Quadriformism
= the emerging next stage of human civilization, according to David Ronfeldt, which combines the earlier three forms of his TIMN framing, i.e. Tribes, Institutions (states) and Markets, under the hegemony of the emerging fourth form, the Networks.
Contextual Quote
"Triform societies are now nearing their end. Because of growing social complexities and complications, they have nearly exhausted their capabilities as designs that can address and resolve all they need to.
“Quadriformism is where future evolution is headed — a distinct fourth realm will emerge and take shape in the decades ahead, absorbing particular kinds of actors and activities that the current three realms are no longer able to handle well. There are reasons to project that this next new realm will consist largely of health, education, welfare, and environmental actors and activities — matters that are about care, broadly defined, rather than identity, power, or profit. These care-centric actors and activities will move (and be moved) into this new realm, which will be as distinct and independent in design as the current three realms are from each other.
“This evolution from triform to quadriform designs will radically redefine the nature of societies as a whole, and improve the performance capabilities of all four realms. New philosophies and ideologies will arise.”
- David Ronfeldt [1]
Discussion
The Context: The evolution of institutional forms
David Ronfeldt:
"“I welcome your advice for healthcare advocates to seek “foundational change” and play the “long game.” I quite agree, and here’s what I’m wondering: The ultimate answer to realizing foundational change in the healthcare sector may not lie within that sector, nor within the broader “medical-financial-industrial complex” (MFIC). The answer may depend on the eventual emergence of a new realm of society that health and other care-centered matters move into.
“Our society, like all modern societies, is loosely organized in terms of three major realms of actors and activity: civil society, with its largely voluntary sectors; government, with its public sectors; and the market economy, with its private sectors. Healthcare does not fit neatly into any one of them; it gets bounced around. Some leaders claim it’s a public-sector responsibility; for others, it’s a private-sector matter; or it is keyed for mixed public-private cooperation. Plus, it’s a problem that civil-society actors have a role in addressing too. Healthcare is thus a vital matter without a true consistent home in the American system.
“That has been the case for decades, even centuries. And by now, as a result of growing enormity and complexity, it seems evermore evident that healthcare cannot be fit, properly in our existing public and/or private sectors, and is too overwhelming to leave to civil-society. It’s a dilemma; and it’s likely to get worse.
“Curiously, healthcare is not the only societal matter stuck in this kind of systemic doldrums. Education, welfare, and environmental matters are stuck there too — they are all stuck in it together. None is exactly a matter for civil society, or government, or the market economy to resolve. That lack of fit is now too big and burdensome to ignore; it's constraining America’s future evolvability
“Here’s my point: While all four matters — health, education, welfare, and the environment — are viewed and treated separately by analysts, policymakers, and other actors, there’s a key commonality that’s being overlooked. All four are about maximizing care: people care, life care, planetary care; the care of body, mind, and soul, individually and collectively. Plus, each activity affects the others; their dynamics and vectors interact. Better health can lead to better education, and vice-vera, especially if welfare and environmental conditions are improved as well.
“Furthermore, the set of policy principles and positions that may be raised for any one of the four is pretty much the same for all of them. For example, debates exist for all four as to whether it/they should be recognized as a legal right, whether to approach matters individually or collectively, how to protect against risks and vulnerabilities, etc.
“What I deduce from this is that health, education, welfare, and the environment have so many affinities and are so intertwined as policy problems that it will make increasing sense for policymakers and other actors to view them as a bundled set — and eventually as bedrock components for constructing a new care-centric realm (sector) of society.
“Today, even if that analysis may sound potentially sensible to some people, it will still seem like fanciful unwelcome academic speculation in many circles. As I’ve been told, government agencies and capitalist enterprises presently have “hammer-lock” grips on healthcare and education. There is no way they will let go in today’s political and economic environments, much less allow health, education, welfare, and environmental matters to be bundled. But I see a path opening up in the years ahead.
“Per that evolutionary framework I mentioned earlier, societies have relied across the ages on four cardinal forms of organization: kinship-oriented tribes, hierarchical institutions, competitive markets, and collaborative networks. These forms have co-existed since people first began to assemble into societies — there was always someone doing some activity using one or more of those basic forms. But each has emerged and taken hold as a major form of organization, governance, and evolution in a different historical era. Tribes were first millennia ago (with civil society becoming its modern manifestation); institutions developed millennia later (e.g., states, armies); then centuries later came market systems for growing our economies — hence modern societies with their three major realms.
“If that were the end of the story, our prospects for evolving still more complex societies would be nearing an evolutionary cul-de-sac (“the end of history”). Notice, however, that the network form is only now coming into its own, starting a few decades ago. Network forms have been around, in use, for millennia. But they have lacked the right kind of information and communications technology to enable them to take hold and spread. Each preceding form emerged, in turn, because an enabling information technology revolution occurred at the time — i.e., speech and storytelling for tribes, writing and printing for institutions, telegraphy and telephony for markets. The ongoing digital information technology revolution is finally energizing the network form, enabling it to compete with the other forms and address problems they aren’t good at resolving.
“As a result, information-age network forms of organization and related strategies, doctrines, and technologies (not to mention ideologies) are currently spreading far and wide. One way or another, they lie behind and help explain nearly all the turmoil disrupting our society and the world at large. Network factors and forces are modifying the natures of civil societies, governments, and markets everywhere, often via the creation of hybrids with the earlier forms — sometimes for the better, sometimes not. The growth of so-called health and hospital networks in the profiteering hands of venture capital firms and giant insurance corporations is a manifestation of this.
“But it’s one thing to disrupt and modify what exists, quite another to transform and radically improve a system’s complexity. Still missing so far are clear signs that the rise of the network form will have the major evolutionary consequence that each earlier form has had: the generation of a distinct new realm/sector of society, through a long hard-fought process of structural-functional differentiation."
(https://davidronfeldt.substack.com/p/looking-for-a-better-ideology-quadriformism-34f)
Source: a comment on: “Foundational Steps Vital on the Road to Universal Health Care,” May 9, 2024, at Wendell Potter’s formidable HEALTHCARE un-covered site.
Quadriformism
David Ronfeldt:
"“We currently live in an advanced modern society that has a triform design — meaning it has three major realms: civil society, government, and an economy, variously arranged and each relying on its own form organization. This triform design emerged several centuries ago. It still holds sway today.
“Indeed, nearly all of today’s ideological isms — capitalism, liberalism, conservatism, progressivism, and populism, as well as trendier anarcho-capitalism, neo-libertarianism, neo-monarchism, accelerationism, national conservatism, techno-humanism, techno-colonialism, cosmo-localism, etc. — are triform in nature. They address how civil-society, government, and/or the economy should be shaped, and how their actors are supposed to think and behave. All of today’s politicians are, at best, triformists.
“But triform societies are now nearing their end. Because of growing social complexities and complications, they have nearly exhausted their capabilities as designs that can address and resolve all they need to.
“Quadriformism is where future evolution is headed — a distinct fourth realm will emerge and take shape in the decades ahead, absorbing particular kinds of actors and activities that the current three realms are no longer able to handle well. There are reasons to project that this next new realm will consist largely of health, education, welfare, and environmental actors and activities — matters that are about care, broadly defined, rather than identity, power, or profit. These care-centric actors and activities will move (and be moved) into this new realm, which will be as distinct and independent in design as the current three realms are from each other.
“This evolution from triform to quadriform designs will radically redefine the nature of societies as a whole, and improve the performance capabilities of all four realms. New philosophies and ideologies will arise.”
(https://davidronfeldt.substack.com/p/looking-for-a-better-ideology-quadriformism-34f)
Greater Geographical Scope is Required for the Shift towards a Fourth Sector
"The rise of each form, in turn, involves and may require pushes and pulls of ever greater geographic scope. If so, the emergence of a +N realm will depend on pushes and pulls from local to global scale, more than any preceding form has — it’ll involve “cosmo-localism,” a P2P-network concept from Jose Ramos and Michel Bauwens. So, yes, as you note, +N should be for addressing problems/challenges that are more global in nature than was the case with the rise of the earlier forms.
Education, health, welfare, and the environment — the challenges I’ve deduced for +N — fit this observation. Perhaps a care-focused +N realm will have to emerge in transnational terms before it takes hold within nations.
To a degree, that’s already underway, for there are transnational actors and activities all around the world (like Kahn Academy, Chef Andres World Kitchen) who look like potential candidates — they’re just not mutually connected yet.
The future of nation-states (not to mention empire-states and civilization-states) still looks pretty durable. Nonetheless, I’m open to alternatives. The one getting the most discussion — Balaji’s “network state” —does not appeal to me, as I intend to clarify in a soon-to-be-finished write-up about ideological backsliding among leaders of the American Right toward neo-medieval ideals and practices. Balaji’s book “The Network State” doesn’t even deal with health, education, welfare, and/or environmental matters. Not much of a state, I’d say. More like a privileged platform. But the networked etc. design he discusses, stripped of its anarcho-capitalist state-aspiring ambitions, kinda resembles the design I’ve had in mind for a +N realm based on pro-commons ideas. So I’m wondering about it from that standpoint — a network realm, not a network state."
Examples
Tim Morgan on N+ Social Commons
Tim Morgan
"I've maintained for a few years that the +N Social Commons Sector (SCS) form has been emerging for at least 30 years, but is largely invisible to larger society because it currently inhabits the nooks and crannies of networks.
Open source software was an early purely digital emergence of the sector, one that enabled the rapid rise of the Internet itself. Its capture & enclosure by +M happened later, but lead to a reactive response with the creation of "pirate" sites containing copywrited software, movies, music, books, and other shareable digital media enclosed by +M.
A physical expression of the +N form emerged as "makerspaces" or "hackerspaces" which embodies a physical instanciation of the knowledge sharing and capabilities sharing ethos of the open source movement. In fact, if you look at the organizational structure of a larger one like the Dallas Makerspace, you see a fully expressed TIMN quadriform in minature; a node in the greater network of such commons. During the Covid Pandemic, I noted that such spaces shift emphasis and started producing locally needed medical supplies like PPE and medical devices for free, thus demonstrating the rapid responsiveness and care attributes of the +N Social Commons. These are just a few examples. Others exist such as local cooperatives and similar attempts to create commons forms which share knowledge to promote the welfare of members. The current gap preventing the +N Social Commons Sector from fully emerging is that they are segmented efforts. They are sharing & connected, but only to organizations like themselves: makerspaces to makerspaces, coops to coops, community gardens to community gardens, etc. We need some state change which drives interconnection between unlike nodes. We need a +N catalyst to bring about an emergence."
(https://davidronfeldt.substack.com/p/looking-for-a-better-ideology-quadriformism-34f)