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Originally Posted by doofus
Personally I think there's a lot more caught up in that third paragraph than meets the eye, and would be interested in teasing out some of the issues (over time).
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Your observation is correct - the idea and the domain of organic logic is where things get real interesting regarding p2p, and I hardly opened the lid of Pandora’s Box with my opening comments...
I have elaborated the topic somewhat in my comments in a
related thread at P2P Consortium but as this a new discussion with a new direction, let’s cover some ground afresh.
In logical terms, a functional
WASTE group is a practical example of an organic entity living in cyberspace. As an organization it is virtually closed from the outside world: it maintains its integrity and structure mainly with direct internal communications; it is not confined to any particular spots in IP number space; it does not depend on external identity/location services like DNS. This organizational isolation is fully voluntary and conscious in nature: a group
can use public channels for any communications at any time if it so wishes; it
can have nodes running in fixed IP numbers for a more reliable peer recovery; it
can utilize DNS addresses for similar purposes. Like other living entities, a WASTE group not only sustains its own structure and defines its own identity but also projects them outwards and interacts with them at its own will.
A WASTE group with enough active members to keep the mesh running non-stop, socializing and sharing files regularly with each other is clearly a self-organizing, self-controlling entity that enjoys a considerable autonomy in relation to its environment. Is it an
autopoietic entity in Maturana’s sense?
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"the relations that define a system as a unity, and determine the dynamics of interaction and transformations which it may undergo as such a unity..." (Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 137) Maturana notes ‘organization’ comes from the Greek and means ‘instrument’. By using this word for the essential, defining character of a system he focuses attention on "... the instrumental participation of the components in the constitution of the unity." (1975, p. 315) It is the organization of a system which defines its identity, its properties as a unity, and the frame within which it must be addressed as a unary whole.
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My answer is: many of them are. WASTE software become available about 2 years ago, and there are many groups that have lived on from the early days of the software. The larger long-lived groups have kept successfully defining and redefining their group identities despite the occasional losses of old members and occasional introductions of new members. The phrase “the frame within which it must be addressed as a unary whole” gets an interesting and concrete meaning in case of WASTE. As the software forces the group to respect the basic formalism of public key exchange in the definition of its membership border, the public key infrastructure
is the solid addressing and approaching frame for the group. Unless you get your own public key imported into group's public key pool, you have no way of addressing the group entity or interacting with it - unless of course the group consciously and voluntarily decides to hear you through some external channel (e.g. message board).
- tg
