See also: A City is Not a Tree
Arborescent
Hierarchical, tree-like networks.
Comes from the way genealogy trees are drawn: unidirectional progress, with no possible retroactivity and continuous binary cuts.
Whenever we have a tree structure, it means that within this structure no piece of any unit is ever connected to other units, except through the its parent (meaning the unit as a whole)
Does power always need to function top down?
“The enormity of this restriction is difficult to grasp. It is a little as though the members of a family were not free to make friends outside the family, except when the family as a whole made a friendship.”
The structure of a blockchain follows this very closely. See also: semilattice
Rhizomatic
“a rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.” (Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus)
A nonlinear and non-hierarchical network with no specific entry or exit points. Defined as a non-arborescent network.
Also what Rhizome is named after.