The trick with big investments and infrastructures (thinking beyond just monetary "capital") is that they take a long time to accumulate, and also a long time to disperse. The energy required to order atoms and other organisms around a tree or former Soviet city or missile fleet or taken for granted infrastructures can take as long to dissipate as to build in the first place. And such investments do not cease to provide value at the moment of their cessation as the ideal system.
Returning to our good friend the Coase theorem, when a hierarchy ceases to be, it can no longer enforce (the same) rules it imposed on the exchange of value it stored. Artifacts storing such stored value, even and especially if randomly redistributed, will tend to end up in the specific other systems in which they would provide the most value by reinforcing the other systems' orders and rules.
The P2P foundation piece misses this point that hierarchies depend on the ragged edges as much as the ragged edges depend on hierarchies. Although it does not explicitly specify how hierarchies come to exist, there are three possibilities. (I equate hierarchy to order for simplicity. I've not thought through a universe in which hierarchies do not imply at least order.)
a) Hierarchies (and order) simply spontaneously come to exist as fully formed systems.
b) Super-hierarchies decompose into into the hierarchies we observe. This cannot be independent of a) or c).
c) Hierarchies are composed of less ordered pieces, and by induction, of self-organized networks and whatever they are made of.
Decomposition with recomposition is the only explanation compatible with the piece's argument that progress (putting new order around things) depends on breaking hierarchies. Otherwise, new order would just form and overlay on the old order and everyone would be happy.
?: "I've not thought through a universe in which hierarchies do not imply at least order."
That's interesting. What's "order" in this case? Would a series of (relatively) rapidly shifting equilibria that still follows some larger pattern apply?
B: Hierarchy minimally requires arrangement of things into above/same/below categories. In this case, I think we're most interested in the kinds and instances of relatively stable and reliable relationships among the things ordered in a hierarchy. To maintain such arrangements requires an energy expenditure (and implied input), whether or not such arrangements generate exploitable efficiencies elsewhere in the system (I think that this was one of the points that the P2P piece tried to make).
The second part of your question concerns how to the spatial and temporal magnification on observations. How long has life on this planet depended on photosynthesis? Which species have provided photosynthetic services over the last 4 billion years and where? Does the series of ever-changing players in the common microbe/plant->animal->animal energy flow make a difference to the pattern, and what would notice?
And most importantly: Given the current network of lock-ins and dependencies, how much freedom does any component of the network have with respect to breaking those dependencies, and at what scale? All life on this planet also happens to be locked into sugars, fats, proteins, etc of the same chirality to be food-compatible with each other. Within Earth organisms, I can easily substitute fish for chicken for legumes for MREs as food, but I cannot easily substitute photosynthesis for eating as an energy intake if all editable (to me because millions of years of evolution have resulted selected for a relatively standard set of robust interfaces) food sources disappear.
(While we're here, this is substantially the reason that I find the anti-finance protests to be mostly pointless. Finance can easily substitute every particular source of inputs [almost exclusively interest and commissions] taken away by legislation. But, as has been pointed out, most of the value generated by finance stays within that system, and little value would be lost by most from its cessation. Humanity had gathered around great works long before there was a modern finance system.
As a highly optimised system, finance operates on a faster beat than the outside world, i.e. in milliseconds instead of hours, so even small decrease in inputs is noticeably multiplied throughout the system. Since the only external source of input into that system is from the masses, simply not feeding any more input into the finance system will be sufficient for it to burn out on its own. There's no need to expend the effort to actively destroy anything as suggested by the P2P article. Large trees and animals fall over and die all the time without being dragged.)
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