Hierarchy, Force Monopoly, and Geodesic Societies (Re: [irtheory] Re: Anarchy and State Behaviors)

[R. A. Hettinga]

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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

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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
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"... 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'