David Ronfeldt on the Historical Phases of Evolutionary Decontrol

Discussion

David Ronfeldt:

"I mean to show that decontrol has mattered as a recurrent requirement, a periodically essential step, whenever one of those four cardinal TIMN forms has emerged, thereby raising prospects that societies are entering a next-new phase of social evolution. From a long-range TIMN perspective, three such phases have occurred, each spanning centuries — and a fourth looms:

• The first great decontrol arose millennia ago when bands of people clustered together to form tribes (the T form), giving themselves and their families over to tribal customs and codes of communal kinship and collective solidarity.

• The second great decontrol began millennia later when states, armies, and other hierarchical institutions (the +I form) emerged and began to professionalize, separating themselves from being run according to tribal principles.

• The third great decontrol emerged seven or eight centuries ago when market forms of organization (+M) arose, and state and other post-tribal actors slowly learned to let go, allowing market actors and activities to grow according to their own dynamics.

• A fourth great decontrol phase lies ahead, depending on what happens with the ongoing rise of information-age network forms of organization (+N) — an emergence whose distinctive potential I’ll discuss later.

Despite beginning ages ago, none of the earlier three decontrol phases has ever fully ended for all societies. Today’s world is rife with evolutionary decontrol problems, all of which boil down to new or persistent difficulties in coping with one or another of the earlier phases."

(https://davidronfeldt.substack.com/p/in-praise-of-decontrol-part-two-intro)