Scale
Six Links to Ruin
Six handshakes separate any two people on Earth, and the same short paths route shocks through markets, grids, and food webs
Average degrees of separation between any two people on
Game-theoretic models and Twitter and Facebook data confirm that no matter how massive a network grows, equilibrium pulls its diameter down to roughly six hops. Efficiency for connection is also efficiency for contagion.
Small-world topology is a double-edged design: the same logarithmic short paths that make networks fast and cheap to traverse guarantee that any local shock is at most a handful of hops from everyone else.
Photo by Magda Ehlers / Pexels
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