What Season is this?

[LMNO]

I think I agree. The Internet already smells of Bureaucracy, but we haven't hit that point of stagnation yet.

It's just not so, I'm afraid.  To one who is adept with computers, the internet is Chaos or even Aftermath.  To your dear old grandmum on AOL, it probably is a lot more Bureaucracy-scented.

I was thinking more in terms of the Internet Providers, the ones who are doing their best to eliminate Net Neutrality, and to impose myriad Orders and Rules on bandwidth.  Which would serve to turn the internet into a sort of Download Bureaucracy.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

(continuing the post above:)
That is to say, is this model really any good for understand things? Superficially it explains a great deal of things, but once you start to apply it to actual events you end up with so many fractal manifestations of the metaphor that you end up left with the abstraction you started with.
Or maybe, that's precisely what makes this metaphor useful as a model.

Well, I think that's precisely why the model can be useful. Indeed, I would argue that the fractal manifestations tend to appear when we don't remain focused. My first post in this thread modeled the US, from a political perspective. Someone else might come up with different dates based on the social perspective. With the Internet, I modeled it above from a technology/control perspective, whereas others seems to have modeled based on the social perspective. No model tells you the truth, at best it provides you with a useful way of ordering data, which (if you're really lucky) might give you a wee bit of predictive power.

Some models are good at very broad views, some are good at very myopic views and some (very few) can model both at the same time. The "Seasons" model seems useful when modeling a System (or a subsystem), but not particularly well if you're trying to model the system/subsystems all together.