As a network guy this reminds me of how a lot of networking equipment (and also distributed system clusters) operate - you have this constant background overhea

As a network guy this reminds me of how a lot of networking equipment (and also distributed system clusters) operate - you have this constant background overhead of chatting and gossiping and keeping in sync with your peer nodes, all so that when the actual work needs to be done you are on the same page. If you are not in that network, you can not get any of that work accomplished.