= a 2025 update to David Ronfeldt's TIMN framework, i.e. Tribes, Institutions, Markets, Networks

Contextual Quote

< "Tribes is about emphasizing inter-personal kinship, lineage, identity, solidarity, community, sharing, etc. to form a close-knit society. In contrast, information-age Networks is ideally about reaching out to others while emphasizing openness, inclusion, collaboration, etc. in flat network designs." >

- David Ronfeldt

Discussion

David Ronfeldt:

Sideways energies matter as much as top-down and bottom-up

Comparisons are often made about something that is said to operate top-down, versus something else that seems bottom-up — long the case with hierarchies vs. markets. Yet forces and factors are rarely said to operate from the side, the middle, or the center. Top-down vs. bottom-up analyses always attract attention. Middle-, center-, and side-in (or -out) comparisons rarely appear. But the more I think about it, that’s what T and +I mainly are: forms that reach and operate sideways — Tribes quite inwardly and locally since ancient times, Networks quite expansively as suits the information age. That’s one clarification that’s dawned on me.

External impulses behind each form’s rise increase over time

The TIMN framework rests not only on its four cardinal forms, but also on a dozen or so system dynamics that recur during every major transition in the progressions from past monoform (T-only) to future quadriform (T+I+M+N) societies. One of those recurrent system dynamics is that each form’s rise involves broader geographic forces and factors than did its predecessor. As the T+I+M+N progression unfolds, the impulses to push for a form’s emergence arise, each time in turn, from a more expansive set of actors, energized by interests in a more expansive geography.

Thus the Tribes form initially has the narrowest demographic scope of all the TIMN forms — just the small number of families, clans, and approved outsiders who constitute a tribe. Moreover, an early tribe’s geographic focus may be limited to nearby fields, valleys, rivers, and ranges. The later evolution of the Institutions form involved much larger geographic territories and populations — e.g., principalities, kingdoms, states, empires. Evolution of the Markets form involved still more distant geographies and populations — not just national but also transnational, and beyond. By extrapolation, the impulses for advancing the Networks form, though they may originate in specific locales, will stem from nearly global if not planetary matters.

Lately, as a corollary, I’ve noticed that the impetus behind each form’s rise comes not only from a geographically more expansive set of actors, but that the set’s constituency has an ever-larger external component. The outside (foreign) component increases with each step in the TIMN progression. Though I can’t be sure, a growing foreign component may be essential for each form in turn to gain sufficient impetus to emerge and take hold within a society.

Accordingly, early Tribes formed for strictly local reasons, with few to no outsiders involved, partly to prevent outside influences. The evolution of +I involved farther-ranging impulses, including dynastic intermarriages. With the evolution of +M, the proportion of domestic to foreign impulses became about even, I’d surmise, since foreign commerce, banking, and investment increasingly impelled societies’ domestic actors to base their economies on market (+M) more than personal (T-type) or statist (I-type) principles. By extrapolation, the impulses for a society to evolve a +N realm (whatever that may consist of) may stem more from external than internal dynamics.

“Networks” is becoming too vague a concept to suit TIMN

Identifying Networks as TIMN’s fourth and future form of organization was a favorite reason for fielding TIMN back in the early 1990s. The form was just taking off, thanks to the digital information revolution. Few other analysts had spotted its rise back then. And at the time it seemed a distinctive form of organization, different from TIMN’s first three forms: Tribes, Institutions, and Markets.

But naming the fourth form “Networks,” though still accurate and pertinent, doesn’t help as much anymore. Partly that’s because the new field known as “network science” took off in the 1990s-2000s too — only to classify all forms of organization as varieties of networks, including TIMN’s tribes, hierarchies, and markets. Networks turned into a trendy bandied word in both research and policy circles. Lots of efforts then went into analyzing and advising how to improve existing social and organizational networks — but not into specifying innovative network designs that may be needed in the future. All of which raised questions and took some edge off my TIMN usage.

Moreover, based on personal experience, there’s often somebody around who turns to deflate ideas that something new is on the way. In this case, they’d point out that networks are not new, far from it — kinship networks, road networks, trade networks, etc. have existed since ancient times. Which is true. And maybe they didn’t mean to be dismissive. But such comments tend to re-direct discussion away from figuring out the future toward reflecting on the past. I often groan and turn mum at that point.

That said, it’s still unclear exactly what network designs will be needed to structure the +N realm that TIMN augurs. If my deduction is correct, it’ll be a pro-commons realm that encompasses health, education, welfare, and environmental matters."

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

Towards Networks as "Exonets"

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.