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.
