From the Rhizome to the Heavy Tail : Concentration of the Digital Market, Concentration in the Individual, and the Rediscovery of Sovereignty

This contribution takes Deleuze's and Guattari's metaphor of the rhizome as paradigmatic for the radical egalitarian approach of early internet utopianism. The egalitarian utopia of the rhizome is contrasted with the extreme concentration of the really existing digital market. In order to explain the discrepancy between utopian expectations and real development, the paper cites Travers' and Milgram's work on the “small-world problem,” which leads to a general theory of the accumulation of the digital market by applying the concept of social networks with heavy-tailed distributions. In such a concentrated network, the question of sovereign power must inevitably arise along the lines of Schmitt's decisionism. The paper tackles this question of digital sovereignty by proposing the transformation of the entire noosphere into a single inalienable global fund