Hettinga does *nothing* but hand-waving, folks...

[Jim Choate]

On Sat, 9 Dec 2000, R. A. Hettinga wrote:

> dropped packets, or time or something, and the network certainly *looks*
> like a geodesic one, with multiple nodes plugged into lots of lines
> routing packets in arbitrary directions instead of up and down a
> hierarchy.

That's not geodesic, that's a distributed systems with stochastic
management algorithms. The epitomy of 'free market' thinking applied to
communications engineering. It's certainly non-hierarchical but it isn't
'minimum distance'.

If we apply 'geodesic' to the network between two participants then the
goal would be to arrange their adjacency (ie minimize transaction costs).
The network makes it appear that they are adjacent because of its ubiquity
and acceptable latency. This goal was reached with the telegraph and the
radio, 100 to 150 years ago.

The next obvious goal would be to reduce the number of regulators.

Then of course there is the aspect of the 'personal bank'. This would be
where you and I exchange widgets via our PDA's that somehow get mapped
into our personal financial/property space without going through some
arbitration via 3rd party. The social and economic implications of this
are staggering. This effectively means no taxes. This means that there are
no shared or common resources. This implies that each person is either
themselves autonomous, or acts as an agent who represents that independent
autonomous collective (ie arcology or zaibatsu). It reduces society to a
collection of 'families'. This implies a multi-planetary system in order
to have resources of the requisite scale. Now consider the sorts of
technology this will require to be ubiquitous? Neuromancer? Not hardly.
Schismatrix is a more apt example. Gene engineered satellites that have
doors made from lips and vagina's and the 'systems' of the satellite are
the biological systems of the being which is the satellite. Killer
butterflies. Shaper versus mechanist. Then consider the implications this
has with respect to individual lifetimes and the changes that occur in
society. It's clear that society changes slowly but a critical component
in keeping it from stopping is the relatively short lives of people. They
just aren't around long enough to have 'grand' plans and carry through on
them. But, take away the economic issues of this ubiquitous melange of
technology and reduce the major driving motivations to emotional ones,
coupled with individual access to constructive technology that potentially
surpasses the current output of the planet. Couple that will lifetimes
approaching 200+ years and we begin to see a side that doesn't bode well
at all. And the currently stabalizing force, the slowness of evolution, is
going to be removed shortly. There will in effect be no apparent boundary
or limit on the attainable goals of individuals. This implies a high level
of conflict, or else some sort of meta-society.

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