Hidden Systems is a book that can teach your kids how the internet works

Growing up, I learned Way of doing things from author David Macaulay’s incredible picture books. I was surprised to see Macaulay’s endorsement in my inbox this week for another author’s new illustrated explainer, but the surprise didn’t last long.

Fifteen minutes later I started going through the preliminary pattern Hidden systems, which just came out this week, I immediately ordered the book for my kids. It looks like a fantastic way to help them visualize the internet, the world’s water supply and our power grid, and get them thinking about the world’s infrastructure they will one day inherit.

In 262 pages, author and cartoonist Dan Knott addresses each of these systems in comic panel form, piecing together the structure of their work and the basis for their creation without ignoring the societal challenges each faces. “I started drawing about hidden systems because comics seem to have this uncanny ability to compare how we to think about something how it works exactly,” Knott writes in the book.

A lot of it is stuff that took me years to learn, distilled into an incredibly readable form. Even adults are likely to find things they don’t know, such as the shapes and locations of secret buildings where telecommunications companies hide their network equipment.

I want to show you some of it, so I asked publisher Random House if I could share the first chapter about the metaphors we use to describe the Internet: metaphors that are sometimes useful but inherently wrong.

They happily obliged, so there you go.