Temperature as Meaning
Collective meaning — a philosophical foundation for emergent consensus.
Temperature in Samizdat Mesh is not a spam filter. It is not a reputation system for senders. It is something more fundamental: emergent consensus on what matters. When a mule chooses to carry a message, they vote with physical effort. When a throwie retransmits, it casts a ballot of battery life. When a network of strangers collectively decides that certain words are worth the joules and footsteps required to propagate them, meaning emerges from action.
The Thermodynamics of Meaning
In physics, temperature measures the average kinetic energy of particles. In Samizdat, temperature measures the average propagation energy humans invest in a message. A message arrives cold at a throwie: zero endorsements, zero history, pure potential. If people carry it, it warms. If they ignore it, it cools. No algorithm decides. No authority judges.
This is not metaphor. It is mechanism.
What Temperature Is Not
Not Sender Reputation
Temperature attaches to the message, not the messenger. A respected community member can write cold words that nobody carries. An unknown voice can speak truth that burns across the mesh. In systems where reputation precedes message, new voices are systematically silenced. When the message itself carries temperature, earned through collective action rather than inherited status, meaning can emerge from anywhere.
Not Likes or Upvotes
A like costs nothing. Carrying a message across a city costs time, battery, attention, and the opportunity cost of not carrying something else. Temperature represents invested effort, not expressed preference. Nobody knows which mule carried your message. The heat accumulates from anonymous physical work, not from recorded endorsements attached to profiles.
Not Content Moderation
Content moderation decides what is allowed to exist. Temperature decides how far it travels. Every message gets at least 7 hops. No voice is silenced. But not every voice echoes across the continent. Absolute existence, relative reach. You can say anything. How far it goes depends on whether anyone thinks it worth carrying.
The Samizdat Precedent
The original samizdat in Soviet Russia operated on exactly this principle. Someone typed a manuscript. They gave copies to friends. Those friends retyped and passed on copies of what they found valuable. The Soviet state could suppress official channels. It could not suppress the thermodynamics of meaning. Ideas that resonated found carriers. Ideas that did not, cooled.
The Mule's Choice
A mule has limited battery, limited time, limited attention. When two throwies offer messages, the mule chooses what to carry. This choice is not made by consulting a central authority. When the mule decides to carry a hot message over a cold one, they endorse the prior collective judgment, amplify it, and invest their own resources in that amplification.
This is what makes temperature resistant to gaming. Fake votes are free. Fake physical transport requires actual hardware moving through actual space.
The Immune Response
When a message enters a mesh from outside, it arrives with attenuated temperature. The local collective decides: does this matter to us? Propaganda injected through a compromised backbone link arrives cold, spreads only near the injection point, and must genuinely resonate to heat up. The math protects what human discernment cannot always catch.
The Philosophical Commitment
Temperature bets on the crowd — but not the cheap crowd of clicks. The expensive crowd of physical effort. The crowd that must deploy hardware and move through space to manipulate the field.
The temperature of a message is not a filter, not a score, not a rating. It is the community's answer, written in physics, to the only question that matters: does this mean anything to anyone?
The network does not decide. The network discovers.