Sublime

When we shift our focus from an individual to their network of relationships, we start asking different questions: how the communities an individual belongs are structured, what is their dynamics, how the influence spreads within them, who are the most active and/or valuable members. This shift reveals not our inferred, but our actual, taste.

Both are dynamic systems in which the selfish actions of countless individuals—whether they be cells or investors—lead to unpredictable consequences at the system level. In turn, these collective actions and consequences feed back to influence individual actions in endless cycles of adaptation and evolution.

Metcalfe’s law, where the value of a decentralized network is a by-product of the number of nodes and their connections within the network.

They surmised that these links could be used to build an index of all the content out there—one where the “best” page on a given topic was the one that had the most other pages linking to it.

Even at the start of an atomic network, there is an important and surprising dynamic at play that only increases over time: there is a minority of users that create disproportionate value and as a result, have disproportionate power.

Ronald Burt’s analysis of social networks and organizational innovation, see his “Social Contagion and Innovation” and Social Origins of Good Ideas.

Network science

is likely that some connections are preserved, such as