The Architecture of Power
Power rarely appears where decisions are made. It flows through beliefs, institutions, and agendas long before anyone argues or votes. This book reveals how power actually moves through social structures—and what becomes possible once you can see it.
About
About the Book
This book is about power—not as influence, authority, or personal dominance, but as an invisible force that shapes the social and material world around us.
It introduces a simple analytical model, the Power Loop, to describe how power circulates through systems—from beliefs to institutions, agendas, decisions, events, and narratives, and back again. It shows why decisions often feel inevitable long before they are formally made, and why changing outcomes without changing the underlying power landscape rarely works.
A central focus of the book is actants: non-human carriers of power—rules, standards, metrics, tools, algorithms, documents, and narratives. Actants do not persuade or command. They enable, constrain, legitimize, stabilize, amplify, or obscure. They make some actions easy, others difficult, and some unthinkable. By examining different types of actant power, the book makes visible forms of power that usually remain implicit.
The book offers both a theoretical foundation for understanding how the architecture of power around us is structured, and a set of practical tactics for engaging with the flow of power in real systems.
This is not a manual for manipulation, leadership tricks, or personal influence. It does not promise control. Instead, it offers a way of seeing power more clearly—by shifting attention away from individuals and toward the structures and actants that sustain power over time.
Once these structures become visible, they can be questioned, navigated, and sometimes redesigned. That is where change becomes possible.
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Author
About the Author
Yevgen Nebesov is a systems architect based in Bruchsal, Germany. He works at the intersection of software architecture and organizational dynamics, bringing a political perspective into a traditionally technical discipline. His work focuses on how power operates in sociotechnical systems—through artifacts, structures, and processes rather than personalities. He writes and speaks about the architecture of power and how it can be understood and engaged.
Beyond his consultancy work, Yevgen is involved in non-profit initiatives that cultivate technical communities in his region, including the organization of IT meetups and tech conferences.
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