Besides relying on force, totalitarian rulers use visuality, symbolism, and tightly supervised public spaces to operate their rule. Building designs operate as one of the enduring means for the functioning of government power. The physicality of buildings and the environment of a community last and endure for more than the period of office of the leaders who built them, and they can implement their rule by controlling what is physically present. Illustration by The Geostrata

There is an idea so deeply woven into how we build and govern software that most people in the industry have stopped noticing it is even an idea, and the idea is that software is a tool. The human thinks, the software executes. Every SaaS contract ever signed, every product liability ruling ever handed down, every regulatory text written about information technology in the last four decades takes this separation as a given, the way a fish takes water as a given. We talk about