretly breeding. He wasn't merely introducing a phone; he was changing how we were going to experience life. “Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything,” Jobs began his famous rolling introduction for the first iPhone in 2007. “In 1984 we introduced the Macintosh. It didn't just change Apple. It changed the whole computer industry. In 2001 we introduced the first iPod. It didn't just change the way we all listen to music. It changed the entire music industry.” Apple devices were cracking open paths to whole new worlds in this sense. The company develops an app for podcasts; a new media form is born. It builds an architecture for video calling; our relations to each other deepen a bit. What Jobs was presenting was new and - until that very instant - unimagined universes of possibility that we'd all explore. No wonder the world tuned in.
When we speak of “architecture” in a digital sense we mean the design of the inside of a computer — how the chips link to each other - or the layout of a phone system, the mechanics of a block-chain or encryption tool, or the ethereal construction of a datascape so it can be better used to train artificially intelligent programs. These are design choices that, just like the ones about where to put a door or a freeway, conclusively decide and shape movement. They affect speed. Politics, social norms, technological needs - these and other forces all shape the architecture of digital systems. But -and this is where a new sensibility comes into play - the architectures, in turn, touch and twist politics, social norms and technology. Instant communication, social webs, fast-spreading news - all of these forces redound powerfully on the real world. They affect how we think and act. And, as a result, controlling these connections is a profound source of power. It’s also true that architectures and designs dropped into different places have different results: Think of how an open computer system plopped into the Middle East might be used differently than one placed in the American Midwest.
It was these sorts of vibrations, the ones made by power pulsing through certain forms or networks in history, that led the Orientalist scholar Karl Wittfogel to his famous “Hydrological Hypothesis” in the last centrury. Ancient agrarian societies - Egypt or China, for instance - developed political orders that were decided by their need for large scale irrigation, Wittfogel explained. Without water, these societies were dead. Without control of that water? Exposed to constant chaos. Chinese dynasties tumbled and Egyptian prosperity collapsed as unexpected, unpredicted droughts and flooding tore them apart. Taming water became the aim of all politics. An unusual centralized effort emerged. It screwed these scattered, nomadic societies into a tight, enduring and largely effective authoritarianism. Wittfogel argued that the “irrigation societies” of Egypt, China, Mesopotamia, and South America all reflected this link between survival and water control. Power pooled in the hands of what he called a “Hydraulic Bureaucracy”. China’s "Yu the Great”, for instance, rose to power around 2800 B.C. because of his skills in throttling the unpredictable and deadly Yangtze flows. “Contrary to popular belief that nature always remains the same,” Wittfogel wrote, “nature changes profoundly whenever
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