Digital water

A word is the skin of a living thought. Change the word, and you change the way the thought moves in the world.

If we want to reduce tensions and build a viable, technologically driven future for humanity, we have to redirect our thinking. To redirect our thinking, we have to reshape our language. A durable, equitable, enforceable digital world will not emerge from technology alone; it must be wrapped in foundational words that even our youngest children can reach for and understand.

“A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged. It is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.”
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court

Let me offer one such word: Digital Water.

Close your eyes for a moment and imagine bits flowing as drops of water in a stream. What we usually call “data” now moves like water across the landscape of our lives. Every message, click, sensor reading, and transaction becomes part of a vast, invisible hydrology: Digital Water.

The flow of digital water

Digital Water behaves according to the same constructal law first articulated by Dr. Adrian Bejan of Duke University. As fresh water flows across the earth, it organizes itself into patterns that make it easier for more water to flow: rain becomes rivulets, rivulets become streams, streams become tributaries and rivers, rivers feed lakes and reservoirs.

Physical fresh water is a closed and finite system. Its volume is constrained. It is monitored, metered, piped, stored, and priced by the drop.

Digital Water, by contrast, flows through a hierarchical network that is effectively open-ended. Bits and bytes move:

• From sensors, keyboards, and cameras
• Into compilers, caches, and storage
• Through retrieval systems and algorithms
• Across the networks of large providers (our digital rivers)
• Into and out of the cloud (our new reservoirs)

Just as physical water recycles through evaporation and condensation, Digital Water recycles through algorithms, software platforms, and feedback loops that continually refine and redirect its flow.

But there is a crucial difference: Digital Water is not finite. It will continue to expand until the energy required to keep it moving — the “surface tension” of compute, storage, and transmission costs — can no longer contain its volume.

The exponential era and the cost of flow

The internet radically lowers transaction and coordination costs. Moore’s law and its successors relentlessly reduce the cost of generating and moving Digital Water. Ever-expanding networks multiply the number of connections between people, devices, and institutions. The result is a world of converging technologies and collapsing time scales. The internet has enabled hyper-consolidated ecosystems to emerge at unprecedented speed and scale. 

We are living in what I have called the ‘Exponential Era,’ a time when the rate of change in technology, business models, and social expectations is itself accelerating.

In this environment:

• More bits flow
• More connections are made
• More volume is carried across more branches and networks

We are creating extraordinary new possibilities while simultaneously exposing profound new vulnerabilities.

Digital water as a precious resource

We should treat Digital Water as we treat clean physical water: as a precious, life-critical resource. Digital Water is now a fundamental source of knowledge nourishment. The future of humanity depends on how freely, cleanly, and reliably it is enabled to flow.

No person, region, or group should:

• Die of thirst in a digital sense,
• Be forced to drink polluted or contaminated streams of information, or
• Be denied access to basic flows of Digital Water

Yet that is exactly what is happening today. In some regions, there is flooding: people are drowning in information overload, unable to distinguish signal from noise. They are drinking contaminated Digital Water in the form of disinformation, manipulative content, and bottled propaganda. In other places, people live in digital deserts. Pipes are too small, non-existent, or prohibitively expensive. Infrastructure, affordability, and policy failures combine to leave citizens effectively without Digital Water, limiting their ability to learn, trade, participate, and protect themselves.

As the velocity and volume of these digital flows increase, they are reshaping the economic, cultural, military, and governmental landscapes we all inhabit. Access to Digital Water is becoming both infrastructure and a weapon.

Mindsets: How we govern digital water

To reach a “digital truce” — a workable balance between innovation, control, and equity — we have to examine the prevailing mindsets that shape access to Digital Water.

1. The national mindset

National (or nationalist) mindsets prioritize conformity and cohesion. Citizens are expected to prefer comfort over anxiety, predictability over ambiguity.

Access to Digital Water is optimized for efficiency and control:

Surveillance capitalism and state monitoring normalize tracking and ranking.

Infrastructure investment is guided by national security and centralized interests. Dissenting flows of information are restricted, redirected, or quietly throttled. The result is often an authoritarian structure. There is less open conflict about access because access itself is designed from the top down. The system appears stable until it doesn’t.

2. The liberal mindset

Liberal mindsets emphasize individual freedom and pluralism. The core question becomes: how much process and conformity is necessary to ensure that one group’s rights do not unfairly constrain another’s? Access to Digital Water is framed as a matter of market choice and formal rights:

• Competition among providers is expected to drive innovation
• Regulatory schemes focus on transparency, consent, and antitrust
• The “free market” is trusted as the primary allocator of access and quality

But liberal systems are still shaped by efficiency, and they tend to produce oligarchic structures. Power and control over Digital Water consolidate into the hands of a few dominant platforms and infrastructure providers, even when the common and amplified rhetoric is about openness and choice.

3. The pragmatic middle

Between authoritarian conformity and fragmented individualism lies a third possibility: a Pragmatic Middle.

A pragmatic mindset:

• Recognizes the necessity of coordination and shared rules,
• Avoids creating a singular, unchallengeable source of Digital Water (whether state-run or commercial), and
• Designs for resilience, not just efficiency.

In this frame, the goal is to optimize flow without centralizing control. Multiple pathways to Digital Water are encouraged, and switching costs are intentionally lowered. Governance focuses on:

• Interoperability instead of lock-in,
• Minimum access guarantees instead of pure market allocation, and
• Shared standards that preserve room for local adaptation and innovation

For boards, policymakers, and technology leaders, the Pragmatic Middle is not a compromise of principles; it is a design choice. It is how we improve the flow of Digital Water while ensuring fewer people die of thirst.

From human right to strategic weapon

For centuries, access to physical water has been used to control populations. Block the river, divert the canal, destroy the well, and you can shape the fate of entire communities.

Digital Water is now being weaponized in similar ways:

• Connectivity can be selectively shut down or throttled
• Platforms can amplify or mute particular voices and narratives
• Data flows can be harvested to predict, manipulate, and pre-empt behavior

At the same time, for more than a century, access to clean physical water has been increasingly recognized as a human right. We know that humans can go days without food but only about three days without water.

In the Exponential Era, our ability to survive and thrive without access to Digital Water is coming under similar constraints. The fundamental divide is shifting:

It is no longer simply haves versus have-nots. It is increasingly those who know versus those who do not. For those who know, Digital Water provides early warnings of storms and crises, access to education and skills, pathways to relief, support, and opportunity, and connections to touchstone documents, shared truths, and collective memory. For those who do not, the world becomes more opaque, more dangerous, and less forgiving with every passing year.

A call for a digital truce

We are not debating whether Digital Water matters. We are debating who controls it, how it flows, and on what terms. If we accept Digital Water as a precious, life-critical resource, then we must:

• Name it clearly,
• Govern it deliberately, and
• Design its flow to serve both individual dignity and collective resilience

In an Exponential Era, access to clean, reliable Digital Water is becoming synonymous with access to life itself. The words we choose now to shape the narrative will shape how that life is distributed and how well we live.

“For a finite-size flow system to persist in time (to live), it must evolve with freedom in such a way that it provides easier access to the currents that flow through it.” — Adrian Bejan, Constructal Law 

illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

Interested in the companies shaping our sustainable future? See on illuminem’s Data Hub™ the transparent sustainability performance, emissions, and climate targets of thousands of businesses worldwide.