RE: Hierarchy, Force Monopoly, and Geodesic Societies (Re: [irtheory] Re: Anarchy and State Behaviors)
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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] CC: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Hierarchy, Force Monopoly, and Geodesic Societies (Re: [irtheory] Re: Anarchy and State Behaviors) Date: Thu, 8 Apr 2004 13:56:47 -0400 -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 At 4:41 AM + 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
Hierarchy, Force Monopoly, and Geodesic Societies (Re: [irtheory] Re: Anarchy and State Behaviors)
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 At 4:41 AM + 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
