This flurry of activity is the result of poking around and seeing what there is on the net regarding networks, etc. And reflects to a great extent on my ignorance or dis-connectedness from the discussions that are taking place both in science and political circles. For example, from a year ago...

"The Limits of Networking" (also available in a prettier form at c u l t u r e k i t c h e n by Alex Galloway and Eugene Thacker is a response to a piece by Gert Lovink and Florian Schneider, "Notes on the State of Networking" which may also have appeared on the nettime-l list; the link is to the makeworlds site, previously mentioned in this blog. A response (also on nettime-l) to the Galloway/Thacker piece by Florian Cramer is good.

Comments will be forthcoming.

On the horizon: The Quantum Theory of Trust: How Networks Work and Organizations Behave; The Secret of Mapping and Managing Human Relationships. Anticipated publication date: September, 2005. There's an outline on the announcement page. Network science used to understand and enhance corporate culture; concepts look to apply to any organization.

jd

A bit more on network motifs:

A taxonomy of network motifs exists. For some clear descriptions and diagrams, see Network motifs. This page describes gene regulation, but it's not too hard to extrapolate from motifs like "autoregulatory", "feedforward", "multi-component loop", etc.

To understand how complex transcriptional regulatory networks produce gene expression programs, it is useful to identify the simplest units of commonly used network architecture. We imagine that these simple units, or network motifs, provide specific regulatory capacities such as positive and negative feedback loops. The frequency with which cells use individual motifs reveals the regulatory strategies that were selected during evolution. These motifs can be assembled into network structures that help explain how a complex gene expression program is regulated.

(from site above).

Network motifs

Connections or actions between nodes have a property of "direction". A can act on B, B can act on A, or A can act on B and B can act on A. In dialectical terms the latter case would be an interaction or interconnection. Throw in a third node, and the number of possible connection types grows to 13?; add a fourth, and the number jumps to 199. (I'm not sure of the math of this, the numbers are from the article referenced below.)

In a 2002 Science article, "Network Motifs: Simple Building Blocks of Complex Networks" six researchers studied various types of networks, and found "the striking appearance of motifs in networks representing a broad range of natural phenomenon."

The researchers studied various real-world networks, including gene regulation, neurons, food webs, electronic circuits, and the World Wide Web. Out of the range of all of the possible connections types, a small number of connection types -- that is, motifs -- showed up much more frequently than the others. Not all networks, though, have the same motifs. The presence of different motifs in different networks suggests a way of distinguishing types of networks.

"None of the network motifs shared by the food webs matched the motifs found in the gene regulation networks or the World Wide Web. Only one of the food web consensus motifs [their term, consensus motifs are "motifs shared by networks of a given type" - jd] also appeared in the neuronal network. Different motifs were found in electronic circuits with different functions. This suggests that motifs can define broad classes of networks, each with specific types of elementary structures. The motifs reflect the underlying processes that generated each type of network [my emphasis - jd]; for example, food webs evolved to allow a flow of energy from the bottom to the top of the food chains, whereas gene regulation and neuron networks evolve to process information. Information processing seems to give rise to significantly different structures than does energy flow.

Two more observations: (1) "In general, the larger the network is the more significant the motifs tend to become;" and (2) motifs "may be interpreted as structures that arise because of the special constraints under which the network has evolved."

Somehow this concept of "motif" is related to the concept of the "law system" (or, the necessary connections) that govern or constrain the interactions between nodes in the network. Or perhaps they are evidence of the existence of the law system? (These would be in part "the special constraints under which the network has evolved" -- internal constraints, while there are also external or environmental constraints as well?)

jd

This is a column I did a few years ago, relevant to this blog.

jd

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The dumbest networks

Found on the Internet: The best network is the dumbest network. But... it's not the most profitable...

So we won't see it.

That's the implied conclusion in David Isenberg and David Weinberger's online essay "The Paradox of the Best Network".

A "dumb network" is a network that is optimized to move bits -- any kind of bits, all bits -- as fast as possible. "Only then is the network truly open to any and all services that want to use it, no matter how innovative or how unexpected. In the best network, the services live at the edges of the network and use the network to transport bits; they do not rely on any special characteristics of the network itself."

But, they argue, the simpler the network, the easier it is for any network operator to provide the service -- capacity grows, prices fall, all is good. Right? Except.

Telecom companies can't make money that way. (Witness the telecom carcasses along the road over the past two years: Northpoint, PSINet, CAIS/Ardent Communications, to name a few; and a number of companies like Global Crossing are teetering on the curb).

The telecom companies make money off of complicated, premium services that aren't versatile. So they have no incentive to develop the kind of networks that (a) serve the most people and (b) realize the possibilities of a well-networked world.

Isenberg and Weinberger argue that "[i]ncumbent communications company clout has forestalled delivery of a variety of radically simplified, extremely affordable technologies," like wireless and fiber optic networks.

It gets better: "Telephone companies are not the only institutions goaded by new network technology. We can see from the reaction to today's Internet that the Paradox of the Best Network is not kind to the recording industry, to book publishers, or to any other group that makes its living by controlling access to content. These groups have already called in the lawyers and lobbyists to protect their current business models. Nor will the new network be popular with any institution — economic, political or religious — that seeks to shield itself from conflicting cultures and ideas."

The apologists for our great economic system like to argue that yeah, capitalism might be rough, but the competitive spirit ensures that new technologies get developed and deployed. The paradox of the best network is just another example that this is a Big Lie.

Capitalism cannot make the most of new technologies. The above is just one more example. The best networks are not being built because they are too hard to make money from. An economic system that favors maximum profit over maximum satisfaction, maximum usability, maximum access, maximum information, etc. etc. is a bundle of chains on society, keeping it down.

Isenberg and Weinberger pose the obvious question: "But if the best network is also the cheapest and hardest to make money from, who will build it?"

The essay goes on to propose some ways to ensure the development of big, dumb networks. They plainly state that "Arguably, building the best network is a Public Good." But between the rock of telecom capitalism and the hard place of Enron-ized government -- here's where we need everyone's imagination and initiative.

What kind of society do we want? We have a world to win, And, well, nothing to lose but our chains.

* * *

Another reason why capitalism sucks: Harold Russell, the disabled World War II vet and non-actor who won an Academy Award for his remarkable performance in William Weller's classic movie "The Best Years of Our Lives", died in January. He was 88. In 1992 he was forced to sell his Oscar -- he needed the money to pay for his sick wife's medical bills.

Jim Davis
2/01/02



This originally appeared at http://www.lrna.org, now living at http://www.gocatgo.com/jdav/columns/dumbnet.html

Here's the description of a paper that I am planning to do for the The Global Studies Association Annual Conference, May 12 - 15, 2005 at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville:

Networks and globalization

"Network" is a popular metaphor for talking about globalization. For the most part, "network" has been just that -- a vague metaphor with many meanings. "Network science", a new cross-discipline offshoot of complexity theory, brings a formality to thinking about network structures. "Network science" concepts like "superconnectors", "preferential attachment", and "small-world effect" are universal in real-world networks, whether they be ecological, social or economic. "Network science" explains both the strengths of globalized capitalism, and its weaknesses. Perhaps more importantly, it provides powerful insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the "network form" of organization, the emerging structure of resistance to globalization.

jd

From Neal Stephenson's The System of the World, the concluding volume of The Baroque Cycle, a great read:

...I saw one or two smoke-rings about the size of a man's hat, propagating across the room, and retaining their shape and vis viva for extraordinary distance. These rings are unlike water-waves, which consist of different water at different times, for smoke rings propagate through clear air, proving that they indeed carry their own substance with them, neither diluting it with, nor dispersing it into, the surrounding atmosphere. And yet there is nothing special about the smoke as such -- it is the same smoke that hangs over battlefields in shapeless clouds. The identity of the smoke ring would appear to consist, not in the stuff of which it is made, for that is commonplace and indifferent, but rather in a particular set of relationships that is brought into being among its parts. It is this pattern of relationships that coheres in space and persists in time and endows the smoke-ring with an identity. Perhaps some similar observation might be made about other entities that we observe, and credit with uniqueness and identity, including even human beings. For the stuff of which we are made is just the common stuff of the world, viz. ordinary gross matter, so that a materialist might say, we are no different from rocks; and yet our matter is imbued with some organizing principle that endows us with identities, so that I may send a letter to Daniel Waterhouse in London in full confidence that, like a smoke ring traversing a battle-field, he has traveled a great distance, and persisted for a long time, and yet is still the same man." (a fictional Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz writing to Daniel Waterhouse; p54)