The Upstream Pattern
How every tech epoch begins in the layers nobody sees
Some technology shifts arrive loudly. Others show up sideways, tucked inside partnerships, tooling updates, or engineering notes that barely register outside a narrow circle. Over time, I’ve learned to pay closer attention to the second kind, because they tend to matter more and often attract less attention.
In technology, those moments work the same way they do in a river system: the narrow, upstream decisions shape the entire downstream flow long before the widening becomes visible. I’ve been watching this pattern repeat for most of my career, not in headlines or valuations, but in where attention and effort migrate upstream, into the layers that decide what is buildable long before anyone argues about taste, policy, or impact. These are the moments when the rules get set before the debate even starts. Spending time this month with teams working on infrastructure-first innovation in Uruguay has only reinforced how often the real decisions are made far upstream, long before they surface as products or platforms.
That perspective shapes how I read moments like this one, less as commentary and more as pattern recognition. The specifics change and technologies cycle onward, but the motion remains familiar, and when gravity starts to drift upstream, the downstream world eventually reorganizes around it.
Every major technology wave I’ve lived through has followed this arc, with power consolidating upstream first in the layers that define constraints, interfaces, and scale, and only later surfacing as products, behaviors, and cultural arguments. By the time that consolidation becomes visible, it already feels natural, even inevitable. This isn’t a warning or a forecast, but a structural move that repeats each time a new system takes hold and frames how I read industry change.
What follows is a walk through this pattern as I’ve seen it play out across cloud, mobile, ecommerce, and now AI. The eras are different and the technologies change, but the underlying shift remains consistent. In each case, the visible story focused on products and experiences, while the real leverage accumulated elsewhere, in toolchains, orchestration layers, and design systems that set boundaries long before most people noticed.
This Deep Cut traces those upstream shifts not to predict winners or declare villains, but to offer a way of seeing that has served me well over time. Once you learn where power consolidates first, the downstream outcomes become easier to understand, and by the time the arguments arrive, the shape of the system is usually already decided.
The rest of this essay follows that arc, from past waves to the one forming now.
