This is almost a year behind Steve Yegge's first post on beads. Gas Town and Gas City provide orchestration for the swarm. So far I haven't seen a perfect implementation but this idea isn't new.
I also don't know that beads is a very strong example that Yegge knows what he's doing - it's famously been described as (pseudo)malware.
The only thing Yegge did was come up with really stupid, convoluted and anthropomorphized language to describe the process and then write unhinged articles about it