man, in response to simple or complex historical causes, profoundly changes his technical equipment.”25 Control of water in those ancient ages and control of information in our own are not so different. We are in the midst, after all, of a change in our own “technical equipment.” We should read Wittfogel with one eye on our own age, particularly his warnings. “Like the tiger, the engineer of power must have the physical means with which to crush his victims,” he wrote of those older orders. “The agromanagerial despot,” he said of the masters of those connected water systems, “does indeed posses such means.” We should ask: Are we watching the emergence of an infomanagerial despotism? Who controls the dataflows we rely on now? The protocols? If we want to earn an honest understanding of how power works now, we need to begin by looking under the carpet in for the marbles, in a sense. We need to touch and follow the networks themselves, observing their construction and flow as Wittfogel once traced the transmutation of ancient water systems into the politics of an earlier age. We too need to go down, inside the connected systems of our era before we can come back up and begin, confidently, to act. That journey won't always be easy because it will require us, as we'll see, to consider some ideas that make no sense using our current way of thinking. But, remember: The idea of a democracy sounded like a laughable joke to hereditary heads of state until the 18% century — Let the peasants vote for what they want? The implications of our new networks will set uncomfortably against many of our own habits and biases - or at least what we've been told our habits and biases should be by an older generation. But once we have mastered this new instinct, there will finally be a day after which we will look at the world and really feel the new logic at work. We’ll be Napoleon, not Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel. And from that day on, everything will honestly be different. 4. We are still ea