-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 4:41 AM +0000 4/8/04, Daniel Pineu wrote:

I am very curious about what are your views about the twin concept of hierarchy

Hierarchy emerges as a result of the economics of information switching. When you have expensive nodes (brains) and inexpensive lines (behavior, talking, writing, whatever), you end up with hierarchical networks. When you have a small number of nodes in a network, hierarchical switching (i.e. chains of command, etc.) can't emerge because direct communication is possible. For instance, in neurobiology, emotion is a way of weighting memory. In human networks, we have the ability to have significant emotional relationships with about 12-16 people at a maximum, not coincidentally the size of a hunter-gatherer band, a social unit that stayed with humanity, from our virtual evolution as a separate species until sedentarianism, which preceded agriculture by several thousand years, roughly 12-24,000 years ago. See Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel" for a nice popular summary of this process. Food surplus creates an attractive nuisance, and causes large populations of even solitary, non-social animals to create dominance and social hierarchies, as a way of avoiding the wasteful expenditure of energy that constant battle would involve. Salmon streams attract Grizzly bears and Eagles, the town dumps at Churchill Manitoba attracts Polar bears, house-cats in a farm-yard, and the intersection of significant agricultural trading routes causes cities. Proto-humans have traded since they invented tools, including sites where hand-axes were literally manufactured at some negotiated rate of exchange for raw materials collected a tens or hundreds of miles away. Persistence of a food source over great lengths of time creates the evolution of social animals. Wasps evolve into ants, cockroaches evolve into termites, solitary proto-cats and -dogs become social lions and wolves, and so on. As a counterexample, Orang-otans are solitary because the distribution of food in jungles is uniform, sparsely distributed, and random in appearance over time. Notice that the speed of information processing is also a component. An Orang-Otan is a very sophisticated information processor, full of data about what plants bear fruit, when they do so, and where they are. And, contrary to popular belief, a beehive, or a termite or ant nest, is not all *that* hierarchical in its organization. Do not mistake functional specialization, like you find in ants and termites, as hierarchy. See Kevin Kelly's "Out of Control" for a nice survey of this idea. An ant "queen" is, in the final stage of her life, a breeding machine, she doesn't signal, even in a gross sense, what each worker does, in the same way that an army general does for privates, for instance. In mechanical information switching hierarchies, the fastest, most expensive switches are at the top, and there is a single route through the network. In the old phone network, you had a single operator for a small enough town, and central offices in large cities had rooms with hundreds of operators in them. The pre-microprocessor automation of telephony (pulse and then touchtone dialing) put expensive automation at the top of the hierarchy, and, as costs fell, moved down from there. This fall in switching prices, exponential after the invention of the microprocessor, is important, and I'll talk about it more in a bit. Human switching hierarchies aren't so efficient, :-), but certainly the most important information summaries are presented *near* the top of a human-switched information hierarchy, and the most "expensive" switches were certainly at the top, and economic rent being what it is, people literally killed each other to be at the top of those hierarchies. Which brings us to two principal features of international relations through the industrial era: force monopoly, by which you literally define a state whether it involves a single national cultural entity or not, and information/social hierarchies, by which that state is controlled . First of all there's the emergence of geographic force monopoly, which is, more or less, a function of sedentarianism, and later agriculture. Nomads may fight over the immediate use of local resources, a watering-hole, say, but they don't set up principalities (Mancur Olsen says in "Power and Prosperity" that a prince is a bandit who doesn't move :-)). So, when you mix geographic force monopoly with social hierarchy you get first cities, then city-states, then empires, and then nation-states. The progression of which is driven directly by speed of information processing, the span of communication, and the speed of that communication over a specific distance. Oddly enough, it is the ability of communication to transmit emotional information (first word of mouth, then words, then pictures, then moving images and sound, all with ever increasing instantaneity) that allows the mobilization of the most resources. Because of their emotional attachment, people will die for their modern nation-states much more readily than the normal merchant -- or obviously slave -- would die for the current tyrant of their ancient city-state, or feudal aristocrat. While it's safe to say that the British Empire started this, Napoleon was the first memorable modern exploiter of this phenomenon, if one remember that most of the salient features of warfare changed at this time. Prisoners weren't given parole anymore, for instance, but were kept throughout hostilities. Warfare was not a game of honor anymore, but an issue of one's individual and familial survival, the resources of all, not just a trained cadre, could be mobilized for war. Because of the emergence of mass media -- even Napoleon commissioned paintings and drawings throughout each campaign, for instance, which were re-printed in newspapers -- politics in France after the Revolution created a much stronger emotional bond with the state than existed under monarchy. The same thing happened in the United States, and it has extended throughout the west and west-influenced world, until nation-states are the dominant force structure in the world today. What's changing is that the price of information switching has, in fact, *fallen*, since, paradoxically, the first real attempt to create a "natural" monopoly out of the telephony market in the US. (I say "create", with natural in quotes, because modern economics shows us that only a force monopoly can create monopoly in another market.) The paradox comes from the negotiation of universal service in exchange for that monopoly, necessitating the automation of switching. Mechanical switching (pulse-dial) became electronic switching (touchtone), which, through the invention of the transistor - - -- by AT&T to solve this very problem -- became microprocessor switching. We now have an interesting problem, however, and a good explication of the physical effects of this process can be found in Peter Huber's "The Geodesic Network". Remember when I said above that network hierarchy evolves when nodes are dear and lines are cheap. However, we have moved into a world in which nodes can literally be printed, photolithographically. The result is Moore's "Law", the observation (thus not a physical law) that the number of transistors you can cram on a semiconductor continues to double every 18 months or so, affecting processor, and thus switching, prices, accordingly. [Nanotechology at least holds out the possibility of making Von Neumann machines, that is, switches which make copies of themselves, almost as if they were alive, dropping the cost even faster someday, but, for the time being, we'll leave that one out there in the weeds, where it belongs, but remember that progress can sneak up on you, if you're not careful.] When you exponentially drop the price of something, you get significant effects, some of which you can't predict. :-). In the case of physical network architectures, when nodes become cheaper in relation to lines, even large hierarchical networks collapse, or evolve, I suppose, into geodesic structures, like the kind of domes that Bucky Fuller used to build, or the structures you get in carbon when you burn it right and get so-called "buckyballs", which are spheres that look like the same thing. When a bunch of these networks are hooked together, you get a ubiquitous geodesic internetwork, the internet, which is what we have today. If you go look at graphs of the internet, you can tell that huge parts of it are physically geodesic, and certainly, in logical performance, the network is completely geodesic. The result is logical "communities", like this one, instead of geographic ones. Communities where people in different parts of the world can talk to each other on a single topic, or, even, act in consort to make something happen, like, say, develop some open-source code. Or conspire to fly an airliner into a building -- something that wasn't possible without the simulator technology enabled by Moore's Law, and which, as software which can be transmitted and eventually used *anywhere* someday, is an interesting feature of geodesic society that can be discussed some other time. The history of humanity, from the discovery of wild fields of edible grass seed in Mesopotamia until the early 20th century, has been the history of ever-increasing social hierarchy. Social hierarchy which has grown as our ability to store larger amounts of information and to transmit it faster and faster over greater distances, but, as hierarchy itself, has not changed in structure until recently, when the price of information switching has fallen dramatically in relation to the cost of transmitting it, which itself is also falling very fast. I would claim that this points to increasingly geodesic, instead of hierarchical, forms of social organization, and that politics, as an effect of physics, and not a cause of same, :-), will be changed as a result. I think that what we call "terrorism", is in fact, a form of geodesic warfare, for instance. I think that geodesic methods are the only way to protect ourselves from it. The use of GPS and JDAMs in Afghanistan by special forces to destroy whole armies is just the beginning of such kinds of defense, and, frankly, I think we're looking at a world of network-organized entities competing for resources using network-organized force. Personally, I think that results in auction-priced markets force and the end of the efficacy of geographic force monopoly as an effective way to control physical resources. Princes will go back to being bandits, in other words, which, like all progress, if it's cheap enough, is a *good* thing. :-). That, I believe, is the very definition of anarchy, at least in terms of political economics. And, since, like physics, politics is an *effect* of economics, not the other way around... Well, you get the idea. Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 8.0.3 iQA/AwUBQHWSRsPxH8jf3ohaEQLl4ACgivxynGisIYyigyJbRQySe1pcMmgAmwWe WtCP+c84v89nnhTfYIkp7sE0 =sPPT -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'