Emergent phenomena in computer networks

1. You set up your email client to automatically forward certain messages to a list of your friends---say, messages with the word "JOKE" in the subject line.
2. One of your friends likes the idea, and decides to do the same thing. But, being a clever person, your friend realizes that she must not forward JOKE message from you back to you. She has a bit more work to do, but she can still set up her email client to do the right thing. She teaches you how to fix your client, and she tells her other friends about it as well.
3. Soon thereafter, you wake up one morning to find your inbox overflowing with thousands of copies of the same JOKE message. Not only that, but the network is behaving very strangely....

This is an example of a maelstrom, a term we use to mean any self-sustaining chain reaction of messages in an network.

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