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ABOUT

Network Rules draws from a lifetime of studying innovation and insurgencies in energy, defense, computers, finance and media to reclaim the deep transformations of complex social systems like markets, technologies and cultures away from autocrats and monopolists back to communities and their ecosystems.  

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This blog tackles ideas and strategies to reconnect left-behind and often radicalized rural, urban and suburban communities by inclusively harnessing what sociologist Manuel Castells predicted twenty years ago would be The Rise of Network Society:

 

“…instantaneity, random discontinuity … split-second capital transactions, … daily war making … scattered all over the planet”

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Technology and media analyst Osman Eralp argues that throughout history successful transformation means changing ingrained notions of property, capital, citizenship and nationhood.

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Network Rules argues for the urgent need for democracies to embrace the very tools and world-views that are challenging them today, just as they did industrialization a century earlier.  Strategies include flexible Universal Capital Accounts, worker-enhancing AI technologies, monopoly taxes, agile real-time institutions, transformational leadership & language, and “interoperable” openness for technology platforms.

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Historian Thomas Kuhn described mighty changes in world-views as creating “a whole new way of regarding the problems.”  

 

Network scientist Duncan Watts  summarizes today's network paradigm bluntly in Six Degrees: “… the first great lesson of the connected age: we may all have our own burdens, but like it or not, we must bear each other’s burdens as well.”

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Covid-19 bursting across an angry and burning planet shows we have no choice but to embrace the network paradigm for the sake of our children and the planet.  

 

POSTS

Reading List [annotations coming]

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  • Duncan Watts, Six Degrees.

  • Geoffrey West, Scale.

  • Manuel Castells, The Information Age (Trilogy), Communication Power.

  • Eric Hoffer, The True Believer.

  • Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

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For the full list click here.

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Network Rules

Networks operate differently from industrial age's factories, mass movements, parties and mass media because they're largely peer-to-peer instead of top down projects or bottom-up power-grabs.  

 

Why are these "rules" important?  Because they dominate how societies, economies and politics are organized on the planet today - they are the tools of monopolists and autocrats, but also the antidote to them.

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  1. Small worlds: digital content travel at lighting speed around the world without "asking for permission."

  2. "Weak" Ties.  The content and links create informal coalitions of like-minded communities outside of formal family, work and political ties.  Weak links should be called informal alliances. 

  3. Homophily.  Lightning speed content connects to people "like us" and disconnects "others." Basic survival network mechanisms like "availability" (premium on sensational and immediate news) and confirmation bias (looking for information that supports our beliefs) amplify and magnify homophily.

  4. Power Laws.  The very geometry of complex networks creates or increases stratification and inequality by favoring upstart innovators, agile incumbents and connected gate-keepers 

  5. Diffusion. The inequality of power laws can only be overcome by community-to-community diffusion of power from concentrated hubs to their adjacent nodes, not by "reform" from above or "revolution" from below.

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For the full list click here.

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