H-Force

I'm beginning to wonder if it's possible to only ever defeat the force of hierarchy temporarily. Like, no matter what you do to circumvent or subvert them, eventually natural hierarchies will leak (a various rates) into the devices designed to defeat or diffuse them, slowly infect them and break it down from within.

Eventually the all conquering power law prevails and progressively re-orders the world on its terms, like gravity; no matter how efficient or subversive you make your device (gravity=aircraft, media hierarchy=blogs, podcasts).

Take alternative methods of creating free flowing and flexible taxonomies like tagging, for instance; I gave up trying to hard categorize my posts into either flat categories or stacked hierarchies on the basis that a) life is too short and b) a fixed structure taxonomy is far too rigid and unsupportive of gradation or nuanced meaning or description. So, I've retro-tagged about two years worth of the 1900 or so posts on this blog. But ultimately, a hierarchy seeps back into the equation in the sense that displaying a tag cloud, weighted or not, containing over 400 tags (which there are in here) is unweildy and pretty useless in the context of a ready reckoner for the side bar. So, I elect only to show the top 50 and - bang - the hierarchy is back. Not to mention a concious limiting of tag application and usage so that complete anarchy doesn't prevail, again a further hierarchy emerges to make sense of the senseless.

So, hierarchies appear to be inevitable, inescapable forces of nature (or, applied in this case meaning or communicability). In which case, can we start attributing hierarchies with differing levels of force, like we do with gravity. In this view, the world of traditional organised business, long since subjugated by the force of hierarchy has an H-Force of 10. Or do we measure the anti-hierarchy capabilities of the devices that defy heirarchies? Do we say that Podcasting has an H-Force of -5, but a year ago it would have been -10 and in a year it'll be nearer -3 where it'll stick?

I'm thinking we need an H-index.

Domination = Evil

Get big and prepare for accusations of having done some kind of nefarious deal with a bebearded, horned chap with a bad case of sunburn at a dusty crossroads in Alabama.

Around ten years ago, Microsoft was just coming out of the phase where they had attracted more praise than scorn and today Google may be passing gradually over that same threshold.

It's hard to separate the various factors; how long do you have to be a dominant player before your pure, unpolluted college sensibilities get binned and you catch yourself casually thinking that one of those grey Dr. Evil suits that button up the back might actually look catching on you; Or, in order to get to be a dominant player do you have to be evil from the start; Or is this evil persona merely projected onto you by everyone dominated in between periods where you were otherwise innocently busying yourself playing painting watercolour landscapes, making cup-cakes and volunteering away your Saturday afternoons for your local charity shop.

It's probably all of the above, but we shouldn't forget that the oppressed, the unsuccessful, the wannabes and the number twos all need to be able to find some way to sleep soundly at night and it's therefore understandably human (and pathologically prewired) to construct a context around yourself that says everyone else is wrong and you're right, or that the only reason other people are more successful is down to a dodgy, evildoer agenda.

Or, Google could just be evil. But their mothers still love them, I'm sure.