Conway's law says that any software reflects the communication structure of the organisation that produced it. The computer scientist and programmer Melvin Conway introduced the idea in 1967. Teams that rarely talk tend to build components with hard boundaries between them, while closely connected teams tend to build tightly integrated systems. Because the parts must fit together, the design ends up mirroring the social lines of the company. The law is applied mostly in software architecture, but Conway meant it to apply to most technical fields.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.