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

Thu Apr 8 17:46:04 PDT 2004

"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."

Well, from the little I can understand of what you're saying, there seems to 
be some stuff worthy of at least cursory consideration there. However, the 
analogy to switching systems is a little off.

For one, a telephony switch isn't really something that can be measured on 
one axis (ie, throughput). There are two (or perhaps 3) axes that really 
describe the family of telephony switches: throughput and granularity. Back 
in my telecom days I used to joke that "In my pocket I have a switch matrix 
capable of 100 Terabits of throughput"...whereupon I'd whip out a (fiber) 
jumper, and point out that this jumper could "switch" 100Tb "from this port 
to this port". (This is an exageration of claims made about the throughput 
of OXCs, or optical cross connects.)

This is important because it is indicative of the fact that there is no 
hierarchy of switches as you describe in a telephony switch. A Broadband DCS 
doesn't somehow control the network. In fact, you could argue that the 
'little' 5ESS switches out on the edge ultimately control the network, 
though even that would be inaccurate.

No, the entire phone network is "governed" externally by an OSS. I don't 
really see how this is describable by a hierarchy per se, and certainly not 
a hierarchy that can somehow be traced to a linear measure of switching 
capability.

As for the tem "geodesic", I have to admit it's cool sounding in this 
context.

-TD

>From: "R. A. Hettinga" <rah at shipwright.com>
>To: irtheory at yahoogroups.com
>CC: cypherpunks at al-qaeda.net
>Subject: Hierarchy, Force Monopoly, and Geodesic Societies (Re: [irtheory] 
>Re: Anarchy and State Behaviors)
>Date: Thu, 8 Apr 2004 13:56:47 -0400
>
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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>
>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'
>

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