Exonets

Discussion

David Ronfeldt:

"Today’s cutting-edge ideas about networks — e.g., “decentralized autonomous organizations” (DAOs), “distributed cooperative organizations” (DisCOs), “open value networks” (OVNs), holacracy, holarchy, and the like — look insufficient for scaling upwards, downwards, and sideways to structure a new realm. Something grander, bigger in scale, more interconnectable across “silos,” perhaps “cosmo-local,” looks needed. And its functionality — top to bottom and side-to-side across all issue areas — may be manageable only if Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) systems are brought in.

Such a vast networks-based realm-defining design doesn’t exist yet, nor do components for beginning to assemble it. It lacks a name too. But I’ve wondered whether “equinets” or “exonets” might be more accurate than plain “networks” — meaning the acronym TIMN would aptly become TIME.

Though I’m not ready to insist on it yet, the term “ exonets” is appealing, for it expresses both the key commonality and key difference I’ve lately found regarding the Tribes and Networks forms: to wit, they are both based on networks — they are both network-centric forms, far more so than are the Institutions and Markets forms. Tribes and Networks are fundamentally different, however. The Tribes form results from kinship and other social-identity networks meant to bond and bind people together as an in-group — Tribes function primarily inward. In contrast, the Networks form reaches primarily outward — it functions to connect and coordinate professional purpose-driven actors irrespective of Tribes identities. The two forms are related (and interrelated), but they cannot substitute for each other. Their strengths and weaknesses are different.

(https://davidronfeldt.substack.com/p/rethinking-what-tribes-and-networks)