Evolutionary Decontrol

Context

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

David Ronfeldt:

"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)