h/t Ivo Velitchkov

Introduction

What is systems thinking? The answer depends on whom you ask. Here are two commonperspectives from which you will get two different answers. Engineering. Here, systems thinking is what you need to build a system whose requirements go beyond current practice. Example: all stages in a plan to evolve into a national energy distribution system for low-emission transportation. Metapolitics (a neologism analogous to metamathematics). Here, systems thinking is what you need (1)to understand the ambient social systems in which we all have unconsciously long been embedded, and (2)to use that understanding to attempt to bring these systems into alignment with current needs, given some disruptive change such as newtechnology or increased scale. Example: modifying the global economy in response to climate change.

This essay is based on the Metapolitics perspective. In two Examples I explore perverse behavior patterns of two ambient social systems, a newoneandanolder one: 1. mass radicalization, disinformation, and other perverse social consequences secondary to new technologies that facilitate intensive everyone-to-everyone communication (for example, “social networking”), and 2. environmental destruction secondary to a compulsion to grow arising from the financing structures of public corporations. Analysis of both of these behavior patterns reveals a common element: Emergent behaviors, not anticipated in classical thinking, arise from highly intraconnected or coupled networks. This failure of classical thought leads to The Big Lesson I wish to communicate in this essay: THINK NETWORKSFIRST, ACTORS SECOND. Here is the importance of this lesson: Effective interventions will arise from altering interactions within networks. You cannot even see these interactions unless you focus on the network. This essay offers two examples that contradict the conventional understanding of Network Effects. We are living inside something we don’t understand.