Evolutionary Decontrol

Context

Evolutionary Decontrol as the Mechanism for Networks to Transcend and Include the Previous 'TIM' forms

David Ronfeldt:

1.

"Decontrol as a crucial system dynamic: With that set of diagrams and the preceding discussion in mind, it should make sense that achieving these progressions in complexity is no easy feat. For the TIMN forms are quite different from each other. As ideals, they fundamentally contradict each other. In many ways, they are incompatible, tug in different directions, and are difficult to combine and hard to harmonize. Yet no society at any scale can do without them — all of them, to some degree. Thus during each phase transition there are major winners and losers. Operational challenges and power struggles occur all along the way, with many turning on issues of what to control and what to decontrol.

Evolutionary decontrol (not to mention control too) may be seen, then, as an art and science of creating a modus vivendi among the forms. Which means finding ways to harmonize their contradictions so their interactions become compatible and productive. Achieving a mutually-adaptive compatibility between the forms and their realms may be the defining goal of decontrol (not to mention control too).

One way to accomplish that over time is by respecting each form’s strengths and limitations, the better to keep them in balance and within limits in their respective realms and sectors. TIMN apparently has policy biases embedded within its evolutionary dynamics, and one is about keeping the forms and their realms in balance and within their design limits."

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

2.

""My main point is that societies cannot evolve from simpler to more complex designs — they can’t make the transitions to become more advanced types of society with additional systems — without allowing for decontrol as well as control processes to occur successfully along the way. All evolutionary theorizing I’ve seen emphasizes that social controls are required for major evolutionary transitions to work well — say, to move from an autocratic to a democratic political system, or from a statist to a market economy, or to deal with free-riders and trouble-makers. But it should not be difficult to notice that social decontrol may figure in there as well — say to assure pro-democracy or pro-market actors can fit in and do their thing properly.

While social decontrol processes appear to be less obvious, they also appear to deserve as much recognition as control processes have long received. Evolutionary theorists, as well as related political, economic, social, cultural, complexity, and cybernetics theorists, write constantly about control problems of one sort or another. It would benefit theory-building if they’d pay comparable attention to decontrol problems too."

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

History

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)

Copied at: David Ronfeldt on the Historical Phases of Evolutionary Decontrol