Hierarchy and distribution


In this week's opinion piece, I look at two ways to organize systems and some of the political and social implications of each.
One thing that we should discuss more is organization.

Normally when we think about a control, we think in terms of a pyramidal hierarchy, one person (or group) passing giving general directions to the next people down the chain, who break the directions down into detailed steps and pass those down to those below. The Organization Man and the modern corporation are classic examples. Each level has more expertise and power than the one below, but is less involved in the details. Much of the structure is borrowed from the military. The upper levels are the “key” people, they are the decision makers. Without their approval and support, nothing can get done.

Now this is one way to put things together, but it is hardly the only one or even the best one.

Imagine a telephone network organized like that. Calls would have to go up the chain until they found something with the authority to send it down another link to it's destination. The upper nodes would be overworked while there would be excess capacity in the lower nodes. Bringing in more upper nodes wouldn't solve the problem because each upper node would have it's own net of lower links. One upper node failing could crash the whole network.

That is why the telephone network moved from a top down hierarchy to a distributed system. It was the only way to add capacity to the system without bogging the traffic down. If one city drops out of the network, the network routes around the problem until it comes back up.

In a distributed network, connectivity and number of nodes replaces the expertise and power of individual nodes. No one node is as critical to the system, but no one node can do as much within the system as the high level nodes of a hierarchy. Even if all the high level nodes failed, the network would still run. Not as well perhaps, but it would still work.

Of course, the best known example of a distributed network in the internet. Sure enough, the weakness isn't in any of the nodes but in the connections. If the New York Times closed it's website tonight, you could still get news from other sources and watch the movie trailers over at Apple's Quicktime site. If Amazon went belly up next week, you could still find almost everything on the 'net that Amazon sells and more besides. Meanwhile, you could still send email, chat with other people, download software, or anything else. But if something happens to your ISP, you are cut off. If something happens to the hub that connects your ISP to the rest of the internet, your ISP and all it's customers including you are stranded.

Another network in the national highway system. There are many different paths to get from New York to San Diego. It doesn't matter if one is torn up because you can work around it. If absolutely necessary, you can go onto the secondary streets to move around the obstruction.

A hierarchy depends on control, sometimes very rigid control. That can be a good thing when no one can afford a mistake. A distributed network is more fault tolerant, but also messier and “wastes” more resources.

“Rank” in a hierarchy depends on the node level and the nodes underneath. “Rank” in a distributed network depends on how many other nodes you touch and your reliability.

So which is better? It depends on the situation. If I need the weather in Washington D.C., I can be a little sloppy about it. If I am trying to land a spacecraft next to the Lincoln Memorial, I need precise control to get everyone out of the way.

What does all this have to do with politics?

Ask yourself if the polticos want to impose a hierarchy when a distributed network will work as well if not better.

There is that choice thing again. Because you see, a free market is a distributed network. It doesn't matter if it is laundry soap or church doctrine. If you don't like one, you can choose another. Failure of one node does not bring down the entire network, alternatives always exist. The only things that can restrict choice is network failure or top down control.

Even if there are choices you don't like and wish didn't exist, you can't do anything about them without compromising the network.

Over time, the good choices will spread.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Sun - December 24, 2006 at 09:49 PM  Tag


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