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)