Hydraulic Despotism

If you control the water, you control the people. This was the basic thesis of Karl Wittfogel. His theory of hydraulic civilisations proposes that certain empires came into power through a kind of environmental determinism.

Now, Wittfogel was frankly savaged by his academic peers, and rightly so. But there’s a tidy little insight I think is worth extracting. And there are some better theories to get after this insight of ours, but better doesn’t mean interesting, and none sound nearly as sexy as Hydraulic Despotism. So I’m going to bring it back.

¶Wittfogel’s theory

Let’s cover Wittfogel’s idea first, because it’s what makes the insight we’re going to extract a bit more inutitive. Essentially it goes like this:

Water, in any society, is crucial to its health. This was perhaps more obvious in a community less distanced from its agricultural backbone than we are. Without water, there is no irrigation of crops. A rich flow of irrigation water would lead to an increased local human population—where better to start a farm?

Eventually, the demand for the water would reach a level of sensitivity which was ripe for despotism. More people means more infrastructure. More infrastructure means less mobility for the populace as they become reliant on the local goods and services to support their size. At some point, the loss of the water wouldn’t simply mean that the populace had to leave, but that the populace would die because they were unable to leave. Control of the water at this point would mean a total control of the people.

It’s an interesting history lesson to investigate the kinds of ancient and modern states thought to have arisen from this circumstance, with no better starting place than the Wikipedia entry. Or perhaps, for the enthusiastic, Wittfogel’s book with emphasis on the first four chapters. Within these pages we learn how the hydraulic despot has absolute control, with no recourse to the checks and balances we’re used to in modern societies under the influence of our modern democratic ideals:

the hydraulic state prevents the nongovernmental forces of society from crystallizing into independent bodies strong enough to counterbalance and control the political machine.

Wittfogel,Oriental Despotism Ch. 3

If you’re a cynic like me, you read something like this and you start looking around at the way we live our lives now with an eyebrow raised. How much of modern society shares these kinds of hydraulic features?

¶Wittfogel’s Error

Like I said, Wittfogel got annihilated by his peers for his theory, and rightly so. I’ve presented things abstractly enough to avoid his problems, but we should at least touch on them.

Firstly, his theory was just wrong on its own terms historically. His book is called ‘Oriental Despotism’ because he reckoned states like China, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and pre-Columbian Peru were examples of his theory. Civilisations constructed around the need to manage the kind of complicated hydraulic works required to achieve large-scale irrigation. Complex projects required massive coordination and centralised bureaucracy, and thus total control over the people.

This in explicit contrast to Europeans, who invented the much less despotic system of feudalism where people were much freer! Decentralised land holdings which meant they were free to resist monarchical authority, and, incidentally, largely starve to death.

The implied problem there isn’t the only problem, either. He wasn’t just stoked about the European approach to civilisation, he seemed almost motivated to make it seem sexier.¹ He cherry-picked examples, and even within those examples, mostly the causality was the wrong way around. Large successful states built good irrigation systems, not the other way around, and many despotic states didn’t fuck about with irrigation at all. Environmental Determinism, it was not.

¶The tidy insight

Hydraulic Despotism, then, carries some heavy baggage. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t an interesting pattern we can infer: a sort-of societal dependency problem. Where Wittfogel was talking literally about hydraulic water systems, we might use it to refer to any resource which ‘flows’ through increasingly centralised infrastructure.

Whether or not ancient empires arose this way, it’s pretty easy to see parallels in the modern world. Our dependence on certain resources seems like it only grows, and when essential infrastructure for it becomes centralised and non-substitutable, those who control it gain enormous power over us.

Thames Water’s £20bn debt pile, and the issue of water aside, consider the product of arable land. Russia’s holiday in Ukraine has everyone worried about food insecurity. Or think about who manages hydrocarbon fuels like petrol and coal. Indeed, any major source of energy, from electricity to gas. Our sources of medicine and medical aid. Our digital infrastructure from ordinary computing to the absurd valuation on Nvidia for it’s control of AI-related resources. The very flow of cash—through just a handful of payment processors. All of these things are controlled by small and centralised forces. All of these things are subject to hydraulic despotism.²

The kind of infrastructure that supports the vast majority of modern human life lies in the hands of a tiny number of people—not simply our governments, but with increasing frequency private corporations and industry groups.

The reason for this is manifold, but two causes stand out. The first, of course, is the pressures of industrial society. The same pressures that erode our communities also promote hydraulic despotism:

[t]he shift from an agricultural lifestyle meant the centralisation of communities in urban areas and social pressures that reduced the size of families. Education and familial care could be delegated from the members of the extended family to institutions. Food could be bought, rather than produced“.

Modern society, if not by design then by nature, encourages us to hand our responsibilities off.

The second is more personal. It’s because this delegation of responsibility is convenient. We are active participants in relinquishing control, because as technology develops, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand. There is no place where this is more evident than in the changing shape of our social networks and communications.

For many people in a modern society, the need to be mobile is paramount. We don’t simply move to where the work is, as Sociologists complained of in the early 20th Century. We also increasingly need to move to where the education happens that permits us to work in the first place.

As such, our social networks often span cities, states, countries, and continents. Not simply our networking contacts but our friends and family too. To stay connected we rely on a handful of tools, owned by an even smaller group of companies. Our emails by Microsoft and Google. Our messages by Facebook, ByteDance, and Google again. Our very links to those who are important to us are subject to the very same conditions that sparked Wittfogel’s thesis. And this seems like, not just a problem, but a preventable problem.

Man is no ant… The urge to act independently is an essential attribute… What happens to man’s desire for autonomy under the conditions of total power?… hydraulic despotism… blocks the development… and… discourages man’s desire for independent… action… hydraulic government is government by intimidation

Wittfogel,Oriental Despotism Ch. 5

¶Dorian’s Hydraulic Despotism

Unlike Wittfogel’s conception, my version of Hydraulic Despotism isn’t so bleak. Social media companies don’t extract corvée labour or manage your survival needs. You can leave TikTok, but you’ll die without water. The coercive property of the thing is fundamentally different.

There is coercion though. You can’t run a business without payment processors, or participate in the AI economy without compute, or talk to your friends without one of Meta’s chat apps. You’re hardly likely to be managing a career in the city and living sustainably out of your backyard. You’re not building your own water infrastructure after you come home from work to your fourth floor flat. You won’t die, but you’ll be marginalised if you don’t participate.

As such, we could just rely on other theories to describe what’s going on. Mann’s concept of Infrastructural power, or the more modern version in platform capitalism, or Callon’s concept of Obligatory passage points in Latour’s Actor-network theory, or even Essential facilities doctrine.

But while those might be better conceptual tools, the name just isn’t that motivating. When I first wrote this article, back in 2020, I called it “Things to be worried about: Hydraulic Despotism”. But it didn’t need all that. Hydraulic Despotism is already worrying sounding. And I want people to be worried.

I say we bring it back.

¶Outro

Now, this is more of a rah-rah article, and I already killed momentum pointing you to theories with less political but more practical utility, so I’m not going to put action items in my outro. But I obviously have lots of ideas in this direction. I followed this article up with From Zero, where I explore several hydraulic features of the modern landscape that seemed salient during the COVID-19 pandemic. My Digital Selves project is directed at this too: technical and digital literacy is increasingly a civic responsibility. I’m also sort-of tracking this in True Family Ties: trying to solve the hydraulic control of our social relationships. I’m certain you can think of ones closer to your heart. We probably won’t be controlling the water, but there’s plenty we can control.

To live in modern society is to relinquish control of our water. But there seems no need for us to lean into that fact, and hand over everything else as well. The defining feature of humans seems to be our capacity for nurture. To share ideas, and bring them into the world. Let’s not lose that.