The TIMN model [Tribes + Institutions + Markets + Networks] developed by David Ronfeldt has influenced much of my own work in looking at how we are moving toward a network society and must create organizational forms that are beyond national governments and beyond markets. Even combining the efforts of civil society, governments, and markets will not be enough to address our greatest challenges — climate change and environmental degradation.
These have been my assumptions to date.
- The three organizing forms for society, chronologically — Tribes, Institutions (Governments), Markets — are widely applicable across history.
- Each form builds on the other and changes it.
- The last form is the dominant form — today that would be the Market form (witness the emerging pandemic-induced recession and its influence on national governance)
- A new form is emerging — Networks (Commons)‚ and hence the T+I+M+N model.
- This form has also been called the noosphere.
- I have found evidence that what initiated each new form was a change in human communication media — T+I (written word), T+I+M (print), T+I+M+N (electric/digital).
- I believe we are currently in between a triform (T+I+M) and a quadriform (T+I+M+N) society, which accounts for much of the current political turmoil in our post-modern world.
- This model can help inform us how to build better organizational forms for a coming age of entanglement.
David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla have recently published an update of their original 1999 work on the ‘Noosphere’ — Whose Story Wins: Rise of the Noosphere, Noopolitik, and Information-Age Statecraft.