But this is merely a side effect of the more fundamental property of self-production. I know that the application of autopoiesis models to social systems is controversial. Some say that social systems can be autopoietic, others would restrict autopoiesis to organisms. This requirement does not seem to apply to society, which has a natural boundary formed by the atmosphere and the lithosphere. The more fundamental aspect of organizational closure, however, is that the network of processes closes in on itself, it is autonomous.
All products leaving the network are merely waste and have no function.
This condition clearly does not apply to most social systems. For example, a company produces products which are meant to be used by other companies or consumers. But if we look at society as a whole, the closure requirement does seem to hold. That would be an argument to show that only world society as a whole can constitute a superorganism, and that there can be only one superorganism as long there is free transaction of information and goods. These are networks which capture the most common associations people make between concepts, thus producing semantic maps of people's intuitive associations.