“‘Segmented, polycentric, ideologically integrated networks’ (SPINs): By segmentary I mean that it is cellular, composed of many different groups…. By polycentric I mean that it has many different leaders or centers of direction…. By networked I mean that the segments and the leaders are integrated into reticulated systems or networks through various structural, personal, and ideological ties. Networks are usually unbounded and expanding…. This acronym [SPIN] helps us picture this organization as a fluid, dynamic, expanding one, spinning out into mainstream society”[1]. Networks as unbounded and expanding give a good picture of what the defining paradigm is within the network era. An integrated, increasingly connected global society that, instead of containing the bulwarks of industrial organisation and bordered nation-states caught within rigid international blocs, has an interconnected series of junctures and circuits (of global cities, airports and international trade routes). It is, as I described before[2], a dialectic relation of deconstruction/reconstruction, where the nature of things like community, industry and citizenship are a bricolage display of decentred variables that can be picked and chosen. It is best represented by the professional association and the logistical firm, both being fluid networks of value chains, human capital, social associations and horizontal communication channels.

“Our nation and our civilization were built on production, on building. Our forefathers and foremothers built roads and trains, farms and factories, then the computer, the microchip, the smartphone, and uncounted thousands of other things that we now take for granted, that are all around us, that define our lives and provide for our well-being”[1]. Marc Andreessen’s recent call to build as a means to regenerate American growth and reinvigorate ossifying institutions is an attempt to break through the latent stagnation in both American and wider Western growth patterns. A teleology of building to disrupt political deadlocks and move from neoliberalism or the California ideology (which has seen huge growth in software, financial engineering and logistics alongside a stagnation in productivity, wages and the “real” economy) to a state-led (or governance-led) post-Keynesian social order[2] with greater state-corporate partnership and a focus on infrastructure.

In modern politics and organisations more generally, the Weberian bureaucracy of clearly-organised hierarchies, lineated systems of control and a series of standardised processes, rules and outputs has been increasingly superseded by the advent of the network, a system of loose control configured more by ideological coherency and the inculcation of values. As Mintzberg describes the evolution of organisational environments, as complexity increases (i.e. the level of knowledge and information to be processed is greater) there is a growing trend toward decentralisation (to work constellations based on expertise and experience) and organic structure based around informal mutual adjustment and work group autonomy[1]. This can be seen in the fields of human resource management, media, think tanks and regulatory organisations acutely.

The hardening of modern political discourse and its dichotomous elements (establishment vs the people, remain vs leave, left vs right) suggest that our modern political institutions are unable to map the conversational nexus that increasingly fragments and recombines before it. The arenas of political discourse are discohered as their foundational axioms are themselves brought to question, turned upside down as alien norms that no longer structure our social institutions. “The rules are now part of the divisions themselves and thus no longer represent a structured, binding worldview. Axioms are being liquefied and institutions don’t have an answer to it”[1].

The realities and codes of modern politics as a series of negotiations and compromises between political actors over distributional, international and regulatory affairs are giving way to something more viscous and difficult to map. The codifications of politics as a delineation of ideological variation between competing but generally set groups whose ideas were known through manifestos and negotiated through shared axioms are now being de-codified as situations are becoming more and more complex, eating away at these institutional capacities to cope. The axioms that were before set in place through loose constitutional frameworks and arenas for debate (parliaments, congresses and ballot boxes) are now becoming battlegrounds and fissures where difference gives way to disconnection and insularity, and where the totality of politics that was previously found in negotiated strategies is now found in singular issues and neo-tribal forms.

The recent political scene of the West can be seen as the growth of fragmentation of nationality, social identity and the political collectivity. The most obvious events come to mind: Trump, Brexit, the Gilets Jaunes and other currents of populist fervour. However these events have greater lineages than is supposed in most media narratives. The tribalism present in modern politics and the ideological variation are built from blocks made during the fall of mass parties and the increasing relevance of policy automaticity and the growth of life politics. A politics of antagonism has built itself upon infrastructure of political disengagement and senses of consensus.

“The tribal form, at its best, embodies high ideals about how a society should be organized and how people should treat each other”[1]. The tribe is the ur-form of the human socius, becoming the building blocks of further governmental assemblages as human societies increased in complexity and scale to encompass different forms of order, from kingdoms and empires to feudal suzerainties to constitutional states and liberal democracies. However, as systems evolved and concatenated, the tribal form remained as an essential presence amongst more complex elements. The language of governance still holds sway to notions of fraternity, affinity and the centrality of councils for discussion and dissemination. While the modes for these forms have been largely de-ethnicised and scaled away from kinship groups toward complex levels of decision-making, the notion remains of maintaining common bonds around bordered and segmented spatio-temporal series.