The Pedagogy of Digital Physics
Three Systems. One Physics.
Originally published on Medium, January 26, 2026.
I was biking the bosque trail in Albuquerque when I saw them — three scientists in waders, working a survey net where the cottonwoods give way to the river near Tingley Beach.
Tingley Beach isn’t actually a beach. It’s a chain of ponds next to the Rio Grande, stocked for fishing, surrounded by picnic tables and children casting for their first time. I fished and fed the ducks here as a child. Got chased by snapping, honking, serious geese through the cottonwoods until I learned to keep my distance. The bosque was just the bosque then — the strip of green we drove over on the way to the west side.
I stopped my bike and watched the scientists work. They were counting something. Making notes. Moving with the careful urgency of people documenting loss.
That search, Rio Grande silvery minnow, was the beginning of years of paying attention. Because we all live leaning toward the river here, one way or another. This is a valley. The water shapes everything.
The Rio Grande silvery minnow is vanishing. Not in the way species usually vanish — no single catastrophe, no obvious villain poisoning the water. The minnow is disappearing the way a language dies, speaker by speaker, until one morning the last grandmother passes and a whole way of naming the world goes with her.
In the bosque, that ribbon of cottonwood forest where the Rio Grande once braided through central New Mexico down to the border, the minnow evolved to expect a particular conversation with the river. Each spring, snowmelt from the Sangre de Cristo would send a pulse downstream, flooding the banks, creating side channels and slack water where young minnows could feed without fighting the current. The cottonwoods listened to the same signal. Their seeds release on cottony threads timed to land on the wet mud the spring pulse leaves behind.
The river taught the minnow. The river taught the cottonwood. Neither knew they were students.
Then we straightened the channel. The logic was impeccable: water moving in a straight line wastes less energy, delivers more volume, reduces flooding. We armored the banks with concrete and jetty jacks. We eliminated the “inefficiencies” — the meanders, the braided channels, eventually the spring pulse itself.
The minnow needed that inefficiency. The cottonwoods needed it. The heron hunting the shallows needed it. The entire bosque, which means “woods” in Spanish, but really it means the place where water and land overlap, where boundaries blur and life concentrates, needed the river to occasionally forget where it was going.
We directed the river to remember. We made it efficient. We made it predictable. We made it straight.
And now the minnow is forgetting how to exist.
The numbers tell the story: fewer than one fish per hundred square meters in 2024. Over three million hatchery fish released since 2002. Thousands rescued annually from drying river sections. Biologists call it a conservation-reliant species — sustained only through perpetual intervention. We are not saving the minnow. We are manufacturing it.
The species’ life history evolved under natural flood-pulse dynamics that no longer exist. The fundamental challenge is hydrological. Everything else is commentary.
The water finds its way.
Where does the water go when the channel is straightened?
Three systems. One physics.
At 3 AM, I stare at my phone in the dark, reading about another data breach, another layoff announcement, another AI capability announcement, and I think: we are making the same mistake. We are straightening the river again. And this time, the mistake will be permanent.
The same logic that is killing the minnow is drowning the middle class. The same logic has captured our democracy. The same logic is now building the infrastructure of artificial intelligence.
The river does not know it is teaching economics. The economy does not know it is a watershed. The digital trust architecture does not know it is both — and yet all three obey the same laws, break in the same ways, and heal through the same interventions.
This is not analogy. This is isomorphism — the same structure, wearing different clothes. Here is the mapping:
In a river, nodes are pools and channels; flows are water and sediment; constraints are banks and gradients; failure mode is when the main stem concentrates flow and the edges go dry.
In an economy, nodes are households and firms; flows are money and labor; constraints are laws and norms; failure mode is when wealth concentrates and the margins collapse.
In a network, nodes are users and platforms; flows are data and attention; constraints are protocols and algorithms; failure mode is when all interaction clears through Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and X — platforms that learned enragement equals engagement. The algorithm cannot function without participation. Remember that.
The math does not care whether it is moving water, money, or data packets.
Autonomy cannot exceed environment. This is not policy. This is physics.
What an organism can do is bounded absolutely by what its environment allows. The minnow cannot spawn where the environment will not support spawning — it does not matter what the minnow wants. The worker cannot bargain where the environment will not support bargaining. The agent cannot act where the environment will not support the action.
You cannot policy your way to safety. You can only engineer environments where dangerous actions are physically impossible.
This is the law that governs all three systems. Everything that follows is demonstration.
The minnow is a cold-water species in a warming climate.
The Rio Grande in Albuquerque now pushes into the mid-70s in summer. The minnow evolved for colder water. Each degree above its comfort zone shrinks habitat and stresses metabolism; beyond a point, survival collapses.
Heat is operational stress, the friction that accumulates when systems run too fast, too lean, too long. In the economy, the deaths of despair are heat signatures, the thermal stress of a system that has stripped away every buffer, every side channel, every slack water where struggling organisms might recover.
In McDowell County, West Virginia, the life expectancy dropped to 64 years — lower than dozens of countries we’d call developing. The coal companies came, extracted, and left. The side channels dried up. The slack water vanished. And people started dying young, not from accidents but from despair: opioids, alcohol, suicide. The straightened economy runs hot because it has no shade, no depth, no complexity to absorb the friction.
Deaths of despair doubled between 2000 and 2017. Overdose deaths for those without a diploma run nearly nine times higher than for college graduates.
The minnow can’t spawn at 75 degrees. The worker can’t organize under at-will employment with global labor arbitrage. The species doesn’t die dramatically — it just stops reproducing.
The straightened Rio Grande lost its bosque. Levees pushed the forest back. Channelization dropped the water table below where cottonwood roots could reach. What remains is narrow, fragmented, invaded by salt cedar. Efficient. Fast. Optimized for throughput.
Every straightened system invents a chokepoint. In rivers it’s the main stem. In networks it’s identity, distribution, and ranking.
The Internet is a straightened river.
It moves information at tremendous velocity. It has been engineered for throughput, optimized for engagement, channelized into platforms that carry most of the flow.
The bosque, the complex transitional zone where different types of interaction could occur, where small communities could spawn and grow, where the pace was slow enough for nuance, has been leveed away.
You swim fast or you drown. You optimize for the algorithm or you disappear. There is no slack water, no eddy where a slower conversation can occur without being swept into the main current. The minnow cannot spawn there.
The point is not to reform the straightened channels. Those levees are built. That infrastructure serves interests too powerful to redirect.
The point is to build bosques alongside it.
Islands of complexity in a straightened world. Federated protocols like Kinetic Trust Protocol, BlueSky’s AT Protocol, and Mastodon’s fediverse offer the archipelago instead of the continent. Air-gapped enclaves where critical processes never touch the public network. Local-first computing where sensitive operations stay on-device and never transit the straight channel.
The minnow does not need the entire Rio Grande returned to its pre-dam state. The minnow needs enough bosque, enough side channel, enough slack water to live its American dream.
Not utopia, but refuge. Not revolution, but construction. Not everywhere. Not all at once. But here, and here, and here.
Who controls the gates?
All winter, snowpack accumulates in the mountains above the Rio Grande. Mass building. Evidence stacking. When the temperature rises, when the melt begins, the pulse flows.
But the pulse can be captured. Dams interrupt. Diversions siphon.
Productivity is up 90% since 1979. Wages up are 33%. That’s not a lag. That’s a siphon — and Lewis Powell’s 1971 memo shows the diversion is by design. A blueprint for corporate capture of institutions, written by a future Supreme Court justice, circulated through the Chamber of Commerce, executed over decades.
Two-thirds of the productivity pulse was diverted before it reached the people who created it. Where did the water go?
The top 1% now holds nearly a third of all wealth — highest ever recorded. The pandemic alone transferred trillions upward; billionaire wealth rose 81% while hospitals ran out of ventilators. CEO pay went from 21-to-1 in 1965 to over 280-to-1 now. Same job title. Different planet.
The floodplain is gated. Home prices have risen nearly twice as fast as incomes since 1985. Down payment requirements have nearly doubled as a share of annual income. You need more than a year’s salary just to enter.
This is institutional inertia — the system armored against the spring pulse of home ownership reaching the next generation. Zoning laws that prevent density. NIMBYism encoded in municipal code. Investor-owned single-family rentals that turn shelter into yield. Banks were straightened just like the river. The levees hold.
The diversions have names. Political networks that spend hundreds of millions per election cycle — building the channels that redirect the flow. Asset managers controlling trillions, voting those shares without asking the people whose retirement funds they represent.
The result? Research has measured it precisely: the median voter’s preference predicts almost nothing about policy outcome. The donor’s preference predicts nearly everything.
The dams were built deliberately. The pulse was captured by design.
But the water finds its way. Given enough time. Given enough channels.
The minnow and the cottonwood need the same thing.
Different kingdoms. Different life histories. Different forms entirely. The minnow is a three-inch fish with a two-year lifespan. The cottonwood is a hundred-foot tree that lives for centuries.
Same pulse.
The cottonwood drops its seeds in late spring, timing them to land on freshly deposited sediment left by receding floodwaters. The minnow spawns during high flow, its eggs drifting downstream to settle in backwater habitats created by the same hydrological event.
This is symbiosis — not cooperation, not agreement, not even awareness. Shared dependence on the same environmental condition. Protect the pulse for the fish, you protect it for the forest.
The balancing loops work the same way.
The union that fought for wages created consumers. The consumers created demand. The demand created employment. The employment created union members.
Union density: 35% in 1954. Under 10% today. Top marginal tax rate: 91% in 1960. 37% now.
The loops were severed. The symbiosis was broken.
Division is what a system produces when all the balancing loops are broken. When the pulse is captured. When the floodplain dries.
A person working three jobs has no time for organizing. A family one paycheck from eviction has no energy for politics. A community hollowed out by disinvestment has no foundation for solidarity.
The atomization is not the plan. The atomization is the byproduct. Extract enough from a system and the bonds that hold it together dissolve. Not through malice. Through physics.
The minnow doesn’t know it shares a fate with the cottonwood. The worker doesn’t know she shares a fate with the union she never joined.
The pulse connects them anyway.
Who belongs, who votes, who enforces?
The acequias of New Mexico have operated for centuries. Water finding its way through channels dug by hands, governed by communities, maintained by shared labor.
I have walked the acequia madre outside Taos in August, when the irrigation ditches run full and the cottonwoods cast their shadows across the water. The system predates New Mexico statehood by three centuries. It predates the US Constitution by two.
The “tragedy of the commons” isn’t inevitable. It’s a failure of imagination.
When Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics for proving what the parciantes had known for centuries, that communities can govern shared resources without privatization or central control, she was describing what northern New Mexico had practiced since the Spanish colonial period.
The acequia serves a watershed. You belong or you do not. The parciantes vote. The mayordomo is elected. The rules emerge from the community. When the spring cleaning comes, everyone works. When the water runs short, everyone shares the shortage.
In 2003, developers tried to buy water rights from individual parciantes in the Taos valley — offering cash for something that had never been sold. The acequia associations fought back. They passed resolutions declaring water a community resource, not a commodity. The developers came with lawyers; the parciantes came with four centuries of practice. The water stayed.
Four hundred years of continuity follows from four hundred years of participation. When the rules are yours, you maintain them.
Here is the hard truth that architects of digital systems refuse to face: digital physics built by engineers for communities they don’t belong to is colonialism with better intentions. By colonialism I mean: rules imposed by outsiders, optimized for extraction, with no durable mechanism for local consent or exit.
I know this. I’m an engineer. I work for a corporation. I’m proposing frameworks for communities I don’t belong to.
If they look at this and say “not for us” — that’s a valid outcome. That’s their autonomy in action.
This work is partly an attempt to build something that could constrain people like me.
And if you’re reading this from inside one of those companies, I’m not saying you’re the enemy. I’m saying you’re in the room where the physics is being written. That’s not accusation. That’s recognition.
You took the job because you believe in what the technology can do. So did I. The question isn’t whether you’re a good person. The question is whether the physics being encoded will serve communities or extract from them. You know things the rest of us don’t. You see decisions being made that won’t be public for years.
The engineers who straightened the Rio Grande weren’t villains. They were solving real problems with the tools they had. They just couldn’t see what the minnow needed.
You can. That’s the difference. That’s the obligation.
In rivers, time is patient. In networks, time is weaponized.
The river metaphor fails at one point. Rivers wait for the spring pulse. Threats do not wait.
The attacker needs no approval.
The defender needs a chain — detection, triage, escalation, authorization, response. Each link takes time. The human in the loop is the bottleneck.
Fifty alerts per day, the human analyst can process. Fifty thousand actions per day, the AI agent can execute.
The human needs sleep. The algorithm does not. The human has a family. The algorithm does not. The human doubts. The algorithm never hesitates.
Ratio: one thousand to one.
How do we keep up with machine speed using policy? We don’t. We need physics.
The capability is leaking into the hands of bad actors. Open-weight models with tens of billions of parameters now run on laptops. What cost $100 million to train runs on consumer hardware eighteen months later.
Consider what becomes possible: An AI that’s read every email your mother ever sent you, crafting messages in her voice, asking you to wire money while she’s dying in a hospital that doesn’t exist. Patient. Tireless. Learning from each failure. How about 10,000 grandparents in a single afternoon.
Disinformation swarms — not single accounts, easily flagged. Coordinated networks. Adaptive. When one pattern is detected, the swarm evolves.
Social engineering agents playing the long game. Building trust over months. A helpful colleague who answers questions, offers advice, slowly builds toward the ask.
Policy cannot close this gap. Political systems evolved to govern human-speed problems.
But physics can.
What does the computation cost in the real world?
The infrastructure drinks water. Microsoft’s data centers consumed over 6 billion gallons in 2022, a 34% increase in a single year. Google: nearly 6 billion gallons. The AI systems we’re building require cooling, and cooling requires water.
Water is just one extraction. Green land is another.
The river is over-allocated. The Ogallala Aquifer, the nation’s largest groundwater system, is being drawn down far faster than it recharges. Once depleted, it will require thousands of years to replenish. The hyperscalers are building in the desert because land is cheap and sun is abundant. But the cooling systems need water. The same water the minnow needs. The same water most New Mexicans drink.
Project Jupiter — a $165 billion AI training campus in my county, approved in a 4–1 vote, the largest private investment in New Mexico history. One of five sites in the $500 billion Stargate AI Initiative. OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer framed the stakes explicitly: “Countries that can effectively leverage their national and natural resources to develop infrastructure will gain a tangible advantage from an economic competitiveness standpoint, and certainly from a perspective of national security.”
National security. Natural resources. Leverage.
Two hundred fifty miles south of where I watched those scientists count minnows, the community of Sunland Park has fought for decades against arsenic-contaminated drinking water. Their utility has repeatedly violated federal Safe Drinking Water Act standards. Now that same utility will serve Project Jupiter. The developers committed $10 million for water quality improvements. The project received $165 billion in tax-exempt bond authorization.
The community learned of the project one month before the vote. The Sunland Park City Council unanimously requested a delay. The commissioners approved it anyway. The New Mexico Foundation for Open Government sent a formal notice of violation, alleging commissioners broke state transparency law. Eleven weeks after approval, the public still hadn’t seen final documents. Construction was already underway.
This is how emergent physics gets written. Over time and without closed feedback loops.
The isomorphism is not just structural. It is physical. The digital river is drinking the actual river. And the communities with the least power bear the cost, just as they always have — the same pattern as the smelters, the incinerators, the decades of poison in the drinking water. Extractive industries target vulnerable communities.
The physics of extraction operates identically across substrates.
Then the knowledge is turned into curricula that normalizes extraction at best. In reality, the climate is distraction and survival. Muzzle velocity. Move too fast to question. Work too hard to organize. Owe too much to resist. Be too scared to hit the publish button.
The pedagogy of extraction teaches us not to see the system. The straightened river looks like progress. The captured pulse looks like efficiency. The conservation-reliant species looks like someone else’s problem.
This is not ignorance. This is education.
The not-seeing is taught. The curriculum doesn’t teach you to trace the productivity-wage gap. It teaches you to compete for grades that become credentials that become debt that becomes compliance. The news doesn’t teach you to see the captured pulse. It teaches you to see the stock market as the economy, GDP as prosperity, efficiency as progress.
The pace doesn’t allow reflection. Three jobs. Medical debt. Rent due. No time to ask why the river was straightened. No energy to organize against the next diversion.
And now the pace accelerates. Regulatory agencies gutted. Environmental protections rolled back. Worker safety rules suspended. The referees removed from the field while the game continues. Tariffs that raise prices blamed on the workers asking for wages. Deportations that remove the hands that harvest the food, then blame rises on anyone but the policy and system. The cruelty is the point, but the confusion is the product. Keep them angry at each other. Keep them too busy surviving to see the straightening.
The not-seeing is the product. The curriculum delivered exactly what it was designed to deliver.
The water finds its way.
But physics works both ways.
Power fears withdrawal more than resistance. When nothing moves, people start listening. The machine requires our participation — our attention, our data, our subscriptions, our purchases. Non-participation is not passivity. It is leverage.
They need us buying. They need us scrolling. They need us divided and distracted and desperate. What they cannot survive is coordinated stillness.
The acequia works because the parciantes show up together for the limpia. The resistance works the same way. Not individual virtue. Collective action. Timed. Coordinated. Felt.
Here is the mechanic: Fifty people in your actual community agree to withdraw together. You know their faces. They know yours. One week. Shared grocery runs, cash, local. No delivery apps. No streaming. Shared meals instead.
Document the week. What did you notice? What did you talk about? What did you not miss?
This doesn’t scale — and that’s the point. It’s not about hurting the quarterly earnings. It’s about remembering what coordination feels like. The limpia before the larger action. You can’t coordinate stillness with strangers. You have to build the relationships first. Collective ritual is how communities build the environmental constraints that make new actions possible.
But here’s the math they don’t want you to run:
Fifty people. Each person finds one other person willing to try. That’s 100. Two weeks later, 200. A month in, 400. By three months: over 3,000. By six months: 400,000. By a year: 50 becomes 3 billion.
That’s not realistic. People drop out. Momentum stalls. The algorithm fights back. But you don’t need perfect doubling. You need enough. The math says the potential is there — exponential growth is how small becomes unstoppable. The acequias started with a few families digging one ditch. Four hundred years later, the water still flows.
The gap between fifty people and $165 billion feels insurmountable. But $165 billion requires our participation. It requires our attention, our data, our purchases, our silence. The math of withdrawal is the same math they used to build the platforms — network effects, exponential growth, the power of coordinated action. They learned it first. We can learn it back.
Then the calendar has days that matter. July 4th or Black Friday — the holiest day of extraction, when silence would be deafening. One day. Buy nothing. Stream nothing. Post nothing. The algorithm cannot optimize for absence. The quarterly earnings call cannot spin silence.
But first, the fifty. First, the faces. First, the presence. Not everywhere. Not all at once. But here, and here, and here.
The environment decides what actions are possible. The action either happens or doesn’t, based on constraints it cannot override. The Time to Good Decision, in a properly architected environment, is zero — not because decisions are faster, but because the environmental constraints preclude the actions that would require decisions.
The window is open and closing fast.
The physics is being written.
What we build in the next 12 — 18 months will determine what is possible in the next century. The acequias laid down in the 1600s still carry water today. The digital physics laid down now will still constrain action when our grandchildren inherit these systems.
By us or to us. That is the only choice remaining.
I learned systems by watching water move.
As a child in New Mexico, I dug canals in the backyard dirt and watched water flow through trenches my hands had made. I built tiny bridges over the current. I created reservoirs that filled and overflowed. I learned, without knowing I was learning, that water finds its level, that blockages create pressure, that systems have their own logic that cannot be overridden by wishing.
My world was that big. A backyard, a hose, a child’s hands shaping channels in the earth.
I had the luxury of boredom, of unstructured time, of play that was genuinely purposeless. That luxury creates obligation.
If I’ve had the space to learn from water and bosques and the people who governed them — that learning isn’t mine to hoard. Ideas hoarded are ideas that die. Water dammed too long grows stagnant.
My wife Nayomi reminded me of something during a conversation I’ll never forget.
We were driving through town to go vote. I told her my book, Break the Chain, felt incomplete. The architecture was there. The heart wasn’t.
I asked her what it needed even though she hadn’t read it, she knew what it said.
She responded with three things I think about every day now.
We must recognize our shared humanity. On the other side of every screen is another human being — someone with hopes and fears and a family who loves them, someone making decisions under constraints we cannot see.
We must take responsibility for the systems we create. Our digital world is not a force of nature; it is human choices made manifest in code. Every algorithm was written by someone. We can make different ones.
Sometimes, to go faster, we must first slow down. The river that seems to waste time in its meanders actually travels farther. The system that pauses to repair itself outlasts the one that runs at maximum until it breaks.
This essay is my attempt at all three.
I’m not building the physics. I’m building a physics. One seed among many. The forest decides what grows.
The silvery minnow still swims in the Rio Grande, though its numbers decline each year. A conservation-reliant species — biologists’ term for organisms that cannot survive without perpetual intervention. Like the middle class. Like democracy itself.
Against all odds, against the straightened river and the diverted flows and the data centers drinking the aquifer, the minnow persists. Not thriving. Surviving. Waiting for conditions that may or may not come.
The acequias still flow, governed by parciantes who remember what the river once was. They gather for the spring cleaning, the limpia, clearing debris from channels their grandparents maintained.
We cannot un-straighten the river. The concrete is poured. The diversions are built. That path is closed.
But we can build bosques alongside it.
Islands of complexity in a straightened world. Zones where communities govern their own flows, where autonomy operates within physics that support it. Not everywhere. Not all at once. But here, and here, and here.
Bosques don’t defend themselves. Channels don’t clean themselves.
The acequia isn’t just a water system. It’s a coordination system: mutual aid in the ordinary weeks, collective defense in the crisis weeks. Skills that never disappeared from communities that couldn’t afford to forget them. Survival programs. Mutual aid networks. The people who fed families while the government watched. Not ideology. Logistics. Not slogans. Practice.
If autonomy cannot exceed environment, then mutual aid is how communities thicken the environment, and collective defense is how they keep it from being straightened again.
The powerful are planning. But they don’t have it figured out either. Their confidence is performance. Their certainty is fragile.
We are connected. They need us divided.
Which communities, which relationships, which networks of people who know each other’s faces — do you trust to build the conditions under which you can flourish?
Water is life.
Chris Perkins writes from Las Cruces in Doña Ana County, New Mexico, where he lives with his wife Nayomi, their two daughters, and three dogs. He is the founder of NMCITRA (New Mexico Cyber Intelligence & Threat Response Alliance) and the architect of the Kinetic Trust Protocol. His work bridges communities and technology through data literacy and data storytelling — empowering people to see the systems that shape their lives. This piece extends the “Web of Data, From Telegraph to AI: The Impact of Technologies on Sovereignty” (2024).
Pronunciations: Pedagogy (PED-uh-goh-jee), Bosque (BOSS-kay), Rio Grande (REE-oh GRAHN-day), Acequia (ah-SEH-kee-ah), Parciantes (par-see-AHN-tays), Mayordomo (my-or-DOH-moh), Limpia (LEEM-pee-ah)