But the decline of newsprint trumpeted by everyone from reporters to media barons has another potential victim — the software companies like Quark and Adobe who’ve spent the past 30 years investing billions in desktop publishing, graphic design and publications management applications.

Harkin believes the ‘drive to respond’ (our simple desire to answer messages) is behind the whole Internet architecture. He also makes incorrect generalisations about the models behind popular file sharing application like Bittorrent and Kazaa. With an interesting background, it’s nevertheless a cryptic story told with an enigmatic voice that we’ve heard most of before.

Achieving the environmental gains that built in natural processes offer seems like a huge task after our history of high waste, factory-style production, but it can start with the simple question ‘how would nature do this?’ Next time you turn on a light at home (which probably uses about 120 volts of electricity) consider that the Amazon electric eel can produce three times as much power using chemicals that also are found in the human body.