Jeff Vail, it turns out, beat me to the idea of a parasitic swarming/heterarchical/rhizomatic media. His blog and (wiki)book are interesting stuff concerning the politics of distributed network theory.
Here is the entry that deals with these new media's reliance on hierarchical hosts. I'd suggest giving the rest of his blog a thorough reading.

"Rhizome has developed as essentially a parasitic theory—in its modern form, with its promise to provide an alternative to the global, hierarchal system, it is a parasite on hierarchy’s communications infrastructure. The front line in rhizome communications—blogs, the internet, cell phones, message boards, etc.—are all technologies of hierarchy, if not all hierarchal themselves. They are technologies that will not continue in the absence of hierarchy, as the very processes that have made such personal electronics available to the masses are a result of our intensely hierarchal system."