I know this is a classic paper in network theory, but my brain has been exploding all over this pdf for the last few hours.

http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/9910332

"Due to the preferential attachment, a vertex that acquired more connections than another one will increase its connectivity at a higher rate, thus an initial di?erence in the connectivity between two vertices will increase further as the network grows… leading with time to some vertices that are highly connected, a ”rich-gets-richer” phenomenon that can be easily detected in real networks."

This suggests that as we attempt to design top level networks (that is our governments) to better realize digital values (http://tinyurl.com/cju4ypf), what we want to be specifically doing is adjusting the rate of preferential attachment to shape the growth of the network. "Shaping network growth" just is governance in the digital age. It is fine if the rich get richer, but they can't get so rich that they deprive some of the people from basic access to resources or otherwise destroy the environment.

I think the marble economy I've been working on is just a specific way of shaping network growth that specifically tries to incentivize labor, in the form of production, distribution, and design. It does this by describing the specific ways that nodes in the network become "attached", what I've been calling "use-behaviors". Objects are designed so that their use is directly correlated with incentives for production, use, and design. If you account for these relations correctly, the idea is that you don't need the additional external incentive of money to organize the system, because the objects themselves account directly for the intrinsic incentives within the system for that labor.

If anyone actually bothered to read this far and wants to know more, I talk about this at length on the Attention Economy wiki, especially the entry on Implementation. http://fractionalactorssub.madeofrobots.com/blog/attn/

[cond-mat/9910332] Emergence of scaling in random networks

Abstract: Systems as diverse as genetic networks or the world wide web are best described as networks with complex topology. A common property of many large networks is that the vertex connectivities …