Conjecture

The personbyte is the constraint that makes networks necessary rather than merely efficient. Because knowledge and knowhow must be embodied in nervous systems, and we have finite cognitive capacity and short lives, there is a limit to what one person can hold, which Hidalgo abstracts as the theoretical amount of information that a person is capable of containing. Products requiring more than that must be chunked among people with different and complementary knowledge. And the two regimes differ in kind: accumulating less than a personbyte is constrained only by individual limitations, while accumulating more than a personbyte is additionally constrained by collective limitations, the chunking and distributing of it. Part I's illustration is exact: hiring one musician off the street and handing him sheet music is bad, and hiring four strangers to form a band is worse, because the performance depends on interaction that only practice builds.

Coordination architecture