The concept of space

The business of selling old clothes appears to have no relationship at all with the modern hi-tech world of electronic communications until the organisation is abstracted away from the actual business. What we then find is a large space (the area of England) covered with collection points where the weekly produce of a commodity in the local area is brought together and sorted.

At each collection point, people sift through the local produce to pull out items according to certain broad criteria. A human expert then undertakes a further examination of a particular category and makes a more precise selection based upon finer detail. These selections can then be transferred to a single collection point: where all the filtered items from the whole space converge.

The importance of this abstraction is that it highlights the fact that the whole process is organised through a hierarchy of humans who use nothing more than the unique ability of the human brain to differentiate between patterns in a complex environment. There are very few instructions, no complicated procedures or algorithms. The whole system relies on the processing power of the human brain to extract a range of specific items from a very large variety of unsorted possibilities.

Even more interesting is the ease and efficiency by which such a human system can be controlled and directed. It can be made to respond and adapt almost immediately to any changes in demand. For example, it was very easy to modify the garment filtering system to find 1940's clothes when they became fashionable. Silk scarves, embroidered blouses, long skirts, etc. could all be filtered out when they were in demand. Just a few worlds of spoken instruction could cause the whole system of people to react almost immediately to any changes in customer demands or fashion trends.

With an abstraction of this system, it is easy to see how information can substituted for garments. It is easy to see how the space of the country of England can be replaced by the space of the Internet.

This provides yet another useful conceptual component to put into my solution space.