Network Architecture is Destiny

R.A. Hettinga rah at shipwright.com
Wed Jun 25 09:46:23 PDT 2008


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On Jun 25, 2008, at 2:57 AM, JP May wrote:

 >Note that here, by "Statism" I was specifically discussing the,  
let's call
 >it, post-monarchical-statism-period (ie, from, say, about 1800).  
(The post
 >began with killing off the kings and the industrial revolution...)

Actually, the nation state starts "officially" with the termination of
explicit religious control of politics and the Treaty of Westphalia, in
1648.

Cromwell, as you know, "killed the king", James, in particular, in 1649.

The roots of industrialism are a little more murky. The scientific
"revolution" is supposed to date to 1543, when Copernicus wrote "On the
Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres". Francis Bacon, who popularized
induction and the scientific method, died in 1626, and the  
mathematization
of science happened around the same time, with Descartes and analytic
geometry, and, of course, Newton, with calculus.

As Jim has noted here many times, Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle" books  
are a
marvelous place to immerse oneself in this period. Newcomen, as  
Stephenson
points out, was building the first (though not that efficient) steam  
engine
at roughly the same time (Hero of Alexandria built the first steam  
turbine
in the first century AD, of course).

Certainly the "hockey stick" phase of industrial progress was fully
underway in the late 1700's/early 1800's.

Personally, I think state control is as old as civilization itself. If  
not
sedentarianism, certainly agriculturalism requires force to control
geography, which, if not of necessity, certainly lends itself to
monopolistic control of same, including the people who work that land  
and
live in the cities that emerge a the  intersections of trade routes.

Human neurology prohibits "personal" relationships (call it trust, even)
with more people than the size of the average hunter-gatherer band,  
say 16
or so to keep it binary :-), and any larger group size transmutes that
"star", "peer-to-peer", "many-to-many", "sneakernet" topology into a
full-blown hierarchy, with one route, "chain of command", whatever,  
through
the network.

Latency of communication controls the hierarchy's size, and the faster  
and
farther news travels the bigger hierarchy can get. Cities beget  
empires --
hierarchies of cities -- and so on.

Obviously, speed of communication actually determines the totality of
control, as well. Fast "pony express" riders kept Ghengis in charge.
Stagecoaches did the same for Napoleon. Packet shipping (the original  
kind
:-)) enabled Brittania to rule the waves, the sun to never set, &cet.

As lots of people here have heard me say before, :-), telegraphy,
telecommunications in general, is where the fun really started. Real- 
time
communication enables real-time control, and control, to paraphrase Lord
Acton, trends toward totality.

It all has to stop somewhere, of course, monadism of any kind is
impossible, we can't all be one "stuff", much less one organization. You
can't transfer-price all assets on the "books" of the same "company"  
-- as
von Mises claimed, and, paradoxically, his disciples' avowed  
"scientistic"
enemy, modern mathematical finance, proved -- you can only discover  
prices
in auction markets, not calculate them with a committee, not even if  
that
committee has guns to enforce its calculated "price".

For totalitarianism, the beginning of the end, the "Revolutions of the
Heavenly Spheres", is, of course, the advent of a non-hierarchical
communication architecture, paradoxically, or maybe not so, the result  
of
legislative mandate in the 1920's.

In exchange for "natural" monopoly over interstate, and thus pretty much
all, American telephone traffic, government required American  
Telephone and
Telegraph to provide ubiquitous, "universal" telephone service: all  
rural
residences must receive telephones, not just the profitable residents of
cities.

Since manually-switched universal telephone service would require a
substantial majority of American women to become telephone operators
(certainly it wasn't a *man's* job ;-)), automated switching (direct
rotary-dial) was not too far behind.

As Peter Huber later noted in "The Geodesic Network", the lower the
relative price of switches compared to lines in a given network, the  
more
nodes there are in the network, the more nodes are connected to other
nodes, and the less hierarchical, the more geodesic, it becomes. Human
switched networks, telephonic or otherwise, are hierarchical because  
human
heads, the parts that do the switching, are expensive. Moore's law  
allows
one to literally print switching machines, and so now we have the  
internet,
the mother of all geodesic networks.

There is no *one* route through a geodesic network, in fact, the number,
the number of routes (and thus the value, as Metcalfe observed)  
increases
as the square of the switching-node count. (Brains are, for the most  
part,
geodesic networks of neurons, speaking of human neurology, but we'll  
leave
that for some other discussion :-).)

I claim -- and it's really not much of a leap when you think about it --
that our social structures pretty much map to our communication
architectures. When our technology enables hunter-gatherer culture, our
networks, and our social structures, are star-shaped. When we became
sedentary near a wild grain source in the Middle East, invented
agriculture, and eventually grew enough food to feed large urban
populations, our networks, our social structures, became hierarchical.

And, when humanity invented telecommunication, which forced us to
mechanize, and then exponentially automate, switching, our networks  
became
more and more geodesic. Presumably, our social structures, our markets  
--
even for force -- will become more geodesic as well. The social
implications, if this all bears out, will be... interesting. :-).


This is, why, of course, I'm such an advocate of digital bearer
transactions. Book-entries require a hierarchy of accounts -- and
state-enforced entities, notice --- in order to clear and settle
transactions. There is only one "route" through a book-entry transaction
settlement system. Like the old human-switched telephone system, it runs
into Russell's paradox, and Goedel's result: It cannot be both  
consistent
and complete at the same time without error. It cannot trend toward
ubiquity without totalitarianism, for instance.

Bearer transactions are more geodesic. Paradoxically, it is their
anonymity, at least between buyers and sellers, which makes this  
possible.
Anybody can trade with anybody, no matter *who* they are, because it
doesn't *matter* who they are, and the trade will execute, clear, and
settle safely.

I call David Chaum the father of modern financial cryptography for this
very reason. He invented the blind signature cryptographic protocol, and
thus -- as Nick Szabo observed on cypherpunks -- the first digital  
bearer
certificate.

By the way, bearer transactions are as old a barter, which apparently
started with australopithecus -- certainly trade was -- and book entry
transactions are as old as writing, which was actually *invented* to do
them, so none of this is new. Though, you note that book-entry  
transactions
was invented at the same time as agricultural hierarchy -- and  
monopoly of
force.

:-)

Cheers,
RAH

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