I found myself, recently, working on a development project that required me to try to create a javascript visualization of an undirected network graph.
As I quickly discovered (to my chagrin) this is incredibly difficult to do, even with the assistance of Dijkstra's algorithm.
After I beat my head against this problem for a while, I started seeing directed and undirected graphs
everywhere - traffic moving on highways, employee organizational charts, website layouts, etc,
Specifically for this post, I saw them in two long-form essays that have strong implications for libertarian political theory: Hayek's The Use of Knowledge in Society and Assange's State and Terrorist Conspiracies. It struck me that these two works are "secretly" talking about the same problem, though they come at it from different directions: there is a wide gap between the knowledge available to hierarchical organizational systems - which operate as directed network graphs - and the information generated by the broader society these hierarchies attempt to govern, which is best understood as a vast undirected network graph. This "knowledge gap" problem is ultimately mathematically insuperable, regardless of any improvements we may achieve in information technology or machine learning, for reasons I hope to cover in this space later. Both Hayek and Assange appear to realize this, and their works explicitly or implicitly propose responses to this problem or the possibilities created by it - but I humbly would assert that both of them have got it wrong, and that they fail to realize that the collision between the impulses of our political class and the hard math of this problem is unlikely to play out in the way(s) they imagine.
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