BOW-TIE CONTROL SYSTEMS

Here's some fun big picture thinking that may help explain current global gyrations/shocks as we head into the rest of a difficult year. I find it to be an interesting model although your results may vary. As always, use it or discard it, it's your choice. Feedback is always welcome.
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The rapid growth of global guerrillas (the systems disrupting, crime fueled sons of global fragmentation), non-bank financial firms (hedge funds and investment banks that are cumulatively known as the "shadow banking system"), and cybercriminals can be explained by a fundamental restructuring of our global economic, energy, and communications system. In a little over a decade, this collection of relatively isolated systems (markets and networks) firmly ensconced within nation-state regulatory/legal structures (political economies and national networks) have merged into a single fluid global system (absent any meaningful global governance). This new structure has enabled a form of parasitic predation by these newly empowered participants, that puts the entire global order at risk.

The Bow-Tie
If we look at this new global system from a distance, its architecture is something called a Bow-Tie (aka "Platform"). This is a form of universal control system architecture that underlies complex systems from the Internet to cell metabolism (for background, read the excellent article, "Bow ties, metabolism, and disease" by Caltech's Marie Csete and John Doyle). While Bow-Tie architectures existed within the nation-state system, it was organically intertwined with political controls.
This new system is devoid of those organic connections. It's pure. The Bow-Tie architecture has the following features:

• Nearly unlimited scalability. The ability to accept a wide variety of inputs (the left bow) and convert them into a small set of universal building blocks (the knot). This, in combination with protocols for interconnection, enable a plug-and-play approach to building a wide variety of outputs (the right bow).
  
• Robust and evolvable at the same time. As environments change in the short term, new combinations can be made from the basic building blocks and protocols to meet new demands. Additionally, since the system is shared, any evolutionary innovation quickly propagates across the entire system.
  
• Fragility. The entire system is vulnerable to changes, perturbations, and hijacking within the core set of building blocks and protocols.

Parasitic Predation
The strength of the Bow-Tie is evident in its ability to handle a wide variety of environmental demands, both efficiently and quickly. However, it can suffer catastrophic breakdowns when the core building blocks and protocols (the knot) are hijacked by parasites. These parasites can use access to the core to radically accelerate growth and gain new flexibility/adaptability. Eventually, other critical processes are crowded out and the entire system collapses.

Comments

[Azr@el]

I don't know if there is a 'best' or even 'good' analogy for the world as it stands. How can a model be fashioned to explain a world that is driven by prime actors that are in turn shaped by a world that hasn't existed for a few years, in regards to the global insurgents, and which hasn't existed for generations, in regards to the leadership of the nation states attempting to maintain their monopoly on violence and their attendant societies. For what else are societies if not the means of organizing violence? Controlling it internally and focusing it outwards against the 'Others'.

We live in a world that is increasingly interconnected economically; I recently, through the good offices of a Ghanaian friend of a Ukrainian friend made the acquaintance of a jovial and somewhat jet-lagged Englishman. Over some remembrances of ALCOA and the flight lieutenant that would be president, he gave me a good overview of his factory in PNG that employs the natives through the use of Japanese capital to service the regional market with a locally made but globally branded product. And this was a text book perfect example of how it should be; the free flow of capital should uplift the world and transform it into a better place and turn a profit to boot.

But the other side of the equation, the missing half that would make this system stable; the free flow of people across increasing artificial and arbitrary borders. This is the root of instability in the world system, this is the bottleneck that will bring it down. We have global economic integration but we lack global political integration to handle such pressing and extremely delicate issues. Is there a model to analogize this state of affairs? Could there be a model to describe how the lag between the prejudices and limits of the imagination, as embodied in our leadership that grew up in the shadow of world war, at the height of triumphant jingoistic nationalism and institutionalized bigotries of a racial and ethnic nature, dooms our current world system to run like a sports car choked of fuel? And as we sputter, the chaos fueled by all of the dashed hopes of a planet souring into frustration gathers to have at the carcass.

[Jeffery]

Any other other graphic representations for nested bow-ties?

[namhenderson]

Maybe this>?

http://www.congo-education.net/wealth-of-networks/figure-7-5.gif

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