S YS TE MI C S Y MBIOTI C P LANETARY

ECOV ILLAG E NE TWORK

Systemic Symbiotic Planetary Ecovillage Network

P O Box 1674
Middletown, CA
95461-1674
USA

silverj6@mchsi.com

Silver J. H. Jones

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 TABLE OF CONTE NTS

Why causality?
4
Why networks?
7
Causal microeconets
8
Multicausal socioeconomic networks
10
Using networks to rebalance social power
10
The basic classification of networks
11
Putting network knowledge to work in microsocieties
13
A look at the new phenomena of parasitic computing
16
References
18

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 CHAP TER IV
Causal Network Dynamics

Silver J. H. Jones
2008

Copyright © 2002 by Silver (J. H.) Jones. All rights, electronic, multimedia, and print, reserved. A publi-
cation of SSPEN - Systemic Symbiotic Planetary Ecovillage Network.
Duncan Watts is one of the pioneers of the science of networks. In regard to the ubiquitous presence of
emergence is all kinds of nature’s systems he asks us to consider these questions [1]:
“How are we to understand such problems? In fact, what is it about complex connected systems that
makes them so hard to understand in the first place. How is it that assembling a large collection of com-
ponents into a system results in something altogether different from just a disassociated collection of
components? How do populations of fireflies flashing, crickets chirping, or pacemaker cells beating -
manage to synchronize their rhythms without the aid of a central conductor? How do small outbreaks of
disease become epidemics, and new ideas become crazes? How do wild speculative bubbles emerge out
of the investment strategies of otherwise sensible individuals, and when they burst, how does their dam-
age spread throughout a financial system? How vulnerable are large infrastructure networks, like the
power grid, or the Internet, to the random failures or even deliberate attack? How do norms and conven-
tions evolve, and sustain themselves in human societies, and how can they be upset and even replaced?
How can we locate individuals, resources, or answers in a world of overwhelming complexity? And how
do entire business firms innovate and adapt successfully when no one individual has enough information
to solve or even fully understand the problems that the firm faces?
As different as these questions appear, they are all versions of the same question: How does individual
behavior aggregate to collective behavior? As simply as it can be asked, this is one of the most funda-
mental and pervasive questions in all of science. A human brain, for example, is in one sense a trillion
neurons connected together in a big electrochemical lump. But to all of us who have one, a brain is clearly
much more, exhibiting properties like consciousness, memory, and personality, whose nature cannot be
explained simply in terms of an aggregation of neurons.”
A form of networks, referred to a graphs, have been known within mathematics since Leonhard Euler’s
work on graphs in 1736. Since this time networks have found their way into many of the major branches
of science such a physics, computer science, biology, ecology, alife, economics engineering, sociology,
and anthropology [2]. The difference between the most recent attempt to understand networks and the
earlier work in mathematics is that today networks are no longer seen as static entities. Ducan Watts de-
scribes the current perspective on networks [3]:

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“The crux of the matter is that in the past, networks have been viewed as objects of pure structure whose
properties are fixed in time. Neither of these assumptions could be further from the truth. First, real net-
works represent populations of individual components that are actually doing something - generating
power, sending data, or even making decisions. Although the structure of the relationships between a net-
work’s components is interesting, it is important principally because it affects either their individual be-
havior or the behavior of the system as a whole. Second, networks are dynamic objects not just because
things happen in networked systems, but because the networks themselves are evolving and changing in
time, driven by the activities or decisions of those very components. In the connected age, therefore, what
happens and how it happens depend on the network. And the network in turn depends on what has hap-
pened previously. It is this view of a network - as an integral part of a continuously evolving and self-
constituting system - that is truly new about the science of networks.”
The most recent efforts to understand the ever increasing awareness of the ubiquity of networks in nature
has become a multidisciplinary effort. Once again, Duncan Watts insider perspective is enlightening [4]:
“If it is to succeed, therefore, the new science of networks must bring together from all the disciplines the
relevant ideas and the people who understand them. The science of networks must become, in short, a
manifestation of its own subject matter, a network of scientists collectively solving problems that cannot
be solved by any single individual or even any single discipline. It’s a daunting task, made all the more
awkward by the long-standing barriers separating scientists themselves. The languages in the various dis-
ciplines are very different, and we scientists often have difficulty understanding one another. Our ap-
proaches are different too, so each of us has to learn not only how the others speak but also how they
think. But it is happening , and the past few years have seen an explosion in research and interest around
the world in search of a new paradigm with which to describe, explain, and ultimately understand the
connected age. We are not there yet, not by a long shot, bus as the story in the pages ahead relates, we are
making some exciting progress.”
When it comes to complex networks, our civilization is still much like a newborn child trying to make
sense out of the vast sensory arena of the world she has been introduced into. In the following discussion
we shall attempt to understand the role of networks in social, economic, political, technological, and spiri-
tual evolution. Understanding causality in networks is essential for our sustainability, progression, and
ascension as an evolving civilization.
As we move through the universe and make decisions we move from eschatology (potentiality) to en-
telechy (actualities). The collective process of making these decisions, creates a causal network dynamic
among all the participants involved in the decision making process throughout the entire universe. What
we are talking about, is something much more complex than monocausal determinism. A causal network
is a highly complex multicausal system which involves feed-forward, multithreaded parallel execution,
and feedback. The complex web of these decisions advances as a causal network, and the collective dy-
namics that this web creates is the vast nonlinear system which we must comprehend and master. Without
relative free will choice, and the consequences of our actions, we would be nothing more than cogs in a
vast mechanical machine, driven by predestination, and totally incapable of true participation in the uni-
verse. We should be thankful that we have been granted the great privilege of true participation. However,
this privilege has a price in the early stages of evolution, where we are operating blindly without a true
understanding of the systemic processes which make symbiotic living a reality. Learning the science and
art of causal network dynamics is essential to our future, and to the future of the universe. We are not
granted the power to prevent the universe from reaching the omega point of evolution, but we can slow its
progress temporarily. If we do, we make life more difficult for ourselves and those around us, by attempt
to avoid the lessons complex causal networks bring to our evolution.

Why causality?
The true function of causality it not to predetermine our lives, and force us to live out a destiny over
which we have no control. Older monocausal mathematics, science, and religion may have painted a pic-
ture of such a universe. Recent advances in nonlinear mathematics, non-reductionist science, and spiritual

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philosophies which incorporate mankind as a cocreators of the universe, have offered us a new view of
the universe which is systemic, symbiotic, self-organizing, emergent, and multicausal. The universe must
of necessity, contain sufficient causality and law, at any given stage in its development, to structure itself
in such a fashion, so as to provide comprehensibility to the life forms that will inhabit it, as an inevitable
consequence of its self-organization. Once intelligent life forms arrive on the scene, the process of evolu-
tion, and the struggle to survive challenges them to observe, reverse engineer, and internally model the
universe. As these life forms go about this process, they inevitably test their modeling by reacting, acting,
and cocreating the universe. The preexistent structures and dynamics of the universe are designed in a
manner that they provide feedback, or effective causality, which informs conscious entities in the universe
about the accuracy of their modeling of the universe. Causality is the feedback that informs us on the ac-
curacy of our modeling of the universe. When this is in error, we receive feedback in many different
forms from the universe. In some instances we simply fail to accomplish our objective, in others we feel
physical or emotional pain, social isolation, or we can incur legal penalties, and in some instances we can
forfeit our lives. Our senses assimilate this feedback, and our central nervous systems combine the diverse
forms of feedback into a feedback network, that is presented to our higher brain centers. The higher brain
centers, where modeling takes place, receive this information and remodel or re-simulate the universe.
The next time we must conceptually or physically interact with the universe, we test out our new models
as approximations again. Environmental feedback occurs once again, and it informs us whether our new
model is an improvement, or a less accurate model of reality than our previous model. With our continu-
ing experience in evolution, our internal and external models of the universe increase in accuracy and
complexity. Because of the enormous differential between the level of intelligence needed to comprehend
the entire universe, and the intelligence capacity of a single living biological life form - we ban together
into social groups, societies, and civilizations, in an effort to improve our modeling by parallel collective
effort. This adds an additional new form of feedback, which allows us to compare our efforts with those
of our fellow citizens. By doing so, we gain an efficiency in our efforts, and this feedback further opti-
mizes our efforts to properly model the universe. Civilizations that develop good modeling practices
thrive and go on to higher levels of evolution. Civilizations that ignore feedback, and model the universe
poorly become lagging cores in evolution, and if this trend is not reversed, extinction is the inevitable fi-
nal form of feedback. The universe has been designed in a manner that rewards good modeling, and
thereby preferentially selects the future cocreators of the universe. This continual process of modeling,
computation, simulation, and testing in the real universal, is a process that will be with us throughout our
entire universe careers. This process is a reciprocal process. The universe acts, and then we react, based
upon our current models. We act based upon our current models, and then the universe reacts, based upon
the universal model. In this continual reciprocal process of simulation, the universe modifies us, and
we eventually modify the universe. In the early stages of the universe this process is somewhat more one
sided, we mainly assimilate information, and we have a minor impact upon the universe. As time and evo-
lution progress, our models of the universe become more universal, and therefore more powerful. We
thereby gain the power to modify a larger and larger portion of the universe. We are progressively becom-
ing more and more powerful cocreators. As our models grow in complexity, we must rely more and more
on simulation to test our modeling. As the quantitative and qualitative scope of these simulations grow,
they eventually asymptotically approach the size of the universe itself. If you take this natural progression
one step further, you are simulating an entire universe and you are standing on the threshold of universe
creation. Could this be the final objective of our progressive simulation and cocreation?

We would like to suggest that this is precisely the objective of universal evolution.

Universes are training schools for future universe designers, simulators, and creators!
Without causality, none of this would be possible. If actions and reactions had no inherent correlation,
there would be no way to learn and improve our modeling. This does not mean that every action has an
immediate and obvious reaction. In large complex systems, feedback may take considerable time before it
becomes obvious to us, and this is one of the reasons we must act cautiously, and utilize simulations prior
to committing to courses of action. Another reality we must also learn to deal with, is the fact that when
we act in the process of our evolution we will not have full knowledge of the universe. We will only have

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access to that part of the universe which is within the reach our individual and collective archives, or real
time information databases. All portions of the universe, in the early stages of evolution, must model, act,
and react based upon less than universal information. So our models will always include some relative
degree of error. The trick is, to continually extend our modeling, to encompass larger and larger portions
of the universe with ever increasing accuracy.
Understanding how causal dynamic networks work, and learning to more accurately model them, is going
to be an extremely important core reality of our ongoing evolution. The sooner we accept this challenge,
the sooner we will begin to receive the full benefits of proper modeling and simulation.
Stepping down to an earth perspective, we must ask how do microsocieties fit into this picture. We be-
lieve that microsocieties provide the ideal testing grounds for social, economic, technological, and spiri-
tual simulations. Multiple microsocieties, spread out across the ecosphere, allow us to simulate in a highly
parallel fashion, in zones of limited exposure to the larger civilization. Genuine simulation involves inno-
vation, but we can never be sure if the innovation will be constructive, of neutral evolutionary value, or
destructive. This is the purpose of conducting simulation under circumscribed circumstances. In so doing,
we attempt to answer our questions under controlled conditions, allowing us to test and retest. A global
network of microsocieties provides a massively parallel and distributed simulation system. The layered
network connecting these microsocieties can be utilized as a progressive cross testing arena, where simu-
lations that were promising at the local level can be tested in a much wider and more varied set of circum-
stances. The most promising simulations can eventually be adopted at the core hubs of the network for
final testing, before being released into the larger macrosociety. It is strange that as a new technological
society we realize the value of first performing in house software testing, then alpha testing, and eventu-
ally beta testing, before any software product is released into the larger computational community. Yet we
seem to have no concept of the similar value of testing social, financial, trade, and governance systems in
a similar manner, even though they probably play and even more important overall role in our societies.

No more obvious example can be found, than the manner in which we run our political systems, legisla-
tive bodies, and election cycles. We realize the necessity of testing software in smaller controlled envi-
ronments, before releasing it into the larger global computing environment. Why is it that we do not re-
quire the same procedures in running our economy, governance, and other forms of technical infrastruc-
ture. In our modern scientific world, when a scientist shows up at a conference and presents his research -
he does not just say, “here is what I think we should do,” like our current political parties, senators, and
presidential candidates do. If our scientists were to present their ideas, in the manner we have just sug-
gested, the cry from the rest of the scientists in the room would be, “where is your data, your simula-
tions.” An astrophysicist who claims to understand how complex systems, like galaxies, form and evolve,
can not get by simply saying this is what he believes. He must present sophisticated supercomputer simu-
lations that support the paradigm he is proposing. Short of meeting these requirements, his ‘opinions’
would be considered to be of minimal value. Yet we allow political parties, economists, and presidential
candidates to behave in this naive fashion, and we commit trillions of dollars to programs that have
never been tested by the type of sophisticated computer modeling that is now a requirement in most of
our sciences. Weather forecasting and hurricane prediction are the most obvious examples of large com-
puter simulations know to the general public. One presidential candidate says she is going to lower your
tax rate, cut capital gains, and eliminate inheritance tax. The other says just the opposite - and they both
claim that these ‘opinions’ are correct, and that they will lead to an improvement in your individual lives
and within our society as a whole. We have now been doing this for more than two centuries in the USA.
We had little choice for the first 175 years, but that is no longer the case. We now have numerous large
supercomputer facilities, which can simulate the economic effects of different combinations of proposals -
allowing us to test these proposals and compare the results, prior to actually initiating them in our econo-
mies untested, which is our current practice. So every time a political party or a candidate tells you
what they are going ‘to do’ on your behalf, based upon their ‘opinions,’ why is the public not
screaming out - “where’s the data, and the simulations which substantiate that your ideas are worth
testing them in the real world.” Each election cycle when we go through the absolutely absurd name
calling, and blame game, we must demand that each party and candidate present us with highly sophisti-
cated computer simulations, that model and test their proposals. Their ‘opinions’ are of no more value

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than those of the general population, unless they can be backup by scientific computer simulations with
high quality data input. Citizens of every country in the world, that have this capability, should absolutely
demand no less from their ‘public employees’ who claim to know what they are doing, when they request
the right and privilege of running your country and the world. An additional form of preliminary testing,
prior to initiating new approaches within the larger economy, should be testing at the microsociety level,
followed by testing at the city, county, state, and national levels. In this manner, pore models can be
eliminated early in the roll out cycle, reducing the probabilities that pore and inefficient policy is propa-
gated throughout the entire financial system.

The latest sub-prime mortgage, securitization instruments, credit default swaps, and high leverage eco-
nomic model, prevalent in the first decade of the 21st century, which has now spread throughout the
world economy, with devastating results - is a perfect example of the dangers inherent in utilizing un-
tested models. Even more foolish, is the initiation of new untested economic policies to correct the exist-
ing problems, which were the result of initiating untested economic policies.

If the coming century can truly be characterized as the century of complexity, then we are very much go-
ing to need a wide and diversified testing network, where a much greater degree of innovation and ex-
perimentation can be practiced in our effort to fully comprehend, model, and manage complexity. We be-
lieve that such communities are absolutely essential to our potential survival. These communities
should not be feared or shunned by the larger society or civilization. Microsocieties should be em-
braced and supported for the very valuable role they will play in the next stage of our evolution.

Why networks?
Why has the universe been designed in a fashion so that the individual components of the universe each
exist in ‘relative’ isolation, and yet at the same time, they are only able to complete their course of evolu-
tion by coordinating their actions within ever larger dynamical causal networks?
If we think of complex systems as both networks and nodes, then we can propose a universal model,
where each seemingly individual object is internally a network, and externally a node in a larger layered
multidimensional network. Every node is super-embedded, meaning that it has networks above it, and
below it, arranged in a self-similar or self-affine fashion. If we apply either a microscope or a macro-
scope, at any new magnification perspective - we see the same general systemic patterning. By progress-
ing up or down the network levels, we gain a greater understanding of the complexity, intraconnectivity,
interconnectivity, and extraconnectivity of the universe. All of these relationships together form a dy-
namical causal network, which incorporates both hierarchical and heterarchical dynamic organization. We
swim in a see of super-embedded dynamic holomotion. The level of the attractors in these networks is
also multidimensional, and continuously shifting, depending on which level we choose to observe the
network from. This is the method our universe has adopted to challenge us to discover more than just our-
selves, and our local environment. With each new stage of evolution, we are asked to look deeper within,
and further out, than we have ever looked before. Now this must be accomplished in a manner, so that we
are not overwhelmed by the enormous systemic nature of this complexity. So systems are designed on the
surface, to appear as if they are individual object. Only gradually, and progressively, do we encounter
deeper levels of structures and dynamics within the object. Greater levels of interconnectivity and mutual
interoperability, reveal themselves to us only gradually, as our maturity and capacity for cocreatorship
increases. We come to understand how the ‘object’ does not exist in isolation, and how it is systemically
interconnected in a much larger network of interactions that we are just beginning to understand. Each
object has causal relationships at its own native level, at lower levels, and at higher levels of network
dynamics, and this is why we speak of multicausal networks and multicausal universes. The multi-
causal nature of the universe, at all levels of existence, forces us to deal with the complexity of the uni-
verse, yet it allows us to function adequately at every level, with less than complete understanding, as we
ascend up the ladder of complexity awareness. As we gain greater understanding of the degrees of com-
plexity in our universe, we are afforded greater degrees of freedom in the exercise of our free will cocrea-
torship. Our potential cocreatorship, increases in power with each new level of understanding - of the

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causal relationships inherent in the dynamical networks we progressively encounter. Newer an more uni-
versal attractors continually pull our attention toward the omega point of universe evolution.
The mantra for the new century and the new millennium is think ‘nonlinear,’ think ‘complexity,’ think
‘systemic,’ think ‘symbiotic,’ and think ‘network.’ We must turn our back on simplistic monocausal mod-
els of the universe, and fully engage ourselves in the new quest to understand the much more complex
and nonlinear universe we inhabit. The enormity of this challenge is obvious, by virtue of the fact that
many of these words have almost no usage in our every day common language. Nor do they appear in our
newspapers, or in our radio and television programs. Our entrance into the technological era, the biotech-
nology era, the genetic era, and the information age era has received some minimal presentation in the
media, but the much deeper implications of complexity, chaos, and networks still remains buried in the
catacombs of academic and research institutions. Overcoming this obstacle would seem to require some-
thing on the order of the Manhattan Project - which operated during World War II. Unfortunately an effort
of this magnitude - can be seen nowhere on the horizon! The technological revolution has already began
to complexify our civilization, yet we show little, if any, interest in fully understanding the causal impli-
cations of this new complexification of our lives. The feedback will be overwhelming, and beyond our
means to cope with it, if we continue on in this naive fashion.

Causal microeconets
Microeconets are highly parallel and distributed network nodes that are dedicated to designing, model-
ing, and testing long-term sustainable social systems that preserve the ecological viability of our eco-
sphere, while simultaneously supporting the technological advancement of civilization. They are dedi-
cated to understanding the multicausal relationships and implication of the technological era of planetary
evolution. Highly distributed microeconets are a new model for civilization encountering the complexity
era of evolution. Why? Because they provide the safest and most efficient means for a civilization to
navigate through the complexity era. Microeconets provide many advantages:
• Because the complexity era is so dependent on massive simulation, in the process of studying complex-
ity - a massively parallel and distributed social and economic architecture is ideal for this stage of evo-
lution. Microeconets provide just such an architecture.

• The relative isolation of each separate node (microsociety) within the network, assures a degree of cir-
cumscribed controlled experimentation, yet allows rapid communication of each node within the larger
network, ensuring rapid assimilation and dissemination of information.

• The bringing together of highly innovative individuals, into a supportive and rich research environment,
will considerably accelerate forms of progress which might be perceived by the larger civilization as
moving to fast.

• The benefit to planetary civilization as a whole, is that it has the luxury of adopting only the very best
models which have already been thoroughly tested within the more limited confines of the micro-
econets.

• The potential cost of funding microeconets, should be more than compensated for by the cost savings
realized by preventing the implementation of less perfected models on a much larger scale before dis-
covering their inherent weaknesses, and unanticipated nonlinear consequences. Newer models will pro-
gressively be adopted into the larger civilization as they become available, after thorough testing across
the entire microeconetwork. The causal efficacy of these models, will have been subjected to a much
more rigorous and robust testing than they would have received in our current social and economic
models.

Such a system of testing is almost nonexistent within our current civilization.

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The current degree of pollution and destruction of our ecosphere, should be more than enough evidence,
that even during the industrial and early technological era, we were not performing enough circumscribed
simulation to understand the consequences of our actions. The potential impacts of the post-genetic era,
and the nanotechnology era, have an even greater potential for destructive effects, if these transitions are
not handled with both the caution and the respect which natures multibillion year ecosystem deserves.
The current mercenary corporate approach falls woefully short of the proper simulation and testing proce-
dures. Without a proper restructuring of our civilization to provide truly adequate testing zones, corpora-
tions will continue to release genetically altered foods into our food chain without adequate testing. Our
current macro-social model can not provide the level of testing that a true microsociety network could -
with all of the massively parallel diversity and interconnectivity that one needs to perform adequate test-
ing. In the evolutionary era of complexity, civilizations can no longer afford to make broad scale disas-
trous mistakes. The large number of advances and the rate at which they will evolve, will overwhelm a
civilization not properly structured to deal with the ever increasing demands for testing that we will en-
counter going forward. The old monolithic models like communism, socialism, and capitalism that have
battled it out in the twentieth century, are insufficient to deal with the complexity of the coming age.
They do not provide for well defined testing zones, where new technologies, drugs, genetically altered
foods, new economic models, new forms of work organization, new forms of education, and new forms of
social organization - can be properly tested within a scaled down version of the larger civilization. Simple
laboratory testing is no longer sufficient, because it is not broad enough or deep enough to truly test the
full implications of new innovations in the age of complexity. The progressive scaling and graduated in-
troduction of new innovations, models, products, and services on ever broadening scales is absolutely
mandatory. The rapid feedthrough of simultaneous unanticipated consequences of new nonlinear systems
could devastate our civilization. The enormous quantity, and the massive parallel introduction of advances
in so many technologies in the coming era, could easily overwhelm an unprepared civilization that has not
intentionally restructured its social and economic architecture to handle such a massive transformation
of its society.
If we had adopted the type of systems we are proposing now in the industrial era, we would not now be
facing nearly as wide a scope of destruction to our ecological environment. Alternative approaches would
have assured that bad models were not adopted system wide, and the efficacy of superior models could
have been more rapidly deployed, replacing the poorer models before the destruction had swept around
the entire planet. Corporations are more likely to acknowledge mistakes, before they have spread to de-
structive scales that will be very expensive to reverse. The current standard practice of attempting to
cover up such incidents, is due to a large extent, to the enormous cost that corporations will incur when
the full truth of the mistakes are uncovered. If poor practices can be isolated in the early stages, when they
involve only limited scale experiments, they can be more quickly reversed at a much lower cost, thus pro-
viding less need for cover-ups. The same analogy applies to government programs, which are seldom
tested on micro-scales before they are fully funded and executed by the legislature. Governments, as evi-
denced by their current practices, are perhaps even less adept at progressive simulation and testing than
the corporate sector. Various forms of welfare, re-employment compensation and retraining, subsidies,
etc. are often adopted at the federal level without any form of efficacy testing on micro-scales prior to full
funding. Furthermore once adopted, the needed processes of continual review and re-evaluation become
very difficult, due to vested interests that are inevitable, once the programs have been adopted on a wide
scale. These types of practices must be reversed, because they can be extremely costly in social, eco-
nomic, and environmental terms.

Causality can either be a friend or a foe. It is more likely to be a friend to those who perform progressive
design, modeling, and testing than to those who adopt new innovations in a non-progressive manner. The
planetary ecosphere we inhabit, and the universe which supports it, are the product of relentless simu-
lation and testing. If we wish civilizations of our own design to have the same degree of robustness as
the biosphere and the universe we inhabit, we must design our civilizations in a similar manner. Ide-
ologies can serve as starting points, but they should not, and can not, be adopted wholesale, without the
rigorous and progressive testing for their inherent efficacy as long-term survivable solutions. We can no
longer afford to adopt models simply based upon emotional, historical, or cognitive preferences, with-

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out sufficient testing to establish their inherent efficacy. Complex system are simply to complex to deal
with them on a philosophical or cognitive basis alone. Attempts at evaluating such systems analytically,
without the degree of simulation necessary to uncover the full spectrum of their unanticipated nonlinear
consequences, is much too dangerous. The world we see around us was not produced in such a fashion,
and neither should we produce civilizations based upon such insufficient simulation. Simple linear sys-
tems, with their monocausal or minimal multicausal relationships can perhaps be understood without ex-
tensive simulation. The more ubiquitous nonlinear systems which provide the complex environments we
are challenged to be evolve in, require extensive simulation to fully comprehend their multicausal interac-
tion networks.

Multicausal socioeconomic networks

In our attempt to examine the numerous ways that microsocieties could be useful in helping us understand
complex nonlinear relationships that exist between the social, economic, technological, educational, and
spiritual systems we can perhaps provide a few examples:
• We need a better understanding of how educational systems effect economic systems.

• It would be helpful to understand how different economic systems effect social systems.

• We should strive to obtain a better understanding of how technological innovations affect our educa-
tional systems, our social life, our economy, our ecology, and our spiritual growth.

• We should attempt to determine how much of a role heterogeneity and homogeneity play in determining
the functional aspects of systems. We should attempt to determine when some combination of ap-
proaches works best, and we should also attempt to determine how these variables change and function
at different dimensional levels of the network.

Using networks to rebalance social power

Networks are examples of complex dynamical systems, and all dynamical systems have both strengths
and weaknesses. Over the last quarter of a century we have gradually been learning about the power of
networks. The enormous control that highly networked multinational corporations have gained over the
general populous, is a perfect example of how networks can be used to extend and amplify power. The
multinational corporations have a considerable lead time on the general public, who have only had the
change to discover the power of networks over the last few decades, with the opening of the internet to
the general public. It is unfortunate that only a small portion of the population has really explored the full
potential of this new infrastructure tool. Most of our citizens see the internet as a download experience.
The true liberating power of networks begins with the transition from the download to the upload experi-
ence. They have not yet embraced the prospect of becoming information providers, and exploring the full
potential of networking. We are just beginning to understand the full implications of networks, their
strength, and their vulnerabilities. Network vulnerabilities are the most recently studied network phenom-
ena, and the least understood, of all network phenomena. What we have been able to learn about network
vulnerabilities, is extremely interesting, not just from a scientific point of view, but also from a social,
economic, and political point of view.
The large multinational corporations have very effectively used their networks and their networking
power to gain an ever increasing control and influence over our planet. Is is possible that we can learn
from this recent extension of power over our lives, and perhaps turn the tables? Now what we have in
mind is completely legal, involves no criminal act like the hacking of their networks, or blowing up
the physical infrastructure of their networks. Not a single gun shot, or act of violence, or even single
act of civil disobedience need be contemplated. What we are talking about is a completely nonviolent
and peaceful evolution/revolution. The revolution we are talking about consists of returning more power
back into the hands of the general populous of this planet, where it belongs, so that we have a more equi-

Systemic Symbiotic Planetary Ecovi!age Network

10
table distribution of power between corporations and the public. We have allowed this power to slip away
from us. Is it possible that we can use the same methods that corporations used to extend their power and
influence over use, to once again regain control of our planet? Yes it is!. There seems to be considerable
raw evidence that this possibility indeed exists, if we choose to do something with this information and
exercise the potential power inherent in it.
Now before we can expand this discussion of how the general populous, or even some small portion of
the general populous, can use their knowledge of network vulnerabilities to rebalance social power, we
must first take a deeper look into the research that has just been accumulated on the nature of large net-
works.

The basic classification of networks

Recent network research has revealed that networks behave differently depending upon their topology.
Different topologies have different strengths and vulnerabilities. Much of what we previously thought
about the nature of networks, which was based upon abstract physical and mathematical models, has been
proven to be incorrect. Our assumptions were naive, and we have learned that even very large highly dis-
tributed networks, like the internet, are subject to vulnerabilities greater than one would expect. We can
start our discussion of networks with three broad classifications, listed in the order of their decreasing
vulnerability:
• Centralized - (central authority) - (spokes of a wheel topology)

• Decentralized - (multiple authority centers) - (multiple stars topology)

• Distributed - (almost no recognizable authority centers) - (a mesh topology)

A centralized network has all of its nodes connected to a central hub. A decentralized network has a num-
ber of locations in the overall network, where groups of nodes cluster towards a single node that act as a
local center, but there is no overall central hub. A highly distributed network has the least degree of clus-
tering, with most of its nodes connected to only one, or a few other nodes. For many years it was thought
that this classification system was sufficient and complete. From our description of the network topolo-
gies, it should be obvious why the vulnerabilities increases as we go down the list. In the centralized net-
work, if you take out the central hub, the whole network collapses, and is unable to communicate. In the
decentralized network, it is somewhat harder to disable the network, but it can be done to a significant
degree, if you take out a large percentage of the sub-hubs or clustered star centers. A good example of
decentralized damage would be the nuclear strategy of taking out the major industrial, transportation, and
communication city centers in a given country. Once these sub-hubs are taken out, the ability of smaller
nodes to reach others destinations becomes almost impossible. Highly distributed networks look very
much like triangulated grids, with only a few links extending from each node. You can shoot a lot of holes
into a grid like this, but the vast majority of the connections remain intact, and these nodes can reroute
signals around the few broken connections. The high degree of distribution in these networks makes them
hard to degrade. Unfortunately we have recently learned that the WWW and the internet have a much
higher degree of vulnerability than these topological arguments would indicate.
Because we must have some way to navigate such large networks, we have directories like Google and
Yahoo to help us locate resources we seek to investigate or utilize. As a result of this, minor and obscure
nodes in these networks, can be much more highly connected to these major directories than one would
expect. Recent studies have shown that the numbers of links between obscure web pages, and these high
traffic center, is much smaller than one would expect. If you would like to study some visual representa-
tions of the way the internet and the WWW are connected, visit these very visual web sites:
http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/atlas.html
Without going into all the details of this fascinating subject, we can learn a great deal just from skimming
over the surface. For a much more complete and fascinating discussion of this topic see Barabasi [5],

Systemic Symbiotic Planetary Ecovi!age Network

11
upon whom we have relied in our discussion of this topic. As the internet continues to grow in scale all
around our globe one might think that each new node (individual computer) might be connected to the
next nearest node, as this would provide the shortest distance in obtaining connectivity to the network. In
practice, this does not turn out to be the case, because other factors are often more important. The closest
node may be the shortest route to get connected, but it may not be the cheapest. A greater bandwidth for
information transfer (speed), and faster routers to direct your information around the internet, often de-
termine costs more than the length of the connection. So if you want fast and cheap information down-
loads and uploads, you often end up going with a more distant connection that has faster bandwidth,
greater server clustering, and a greater number of much faster routers. These preferential attachments,
skew an otherwise distributed network, into one that takes on a power law relationship. Server clustering,
high speed optical fiber, and larger clusters of fast routers tend to be centered in high population areas,
where there in greater demand to move large quantities of information. These locations, happen be the
same locations where corporate headquarters, large government institutions, and large private institutions
tend to cluster. The major internet providers are clustered in these same locations, and they have many
distant telephone, DSL, cable modem, and light optical fiber threads feeding into them. Even though the
internet has a somewhat fractal structure, many of your signals get processed through these major centers
on the way to their destinations.
If you take an overview of the World Wide Web, from a system theory point of view, you will realize that
most of the really important existing features, and the new features that are constantly emerging, are de-
termined by what can be called the Web’s large scale self-organizing topology. The self-organizing dy-
namics of this vast network does more to structure and determine the nature of the network than any gov-
ernment or group of industries could ever hope to achieve. The search engines on the internet rank web
sites by the number of links that have been established to that site. Search engine ranked web sites, are the
easiest web sites to find. A single ecovillage placing its web site on the internet by itself, with no incom-
ing links from other web sites, has little chance of receiving a decent ranking by the search engines. In
contrast, web sites with 21 to 90 incoming links have a 90 percent chance of being recognized and ranked
by the search engines [6]. Why does ranking matter? How a search engine ranks a web site is important,
because it determines whether that site ends up on page 1 of the search results or page 72. Not too many
people are going to dig 72 pages deep to find a web site. If individual ecovillages link to each other across
a large ecovillage network they increase the number of incoming links to their individual web sites, and
then each individual ecovillage, and all the ecovillages collectively, together - climb up the ranking tree
on all the search engines. Your ranking position to a large extent determines the degree of your impor-
tance on the WWW. It determines whether you are New York, London, or Hong Kong on the web, or
some obscure little village out on the fringe of Mongolia. If you want to be an important player on the
WWW, you need a high search engine ranking! In the early days the search engine companies actually
used to go and look at new web sites, and then rank them based upon the quality of the web site. This was
a much more democratic approach, because ranking was then based upon the quality and content of the
site - unfortunately this is no longer the case. Today a site is ranked by its familiarity and popularity, and
this gives large well known corporations a distinct advantage in the form of name recognition. Microso-
cieties, on the other hand, are almost unknown, so the only way they can compete is to become much
more tightly linked to each other within a collective network, which allows them to rapidly climb up the
ranking trees of the search engines. If the web had no search engines it would be a much more scale-free
network, with each web site having an equal opportunity chance of being discovered. Unfortunately such
a Web would also be a Web that was very hard to navigate. Those of you who were on the internet during
the first few years of its opening to the general public, will remember these days. Real networks, as op-
posed to abstract networks, exhibit a large degree of scale-free topology. Our need to navigate these net-
works efficiently, ends up reversing or counterbalancing this process, by bringing scale back into these
networks via organizing processes like search engines. Without search engines web sites could be mil-
lions of links apart in the total web space. Studies over the last few years have shown that the average
web site ranked by a search engine is no more than 19 links separated from other web sites, thanks to their
common connection to popular network hubs like Google and Yahoo [7].
The economy in this new century is going to look very different from the economy of the last century.
The business model of the industrial mass production era of the last century, was structured around the

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12
central authority model network. Barabasi describes the model for the new economy in a very different
fashion [8].
“The most visible element of this remaking is a shift from a tree to a web or a network organization, flat
and with lots of cross-links between the nodes. As valuable resources shift from physical assets to bits and
information, operations move from the vertical to virtual integration, the reach of businesses increasingly
expands from the domestic to global, the lifetime of inventories decreases from months to hours, business
strategy changes from top-down to bottom-up, and workers transform into employees or free agents.”
Although Barabasi’s statements are concerned primarily with networks, the wording seem to capture ex-
actly what we have been saying about microsocieties - organized in highly linked distributed networks as
the most viable model for the future.

Putting network knowledge to work in microsocieties

Those of you who daily rely on the internet, may well remember April 25, 1997, when a large portion of
the internet became inoperable. On this date a company named MAI Network Services, which is a small
internet provider in Virginia, attempted to do a routine router table update for its system of routers. Router
tables essentially serve as a type of internet road map, and store the addresses of distant server locations.
Because the internet is constantly growing and changing, these addresses must be updated frequently to
reflect the new network topology. On April 25th a mistake was made at MAI which caused the router up-
date to extend beyond the limits of its own routers. This caused many distant routers to also change their
address tables. The end result was that all these routers in the much bigger networks like Sprint and
UUnet, sent all their signals back to the much smaller cluster of routers at MAI. The tremendous influx of
unintended signals from the larger high capacity network, to the much lower capacity network at MAI
caused widespread internet failures. This very quickly created something similar to a black hole in the
internet, within less than 45 minutes major internet providers watched their signals disappear into the
black hole at MAI. MAI had to completely shut down operations, to stop this influx, and UUnet, Sprint,
and many of the other major internet providers were only able to restore service by manually restoring the
proper router tables. Hours of internet service were disrupted as these problems rippled through distant
locations in the network [9].
Now you may be asking, what in the world does this have to do with microsocieties? If a small internet
provider could unintentionally redirect a large percentage of internet information or traffic towards its
location, what could a computer savvy and networked system of microsocieties do to the business of large
transnational corporations, by legally and intentionally attracting business away from large transnational
corporations toward their own eco-friendly businesses, with better built products, and better customer
service, and better technical support. Of course what we are suggesting here is not that these microsocie-
ties subvert the router tables of the major corporations, but rather that they compete with corporations via
networks in an effort to legally redirect a large portion of the business of these corporations to their own
businesses, products, and services. In a certain sense we have already seen an example of such a phenom-
ena in the explosion of the dot.coms, which during their heyday redirected a significant portion of the to-
tal brick and mortar sales to the new on line dot.com locations, taking business away from the ‘old boy’
well established business network. Magazines in this era were asking questions like, would any brick and
mortar business survive in the coming era if they did not have an internet presence? Large corporations
shocked by the quickness with which this seemingly ‘sneak attack’ overcame them, rushed to establish a
web presence. Even Bill Gates (then thought to be the wealthiest man in the world and the CEO of the
largest software company in the world - Microsoft), in the early days of the internet, said he thought the
internet was only a fad which would soon fade away. He very quickly changed his tune, and thrust Micro-
soft into a crises mode to reinvent its operation system, Windows, to accommodate the new public interest
in the internet. Because Microsoft was the 800 pound gorilla of software companies, it began by quickly
buying up smaller more innovative internet software companies in an attempt to chase the growth curve
of the internet which had left Microsoft behind.

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13
If microsocieties unite together via networks into much larger synergistic units, they can attain the same
size, distribution around the planet, economic, market, and political power, that transnational corporations
now enjoy. If microsocieties unite into large purchasing blocks they can demand the same kind of whole-
sale pricing that corporations demand and get. If they unite together as businesses which cooperate and
share research and development costs, they should be able to function much more effectively in the tran-
snational corporate world. This is a bottom-up corporate model, as opposed to a top-down corporate
model which is typical of most of the well established larger transnational corporations. By keeping the
basic functional units small, and preserving the rapid response, quick adaptability, and rapid reorganiza-
tion ability, so necessary in the coming rapid turnover high technology economy - while at the same time,
uniting together into much larger collective purchasing and distribution blocks, microsocieties can have
the best of both worlds. By maintaining almost real-time on demand inventories, they should be able to
respond to fluctuations in inventory demands, thus preventing large inventory buildups during temporary
economic downturns. By designing their production facilities in a highly flexible and more modular fash-
ion, microsocieties should be able to adapt and shift from one type of product production to another much
more rapidly than the larger more entropic transnational corporations. This capacity to continually shift,
adapt, and change your business model, or what you produce, or the services you offer, is going to be ex-
tremely important in the new, rapidly changing, high technology economy. Microsocieties should have an
edge here, if they design their business models and facilities in highly adaptable manner from the outset.
Working hard at maintaining good customer loyalty is also important. It has been estimated that as much
as 80 percent of the cost of advertising, is in acquiring a customer for the first time. If you then lose that
customer because of poor quality products, poor customer support, or poor technical support this is very
costly. It is also very important to maintain good relationships with your supply chain. They must be
made to feel apart of your business family, if you want good products with high reliability, excellent qual-
ity control, and reliable delivery. This is an area where the transnational corporations are very vulnerable.
Many corporations provide very poor customer relations and technical support. A well run business must
view their customers as part of their extended network, and as part of their community. In the era of
rapid product development and turnover, the importance of maintaining customer loyalty is much more
important than it was in the old industrial economy. Giving your customers good reliable products and
services makes them feel like they are part of your family, and you will be well rewarded. The endless
tape loops, and the poorly trained and uninformed staff that one encounters at so many of the large corpo-
rations, is sufficient evidence to show that the large corporations do not understand this, and they think
they can get away with it - because there is no one to challenge them. With their enormous lobbying
powers, they have gutted the consumer protection departments of the governments around the world,
which were formed with the intent of representing the interests of the consumers.

There are causal consequences within networks, and understanding how to maintain the connectivity of
the existing nodes, attract and add new nodes to the network, and scale your network without compromis-
ing service and quality to already existing customers, is a science and an art that microsocieties would be
well advised to learn and implement.
A single microsociety, or a small cluster of networked microsocieties, might be said to be roughly similar
to the case of MAI in our example. But hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of microsocieties all
linked via systemic and symbiotic networks, and working as a cohesive force is more than an 800 pound
gorilla. Individually, microsocieties are extremely vulnerable to larger local government institutions like
zoning commissions, and building and development offices, economic systems, local corporations, na-
tional corporations, and transnational corporations. Linked up in a highly interactive and activist network
- microsocieties become a true force in the world economy. Let us take a single small example. A 1000
microsocieties with a population of between 30,000 and 50,000 people (the population of a major univer-
sity) almost equals or exceeds the combined population of the state of California in the United State of
America. This is the 7th largest economy in the world!
We look forward to the day when, if you watch the Superbowl, you will see a big ecovillage network add
saying:

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Shop at the ECONETWORK WEB, the earth preserving, eco-friendly, symbiotic alternative.
Where you will find better products, better service, and at the same time you will be supporting a
sustainable civilization for yourself, your family, and the future generations that will inhabit our
planet.
Now if we had 10,000 microsocieties with a population of 50,000 people each, this would be a population
of 500,000,000 people, almost twice the population of the United States, the largest economy in the
world. Just let this sink in for a few minutes! The web site Intentional Communities ( http://www.ic.org),
lists about 1684 (08/13/2009) listed communities in the USA alone, with 230 listed in California. Are they
the size, scale, or strength of the type of microsocieties we are suggesting? Unfortunately they are not,
and from what we can tell their is almost zero awareness of their collective potential networking power. If
you add to these examples the thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of natu-
rally occurring microsocieties in the Second and Third world - you have the kind of critical mass we
are looking to achieve! Furthermore, we can not think of a better approach to lift these societies to a
higher standard of living - allowing the enormous creativity of their artisans to have direct access to open
markets, where they can sell their art directly (ebay, paypal, amazon, e-commerce, etc.) and thereby be
able to provide for their families and strengthen their local economies.
Community is not where you are located, it is how you think, how you vote, how you purchase and
produce goods and services, how you invest, and most of all, how you envision the future of this planet.
The internet contracts space and time, and makes any community possible via e-mail, web sites, video-
conferencing, and multimedia exchanges via CD-ROM, DVD, digital video, etc.
In many instances very large corporations use their gorilla status to either crush or take over the smaller
more innovate companies that feed our system with new ideas. The recent (~2003) federal and state law-
suits against Microsoft were initiated at the federal and state levels because of accused monopolistic prac-
tices by Microsoft. Microsoft was accused of using its gorilla status to force computer hardware manufac-
turers to include Microsoft’s internet web browser on their computers, to the exclusion of it’s competitors,
like Netscape. If the companies refused, Microsoft threatened to not allow them to install Windows on
their computers. Since the Windows operating system has a 90 percent market share, this would mean
economic suicide for these hardware manufacturers. Netscape was the smaller and more innovative com-
pany, and it was the developer of the first truly professional internet browser. For further insight into go-
rilla games in economics see Moore [10].
We are firm believers that turn about is fair play. It is time to turn the tables. The goal is not to cripple ex-
isting corporations, but to turn them into something closer to an eco-friendly corporate network that we
can work with in creating a sustainable future for our people, our children, our children’s children, and
our planet. Unfortunately at this point in our history, these corporations have gained so much power and
are so arrogant that they no longer listen to individual citizens, whom they have managed to atomize into
lives of separated struggle and survival. These corporations have accomplished this by networking and
linking up their efforts across states, nations, and continents. Closely recombine these atomized people,
and you have the needed critical mass to reinvent the planetary economy and the planetary society.
These corporations are betting that ‘you the people’ will not do this, and they will give you no respect
until you hurt them where they live - profits. Want to prove them wrong? Throw all the philosophy and
ethics you want at them, it roles off like water on a duck. Hit them where they live, profits, and you will
get their attention very quickly! At first these corporations laughed at the dot.coms. Then within just a few
years the dot.coms scared the hell out of them, so they first attempted to consume the paradigm they had
previously rejected, and then they pulled the funding from the dot.coms they did not control. It is true the
dot.coms often did not have good business models, and they often lacked sensible management, which
made them vulnerable. They were each competing against each other, in addition to competing with the
brick and mortar well established businesses. It might have been a different story, if the dot.coms had or-
ganized and cooperated in an effort to present a collective challenge to the established business structure.
This is the lesson microsocieties must learn. Systemic, symbiotic, and synergistic cooperation between the
dot.coms might have made the difference, because they were well on their way to taking a significant por-
tion of business away from the traditional business sector. The choice of the dot.coms to adopt the Dar-
winian win/lose model of competition, rather than the systemic win/win model, may have been the big-

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15
gest reason for their downfall. They adopted a new way of doing business, but failed to examine the core
competitive philosophy of the existing business paradigm. Their approach was revolutionary, but it
lacked sufficient depth in its reinvention. No one bothered to examine the core principles.

A look at the new phenomena of parasitic computing

In early 2000 Notre Dame organized a conference to discuss the effects of the internet on many aspects of
our society. A number of people who attended the conference began to think over the concept of looking
at the entire WWW, or internet as a single computer, metaphorically speaking. They maintained that an on
demand, user driven, WWW does not make a true computer, but with slight modifications, one could pro-
duce something within the internet TCP protocols that would act like a single computer, and this would
also be an example of ‘parasitic computing.’ Information signals on the internet are broken up into small
packets before they are sent. These individual packets may take many different and separate routes on the
way to their final destination - where all the packets are then reassembled into one coherent message
again. Something as simple as clicking on a web page, sets up just such a packet delivery message. Now
if one wanted to obtain some free computational time, parasitic computing is a means to this end. A mas-
ter host computer could be set up to send out such seemingly simple information requests, such as return-
ing a web page, but hidden within these packets the computer could request all the computers along the
message path to perform some small amount of computation. This computation would not be very obvi-
ous, because of the low system resource load it would demand. Any system administrator monitoring the
computer systems activity would not notice the increased CPU demand. By hiding extra computations
within these packets, and by requesting all the computers along the messages pathway to its destination,
to perform these computations, one could obtain free computations from 1000, 10,000, or 100,000 com-
puters distributed all over the internet. A test of this possibility was conducted, and it was successful in
producing an example of unauthorized parasitic computing. A new type of unauthorized distributed com-
puting was born, which is referred to as ‘parasitic computing.’ The test was conducted to see if such a
threat was a real possibility for the security of the internet. The fact that it was possible for a party to en-
slave large numbers of computers located at positions all over the globe, was a shocking discovery [11].
Now the reason we have mentioned this test, is quite different from the original intent of the test. We want
to look at this phenomena from a whole different perspective. We want to shift this discussion into the
social and economic sector of society. We want to ask another question. Is it possible that what the whole
body of transnational corporations are doing on our planet could be described as a form of ‘quasi-
parasitic computing?’ If we look at the whole economic system as a form of highly distributed computa-
tion, driven to a large extent by transnational corporations, what can we learn? These large transnational
corporations are structured almost exclusively by profit motive. These corporations employ a large num-
ber of the earth’s inhabitants, either directly or indirectly, through their companies and their vast supply
chains. Corporate objectives and policies are set at the board and management level, neither allowing for,
nor accepting any significant degree of input from their employees or stockholders. With the recent in-
crease in the utilization of temporary labor to replace the older longer term employment, this is even more
the case today. Do we have an analogy here, could we say that what we have here is a an example of
parasitic computing? If we think of each one of the employees in these companies as effectively a CPU
in the larger parallel computer of the corporation, which is not allowed to have any say in what they end
up computing, could we say that these employees are very much like the CPU’s enslaved by parasitic
computing?. Granted there is no ‘forced labor’ involved here, in the strictest sense of this term. Yet people
need jobs to support themselves and their families, and if these corporations are the largest providers of
jobs, can it truly be said that there is free choice, when all of these corporations operate in the same man-
ner? If there are few alternative choices, then are these people really allowed free choice? In truly para-
sitic computing there is no compensation for work, since the employees of these corporations receive
some form of compensation for their labor, we have chosen the term quasi-parasitic computation instead
of parasitic computation to describe their situation. It is questionable whether their compensation is equi-
table, when corporate officers are receiving salaries on the order of 500 times that of the average em-
ployee in America, and have enormous ‘golden parachute’ clauses in their contracts. The real issue is
whether these employees are at least partially being forced to perform computation which is not of their

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choice. Are employees allowed to utilize their lives in a way they would like, or do they find themselves,
at least partially forced, to perform labor/computation on things over which they are allowed to have little
or no control? Perhaps some people will think that this analogy is a bit of a stretch, but we feel that it de-
serves some serious consideration.
Now the fact that local corporations and large transnational corporations may currently be involved in
quasi-parasitic computation, does not mean that this situation cannot change. If we look at the entire body
of human directed energy on our planet, as a form of computation, then our goal should be to shift ex-
amples of parasitic computation into a form of symbiotic and synergistic computation, where everyone
that participates in this directed computation is able to see and realize the benefits to themselves, to their
civilization, and to the ecosphere that supports our evolutionary efforts towards ascension in our universe.
It is our hope that microsocieties can provide an alternative economic model that does not make people
feel that their lives are being negatively subsumed, in organizations that allow them to have little or no
say in the organization, purpose, and future direction of their life efforts. We do not believe that exploita-
tion has to be an innate ingredient of the free enterprise system, even though this meme is continually
reinforced in the ‘old world’ model.
If we have not convinced you of the importance of networks in this new century, perhaps the following
passage from Barabasi will leave you with something to think about [12].
“The connectors of society, the stars of Hollywood, and the keystone species of an ecosystem are sud-
denly only manifestations of a single reality, their perceived importance within their environment attribut-
able to their status as hubs within their respective networks. Network thinking is poised to invade all do-
mains of human activity and most fields of human inquiry. It is more than another helpful perspective or
tool. Networks are by their very nature the fabric of most complex systems, and nodes and links deeply
infuse all strategies aimed at approaching our interlocked universe.”
The dynamics of networks and the types of causality they exhibit, have always been with us in nature.
What is new, is our increasing interest in networks, which is the direct result of our societies entrance into
the technological and information age era of civilization. If we successfully pass through this era we can
look forward to the even more advanced stages of evolution we have referred to as biorapture and ascen-
sion. If we fail, our civilization and our biosphere will suffer enormous consequences, even if some as-
pects of our civilization survive. The next attempt at advanced civilization will be even more difficult,
because we will have already expended a large percentage of all of our non-renewable resources. This
century we have just entered, may very well be the critical ‘make or break point’ in our civilizations’ as-
cension process. We do not want to sound like alarmists or fatalists, but before we throw it all away, we
should ponder the almost 5 billion years of preparation that have gone into providing the precursor condi-
tions and environment that that is necessary to poise humanity on this threshold. Many civilizations
throughout the universe have probably already faced this challenge, they are watching to see if we shall
join them in the great universe ascension quest.

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References
1. Watts, Duncan. Six Degrees - The Science of a Connected Age. W. W. Norton and Company, 2003.
pp. 24 - 25.
2. Watts, Duncan. Six Degrees - The Science of a Connected Age. W. W. Norton and Company, 2003. p.
28.
3. Watts, Duncan. Six Degrees - The Science of a Connected Age. W. W. Norton and Company, 2003.
pp. 28 - 29.
4. Watts, Duncan. Six Degrees - The Science of a Connected Age. W. W. Norton and Company, 2003. p.
29.
5. Barabasi, Albert-Laszlo. Linked - The New Science of Networks, Perseus Publishing, 2002.
6. Barabasi, Albert-Laszlo. Linked - The New Science of Networks, Perseus Publishing, 2002, p. 174-
175.
7. Barabasi, Albert-Laszlo. Linked - The New Science of Networks, Perseus Publishing, 2002, p. 33-34.
8. Barabasi, Albert-Laszlo. Linked - The New Science of Networks, Perseus Publishing, 2002, p. 202.
9. Barabasi, Albert-Laszlo. Linked - The New Science of Networks, Perseus Publishing, 2002, p. 153.
10. Moore, Geoffrey A. The Gorilla Game. HarperBusiness, 1999.
11. Barabasi, Albert-Laszlo. Linked - The New Science of Networks, Perseus Publishing, 2002, p. 156-
157.
12. Barabasi, Albert-Laszlo. Linked - The New Science of Networks, Perseus Publishing, 2002, p 222.

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Systemic Symbiotic Planetary Ecovi!age Network
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