The Need For Community As well as a craving for self-sufficiency and solitude, there exists, deep within the human mind, also a strong and fundamental need to mix and interact with others.

With no connective infrastructure, hythe-based society could rapidly become a world of hermits. In a hythe-based world, each family is a single indivisible socio-economic unit. This unit is essentially self-sufficient in the basic needs of life. And in a high-tech world, it could trade its specialist goods and services for the most part by some form of physical or electronic 'mail order'. So purely from an economic point of view, its members would have little - if any - reason or motive to interact with outsiders.

But observation shows that under any free social structure almost every human being does interact with individuals outside his own family unit, and that the interactions can be both frequent and intense. This suggests that psychological mechanisms must exist within the human mind from which must emanate the strong forces which drive these social interactions. These forces manifest themselves as a kind of synthesis of curiosity and thirst.

Probably the most powerful of these forces is the sexual force that drives a young adult to mix with his peers from other families to find a spouse with whom to start a new nuclear family for the next generation. But there are also emotional, intellectual, spiritual, social, cultural, educational, economic and recreational motives for interacting with people outside one's immediate family unit. The human life-form thus needs company as well as solitude. It needs to be part of a society which embraces both calm and chaos.

The global society of mankind can therefore be seen as a billion family units which, under the influence of built-in sociological forces, interact with each other in a variety of ways according to a set of natural laws. Neighbour acts towards neighbour. Neighbour responds to neighbour. Neighbour interacts with one neighbour in one context and with another neighbour in a different context. Multitudinous cascades of action and reaction. A swirling hive of spontaneity, probability and chance. It is what mathematicians would rightly call a complex dynamical system.

The old political, religious and commercial hierarchies are gone. So through what kind of connective infrastructure does this complex social interaction flow, and what fundamental force drives its formation and operation?