The Boulder

Every morning the boulder is at the bottom of the hill, and every morning
someone has to decide what to do about it. The hill does not care. The
boulder does not care. The deciding is the only part of the arrangement that
belongs to anyone.

There are two ways to move a boulder. The first is to put a shoulder against
it and push, alone, for as long as it takes. This works. It has always
worked. It is also how you come to believe that boulders are a private
matter, and that the hill was built for you in particular.

The second way is to notice that the hill is covered in people, each with a
boulder, each quite sure that theirs is the only one. Nobody on the hill is
short of effort. What the hill is short of is arrangement: a way for the
person who is resting to lend a shoulder to the person who is not, and to be
lent one back.

That is all a network is. Not a bigger shoulder, and not a smaller boulder.
An arrangement by which effort that would otherwise be spent standing still
is spent on something, and by which the something is checked, so that
nobody is paid for standing next to a boulder and breathing hard.

The checking is the difficult part. Pushing is easy to fake from a distance.
A boulder that has been pushed and a boulder that has been described as
pushed look much the same in a report. So the arrangement has to ask for
more than a report: it has to ask for the boulder, at the top, where anyone
can walk around it.

None of this makes the hill shorter. The boulder still rolls back. But a
boulder that many people have pushed, and that many people can see has been
pushed, rolls back to a different place than it started from. That is the
whole of the claim. One must imagine the hill, eventually, somewhat flatter.
