Beyond markets: sense-making and organising, in a world of open networks — with John Robb

Podcast Notes

In this episode, we have a Boundaryless Conversation with John Robb, the owner and principal analyst for the monthly Global Guerrillas Report, that covers the intersection of War, Politics, and Technology. Its goal is to provide people with the frameworks needed to make sense of our relentlessly chaotic world. In other words, John helps people think clearly at a time when that kind help is in short supply.

In our conversation with John, we explore how the rapid power shifts we’re witnessing towards open source, and self-organizing networks are going to change the way we organize society and the economy.

We touched upon the fact that the emergent future of organizing may not disrupt or obsolete the existing markets, but rather coexist, and that there’s no way we can get away with ignoring the question concerning technology as society literally “becomes a technological artifact” as John said.

Here are some important links from the conversation:

•  John’s patreon page https://www.patreon.com/johnrobb
•  David Ronfeld, Tribes, Institutions, Markets and Networks, https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2005/P7967.pdf
•  John Arquilla, David Ronfeldt (eds): Networks and Netwars, The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy, https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1382.html
•  Marshall McLuhan, whose ideas were frequently mentioned in the conversation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan
•  The Cynefin Framework for Simple, Complicated, Complex and Chaotic domains, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7oz366X0-8
•  Examples of games mentioned that allow modifications to be developed in the kind of open source community: Fallout and Skyrim: https://fallout.bethesda.net/en/; https://elderscrolls.bethesda.net/en/skyrim
•  Code Academy, https://www.codecademy.com/
•  Cameo, a new platform for getting personalised messages from celebrities, https://www.cameo.com/
•  The company where John in 1996 wrote the report “personal broadcast networks” https://go.forrester.com/
•  How to Run a City Like Amazon and Other Fables, a multi-author future fiction imagining cities being run by different companies. https://shop.meatspacepress.com/product/how-to-run-a-city-like-amazon-and-other-fables

Key insights

1. The emergent future of organizing may not disrupt or obsolete the existing markets but rather coexist through different layers, such as Tribes, Institutions, Markets and Networks (like in David Ronfeld’s TIMN framework)

2. To build local resilience, local constituencies need to find ways to connect to the global system “on their own terms”, but still have enough local capacity to survive short- to medium-term disruptions (e.g. energy supply).

3. There’s no way we can get away with ignoring the question concerning technology as society literally “becomes a technological artifact” as John said, referring to various framings by Marshall McLuhan. The next frontier of this techno-social and entrepreneurial shift is according to John the virtual reality space.

? Boundaryless Conversations Podcast is about exploring the future of large scale organising by leveraging on technology, network effects and shaping narratives. We explore how platforms can help us play with a world in turmoil, change, and transformation: a world that is at the same time more interconnected and interdependent than ever but also more conflictual and rivalrous.