This chart is deceptive because it focuses on details of micro relationships while ignoring alignment of factions with global powers vying for control over resources and political influence, which has been stirring this pot on and off for thousands of years.

The western media portrays these battles as isolated internal disputes, and while there are very serious regional disputes, they are influenced by external powers like the US and Russia. Similar to the way in previous epochs groups like Muslim or Roman empires affected outcomes or took advantage of regional conflicts.

It is a crucible. I believe that the biggest driver is still fossil fuels. Yes, solar and other systems are rapidly replacing a portion of the energy demand, but still, the critical need for oil cannot be understated. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_consum.... You can see that this is quite an unequal distribution. The need to maintain that is what puts pressure on that region and causes regional animosities to be taken advantage of in order to move power over to groups siding with dominant forces.

Even though solar and other energy sources are gaining ground, the industrial reliance on fossil fuels is a much tougher nut to crack, and I actually believe that creating viable industrial production processes based on bio-fuels or significantly different chemistry is the key to 'peace in the Middle East'. Obviously, bad blood between groups going back thousands of years does not go away just because someone invented a non-fossil-fuel-based industrial precursor, but the motivation for stirring up those conflicts in order to further political power of one group gets reduced.

There are other aspects to this aside from fossil fuels. The fire for the crucible is fueled generally by the global power struggle which has other aspects like currency domination. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_hegemony or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Great_Game.

For some people, for example, those who read western media which is full of talk of local "evil dictators" and "terrorists", framing things this way will be very controversial. My next paragraph will probably be even more controversial for everyone.

I believe that hegemony and centralized control (at least on a physical regional level) could someday be supplanted by global cyber-states. In other words, the borders are not dictated so much by the map or actual physical areas, but by alignments with global systems of political power and organization, connected by internets. There will likely be multiple internets controlled by different global factions, since controlling these internets is key to controlling the global organizations.

Technologies like advanced 3d printing (eventually moving into the area of programmable matter), and free information flow may democratize force so that power over life and death, and therefore ultimate political control, moves from central authorities into the hands of individuals and more regional groups. At the same time, this type of technology could enable the global super-cyberstates as it would enable any group with sufficient control of a net to nearly instantly muster military assets at any point around the world.

I can go so far as to frame all of this as a need for good tools and systems for knowledge management and securing human needs, with the two interacting.

One of the core problems for knowledge management systems is how to promote an efficient, integrated, holistic view of the system, while still providing a strong capability for the evolution and maintenance of divergent branches or systems which evolve in new and beneficial directions. Or just, divergent branches which allow localized freedom in the knowledge graph, which may later lead in beneficial directions.

An example of this is different standards or platforms competing for dominance in technology. Based on a certain platform of solutions and set of common assumptions, a set of new problems arises, and many different groups and individuals solve those problems in relative isolation. In order to move on to solving the next set of problems, or for the overall group to gain the advantages of the new solutions in a way that integrates with previous efforts, a certain solution set is selected.

The particular process by which solutions are selected and integrated into the system, or multiple interacting systems, affects everyone working towards the advancement or maintenance of the systems greatly.

Github is a concrete example of this.

There seems to be a tendency towards a very small number of systems which exhibit high coupling and low cohesion. But maybe that view is too mechanistic and low-level, and a higher level view which better incorporates abstraction has a different problem.

Creating an abstraction prunes redundant solutions but also often discards less generally relevant information that may however be important in certain circumstances. Abstractions are powerful because their hierarchical structure allows individual nodes to leverage aggregate powers of branches. This hierarchical structure is also a disadvantage though in terms of the reliance that leaves have on the integrity of each branch.

Compositional rather than hierarchical structures can provide the same power of abstraction without the brittleness and central-point-of-failure that hierarchies have.

It seems though that more compositional networked structures tend to converge towards what are effectively hierarchies.

Anyway, I think that there must be some tools or processes or perspectives that would provide for somehow more optimal evolutions of structures. Probably some that are not discovered or in common use. In case anyone read all of this and knows of some relevant links, please let me know.