The document discusses various topics related to networks including: - A quant describes the impossible task of visualizing a million-dimensional graph representing all factors that could impact profits. - An employee explains Valve's non-hierarchical structure where employees have freedom to self-direct to the most valuable work. - Exercises are suggested to help visualize networks including relationships between objects in one's home and people in public spaces.

1. Network Effects
A nonlinear presentation

2. In other words, the slides can be viewed in more
or less any order.
There are some groupings within them,
generally apparent.

4. Emergence
In philosophy, systems
theory, science, and art,

5. Emergence
In philosophy, systems
theory, science, and art, emergenc
e is the way complex systems and
patterns arise out of
a multiplicity of relatively simple
interactions.

7. Meme
“A meme (/ˈmiˈm/; meem) is an
idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person
to person within a culture.

8. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural
ideas, symbols, or practices that can be
transmitted from one mind to another through
writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other
imitable phenomena.”

9. Manuel Lima
Manuel Lima, senior UX design lead at Microsoft
Bing, explores the power of network
visualisation to help navigate our complex
modern world.

10. Mapping knowledge

11. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond
d'Alembert: Encyclopédie (1751).

12. Deleuze and Guattari
• A Thousand Plateaus contrasts rhizomatic thinking with
arbolic thinking. (See Table A). “A Thousand Plateaus is
organized around the distinction between 'arborescent' and
'rhizomatic'. The 'arborescent' model of thought designates
the epistemology that informs all of Western thought, from
botany to information sciences to theology. . . .” (Best and
Douglas 1991, 98) Arbolic thought is said to be
linear, hierarchic, sedentary, and full of segmentation and
striation. Arbolic thought is State philosophy. It is the force
behind the major sciences. Arbolic thought is represented by
the tree-like structure of genealogy, branches that continue to
subdivide into smaller and lesser categories. Arbolic thought
is vertical and stiff. Rhizomatic thought is non-
linear, anarchic, and nomadic.

13. Rhizomes … cut across boundaries imposed by
vertical lines of hierarchies and order.
Rhizomatic thought is multiplicitous, moving in
many directions and connected to many other
lines of thinking, acting, and being. … Rhizomes
are networks. Rhizomes cut across borders.
Rhizomes build links between pre-existing gaps
between nodes that are separated by categories
and order of segmented thinking.

14. Deleuze and Guattari
Rhizomatic Arbolic
Non-linear Linear
Anarchic Hierarchic
Nomadic Sedentary
Smooth Striated
Deterritorialized Territorialized
Multiplicitous Unitary and binary
Minor science Major science
Heterogeneity Homogeneity

15. As Massumi points out in the introduction to the
work, A Thousand Plateaus is recursive; it is meant
to be read as one would sample a record. Place the
needle on any groove and listen. Turn the book to
any chapter and read. The work is quite unlike most
others and is a model for a different way of thinking
and being. “A Thousand Plateaus provides an
example of such an open system. It does not
advocate an intellectual anarchism in which the
only rule would be the avoidance of any rule. It
deploys variable, local rules….”

16. “A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections
between semiotic chains, organizations of
power, and circumstances relative to the
arts, sciences, and social struggles.” (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987)

17. So in that spirit, let’s establish some
connections.

18. 風吹けば桶屋が儲かる
Kaze fukeba okeya ga moukaru
A bucket shop profits when the wind blows

19. As Geraint Anderson wrote in Cityboy,
“With hindsight, it was that fifth glass of
absinthe that cost my bank £1.2 million.”

20. “I understand that my work may have enormous
effects on society and the economy, many of them
beyond my comprehension.”
— Emanuel Derman and Paul Wilmott,
The Modelers’ Hippocratic Oath
Derman and Wilmott are quants, creators of
mathematical models for the finance industry.
Derman was perhaps the first quant. He moved
from an academic job in physics to Goldman Sachs
in 1985.

21. Everything happens for an infinite number of
reasons.

22. Who or what caused the 2008 economic crisis?

23. Adam Smith, Reagan, Thatcher, Milton
Friedman, Timothy Geithner and Larry
Summers, Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, the
home buyers, the mortgage lenders, the
investment banks, the quants, the insurance
companies, the ratings agencies? Human greed?
Evolution? Chemical addiction to money?

24. A quant speaks
"Imagine building a million-dimensional graph.
Each input - all of the axes but one - is some fact
about the world whose future value is
uncertain: the temperature this winter, the
population growth in China, the price of
corn, the number of homes built in Utah, the
amount of rainfall in Tuscany.

25. “Each of these inputs is uncertain, and each can
have an effect on the others.

26. “The output - the last axis, call it the "height" of
the graph - is the amount of money that your
company will make given any set of values for
each of the other 999,999 axes. The higher the
graph at any point, the more money you make
at that point. Higher - more money - is better.

27. "You can't build that graph. You can't visualize a
million dimensions (this screen is crowded
enough with three), you can't think of all the
uncertainties in the future that might
matter, and you can't figure out how much
money you'll make in every state of those
uncertainties.

28. “I just wanted to tell you about it because
everything in the financial world is an attempt to
catch a flickering glimpse of that graph.

29. “That graph is the thing, the Platonic form.
Stocks and bonds and hedge funds and
derivatives and everything else are the
shadows, the imperfect methods of approaching
the thing.

30. If you want to make all the money in the world,
go make that graph.“
— Matt Levine, What is a Derivative?

31. Snowden’s revelations on the NSA
"Secret documents published on news website The
Intercept on Wednesday showed that the NSA
impersonated Facebook web pages in order to
gather information from targets. When those
people thought they were logging into
Facebook, they were actually communicating with
the NSA. The agency then used malicious code on
the fake page to break into the targets' computers
and remove data from them. Last year, Facebook
moved to encrypt all its pages, making such
impersonation more difficult."

32. • Other programs disclosed by Mr. Snowden
and described by The Intercept include
CAPTIVATEDAUDIENCE (“used to take over a
targeted computer’s microphone and record
conversations”)

33. • GUMFISH (“can covertly take over a
computer’s webcam and snap photographs”)

34. • FOGGYBOTTOM (“records logs of Internet
browsing histories and collects login details
and passwords”)

35. • GROK (“used to log keystrokes”) and
• SALVAGERABBIT to exfiltrate data from
removable flash drives connected to a target’s
computer.

36. Other programs disclosed by Mr. Snowden and
described by The Intercept include
CAPTIVATEDAUDIENCE (“used to take over a
targeted computer’s microphone and record
conversations”), GUMFISH (“can covertly take
over a computer’s webcam and snap
photographs”), FOGGYBOTTOM (“records logs of
Internet browsing histories and collects login
details and passwords”), GROK (“used to log
keystrokes”) and SALVAGERABBIT “to exfiltrate
data from removable flash drives connected to a
target’s computer.” (-RT)

38. Pando is a clonal colony of a single
male quaking aspen

39. determined to be a single living organism by identical
genetic markers and one massive
underground root system.

40. The plant is estimated to weigh 6,000,000 kg, making it
the heaviest known organism. The root system of Pando, at an
estimated 80,000 years old, is among the oldest known living
organisms.

41. To macroeconomists, Bitcoin isn't scary because
it enables crime, or eases tax dodging. It's scary
because a world where it's used for all
transactions is one where the ability of a central
bank to guide the economy is destroyed, by
design.
— Alex Hern, The Guardian (UK)
Is Bitcoin About To Change The World?

49. I have a big problem with making lists. Lists are not actually
very informative. They are an ineffectual way of presenting
information, because they are not very intuitive or visual. Lists
are linear, unlike most of reality, which assembles itself into
complex networks and systems. They do not effectively portray
the relationships between their elements. I wish I could
draw/write lists in systemic networks effectively, and I spend a
lot of time thinking about how I could do that. The best
solution appears to be in the form of images, which is why I’m
beginning to invest time and energy learning how to draw.
— Visa Veerasamy

54. “If you pay enough attention, you will find
systems and networks everywhere you go…
Anything of depth and complexity assembles
itself into networks, just like
language, economies, human knowledge and
academia, cities, consciousness….
— Visa Veerasamy

55. Anything of depth and complexity assembles
itself into networks,
just like language, economies, human
knowledge and
academia, cities, consciousness….”
— Visa Veerasamy

59. The social network LinkedIn is really
interested in harnessing the power of
the network.

66. The world stage is very difficult. It’s not easy to
be on the world stage. The world is now much
more difficult than it was during your revolution.
It’s even more difficult. The world. More
complicated, complex, difficult. It’s a
spaghetti-like structure. It’s mixed up.
— Mohammad Morsi, 2012, to an American
reporter, when he was president of Egypt

68. Hungry?
Remember what Steve Jobs said.
“Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”

69. Let’s talk for a minute about Valve.

70. What the heck is Valve?

71. It’s a company that makes games.

72. It has no hierarchy at all.

73. How could that work, you might ask?

74. Let’s let one of its employees tell us
about it.

75. Valve is different (writes an employee on his blog).
Gabe (the founder) tells it this way. When he was at
Microsoft in the early 90’s, he commissioned a
survey of what was actually installed on users’ PCs.
The second most widely installed software was
Windows.
Number one was Id’s Doom.

77. The idea that a 10-person company of 20-
somethings in Mesquite, Texas (Id, the company
that made Doom), could get its software on
more computers than the largest software
company in the world told him (Gabe, the
founder of Valve) that something fundamental
had changed about the nature of productivity.

78. When he looked into the history of the
organization, he found that hierarchical
management had been invented for military
purposes, where it was perfectly suited to
getting 1,000 men to march over a hill to get
shot at.

79. When the Industrial Revolution came
along, hierarchical management was again a
good fit, since the objective was to treat each
person as a component, doing exactly the
same thing over and over.

80. The success of Doom made it obvious that this
was no longer the case. There was now little
value in doing the same thing even twice;
almost all the value was in performing
a valuable creative act for the first
time.

81. In the Internet age, software has close to zero
cost of replication and massive network
effects, so there’s a positive feedback spiral that
means that the first mover dominates.

82. If most of the value is now in the initial
creative act, there’s little benefit to
traditional hierarchical organization that’s
designed to deliver the same thing over and
over, making only incremental changes over
time.

83. So Valve was designed as a company that would
attract the sort of people capable of taking the
initial creative step, leave them free to do
creative work, and make them want to stay.
Consequently, Valve has no formal management
or hierarchy at all.

84. How could a 300-person company not have any
formal management?

85. It takes new hires about six months before they
fully accept that no one is going to tell them
what to do, that no manager is going to give
them a review, that there is no such thing as a
promotion or a job title or even a fixed role
(although there are generous raises and
bonuses based on value to the company, as
assessed by peers).

86. That it is their responsibility, and theirs alone, to
allocate the most valuable resource in the
company – their time – by figuring out what it is
that they can do that is most valuable for the
company, and then to go do it.

87. That everyone on a project team is an individual
contributor, doing coding, artwork, level
design, music, and so on, including the leads;
there is no such thing as a pure management or
architect or designer role.

88. That any part of the company can change
direction instantly at any time, because there
are no managers to cling to their people and
their territory, no budgets to work around.

89. That there are things that Gabe badly wants the
company to do that aren’t happening, because
no one has signed up to do them.

90. It’s hard to believe it works, but it does. I think
of it as being a lot like evolution – messy, with
lots of inefficiencies that normal companies
don’t have – but producing remarkable
results, things that would never have seen the
light of day under normal hierarchical
management.
— Michael Abrash, Ramblings in Valve Time

91. The artist Yayoi Kusama’s mirrored
infinity rooms certainly have some …

92. …relation to this topic.

93. In the nodes of the network we see
ourselves everywhere

94. And nowhere.

95. To help you think about networks, here are
some exercises to try.

96. You can try to visualize a modified version of the
graph that Matt Levine wrote about above:
"Imagine building a million-dimensional graph. Each
input - all of the axes but one - is some fact about
the world whose future value is uncertain: the
temperature this winter, the population growth in
China, the price of corn, the number of homes built
in Utah, the amount of rainfall in Tuscany. Each of
these inputs is uncertain, and each can have an
effect on the others.”

97. The output - the last axis, call it the "height" of
the graph - is the amount of money that you will
make given any set of values for each of the
other 999,999 axes.
Or, alternately, the last axis is the length of your
life. Or your happiness. Or anything else you
like.

98. Next. Look at the objects in your home. Think
about the path that each took to get there.
Where did they come from? Imagine a diagram
of all these paths.

99. Think about all the people you see every
day, including and especially people you only
see in public spaces.
Remember what the Austrian communications
theorist Paul Watzlawick wrote: “You can’t not
communicate.”
What are these people communicating to you?
What are you communicating to them?

100. Everyone on a subway car is a networked
community for a minute or two. Visualize this as
a thin line joining each person to each other
person.
Visualize the networks that each person is part
of. Visualize the people in their networks, and
the people in those people’s networks, and so
on.

101. Your own network, and its extension.
To how many people and things are you
connected? Try to visualize them.
To how many people and things are they
connected? And so on, and so on.

102. And hang out and enjoy the network.

103. It’s all we really have.

104. Or are.