Scale-Free Horizontal Transmission Systems

Scale-free horizontal transmission systems, especially when they are provided for free or minimal cost, provide a new communications infrastructure for human systems of unimaginable scope and potentiality. The bottom line of scale-free horizontal transmission systems--any information, anywhere, anytime, on demand. Not just superficial, popular, sex- or violence laden information, but expert, detailed, refined knowledge. A university, no even more, the entire common stock of human knowledge, available at anyone's finger tips, any time-zone, anytime of the day or night. 

A free and free access Internet is part of this formula, it should go without saying. Another important part, increasingly, is wirelessness of systems that mean they and we can be mobile and can go anywhere, anytime--they are no longer bound by the wires that tie them to the wall and to one another.

The next step of course would be to build an infrastructure around this, in which any thing, good or service, can be delivered by the fastest and shortest route possible, to any place on the earth, hopefully at least cost. Cut out the middle-men--producer direct. Short of a Star Trek transporter system, we haven't figured this second half of the equation out just yet, but Federal Express seems to be getting better at what they do. "Scotty, beam up my vegetables and my new car."

The implications of this are enormous. They lead to a human knowledge revolution, which should in time generate a human systems revolution as people, armed with the total global stock of knowledge, come to demand to achieve greater self-realization and social systems that permit such self-realization. 

Of course in the free-range chaos of New Frontiers, there is plenty of room to screw things up and plenty of opportunity for "winner takes all." Major attractors in such networks come to function like "magnates" that grow disproportionately well connected compared to the vast majority of other nodes in such networks, and in the process the system as a whole becomes more, not less, vulnerable. Perhaps these developments are, from the standpoint of systems, inevitable, but there is something to be said for increasing the number of connections between all possible nodes.

We are in a situation where the number of nodes are virtually unlimited, but the number of connections between nodes are limited by built-in channel capacities, and especially, by built-in human limitations. It reaches a point where there is just too much information to process, to many possibilities to deal with. Humans can't afford to always function with a min-max game strategy, and, must, to achieve some sense of satisfaction, adopt a "satisficing" strategy. Thus people don't buy a newer better computer every year or even every other year, and they don't always need to get the newest and most up to date software to run in their system.

So on one hand, we can expect significant increases in channel breadth and overall carrying capacities of channels. At the same time, we should expect to see the development of more effective programming systems and interfaces that render information processing technologies more available to the average and relatively untrained user. Though there will always be these kind so of extrinsic and intrinsic limitations to horizontal transmission systems, even with virtually unlimited processing and storage power, it seems that these kinds of constraints can be eventually obviated for most intents and purposes.

We can state, from the standpoint of  the development of a global meta-culture, that this global meta-culture will be in the first and final analysis a kind of "e-culture" that is based upon the effectively unlimited capacities for sharing of information of all kinds made possible within a completely scale-free horizontal transmission system. No longer is the lack of information a critical obstacle to the challenges of human development, as long as there is access to the Internet in a consistent, reliable and uncensored manner. Increasingly, in the future, it will become limited access to energy, and to other real resources, and not information, that will serve as the rate-determining factor and the primary limiting factor for human development.

It strikes me that one of the best (and possibly worst) things that can be done is to hook as many people in as many areas as cheaply as possible to the Internet. But one might ask somewhat rhetorically and ironically, what good is the Internet if one is still starving to death? This seems, increasingly, to be a dilemma shared by many people, from both rich and well connected regions, to those large swaths of the earth where the Internet still is something for the future.

Communist  China, take heed, and fair warning, as the future is advancing rapidly. All efforts at total control and censorship of the web are ultimately doomed to failure, unless of course China-net becomes, through force-of-arms, Global-net.