For generations, the foundations beneath our electronic devices were assumed to be silent witnesses — inert platforms on which the real action unfolded above. Researchers at UC San Diego have now revealed that these substrates are not passive at all, but active partners in the energetic life of the devices they support, exchanging forces with films a ten-thousandth their thickness. This quiet correction to a decades-old assumption opens a new geometry for computing — one that builds inward and upward, toward chips that think more like brains and consume far less of the world's energy.