Meerkat Days

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Been a bit of a lazy day here - no change there, then - a light lunch out at the Anglesey Arms, couple of pints and a read of the weekend papers, followed by a bit of shopping - Christmas Day lunch sorted! - and back home to watch a couple of rather silly films, followed by the Strictly semi-final, which turned out to be a belter. The final should be one of the best in the history of this seemingly irrelevant but highly diverting programme.

Reading the FT over lunch I came across the Technology byline by John Thornhill, writing about networks. He talked about Metcalfe's Law: "[the] systemic value of compatibly communicating devices grows as a square of their number...". It is the 'value' in this phrase that is problematic: the observation about network growth is trivial in and of itself, but ascribing 'value' to that growth is difficult and flawed as a similar generalisation.

As Thornhill rightly points out and as Metcalfe himself admitted, it all depends on context. The example used in the piece is Uber, but the basic issue could apply to almost any network or set of networks. As complexity and scale increases, a particular network, or network of network's usefulness and value can plateau and start to fall as it saturates its sphere of influence and de facto slows its own growth. Thornhill relates this phenomenon to the self-regulatory nature of the natural world, citing meerkat society as an exemplar.

Are we seeing the same mechanism at work in British politics at the moment? The plateauing of the reality distortion field that is Doris Pooh and his eccentric orbit (network)? Could he have reached the limits of his sphere, and having saturated his bed now have to lie in it? The bye-election in Shropshire North will be a test, and as his time is definitely running short, if the vote for this otherwise safe seat deserts the Tories, he will face a party already low on patience toward him, and having lost the expediency of his hitherto vote-gathering halo, they will almost certainly give him the push. God willing.

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