Connexity: How to Live in a Connected World

"It’s a very old English word, whose meaning is implied by the word itself. It refers to the interconnection of things, how things fit together. The book was written in 1997 and, in it, Mulgan makes three main thrusts. The first is that, because of the integration of economies, the arrival of the information age, the mixing of cultures, and global travel, the world is interconnected in ways that it has never been before. He argues that this has been a profound change, probably the biggest of our age. 25 years on, we can see the effects of the process he was talking about, with the internet, social media and so forth. He was way ahead of his time. This brings us back to the concept of systems. To truly understand the world, we need different frameworks from those we’ve been using for the last century, or the last 200 years. We need to be able to reimagine the way societies operate, and systems thinking is the way to do that. “I searched on the internet, but I couldn’t find a list of the nations ranked by their peacefulness” The second thing he said is that the mechanisms of governance we’ve got today are outdated. Current systems are hierarchical in nature. They’re built around politicians and government, or the legal entity of the corporation. But because of this interconnectivity now, the issues are much broader. We need to think of new ways of being able to govern. Part of that is the concept of the network. In our age, we can see networks everywhere, and we can see how networks actually create and distribute information in ways hierarchies never can. They can create movements. Think of Black Lives Matter, for example, whether in the US, the UK, or even in Australia. What networks can’t do is act effectively, because there is no real chain of command. Hierarchies are very, very effective at being able to do things. And so, unless you have got a hierarchy, it’s hard to really execute on something efficiently. Think of the military. They’re becoming more and more hierarchically bound because modern weapons and wars are happening so much faster. They need the process and disciplines in place to manage that. Think of an operating theatre. If you go in for an operation, do you want to go for an operation with a bunch of people who came together because they were networked on social media? Or do you want to go into it with people who have true and tried practices and procedures? So, as we move into this age now, somehow we have to have new ways of governance, which can look at the effects of the network, and combine these with old-fashioned hierarchical structures. The third aspect is this concept of a moral dilemma. As we look at the connectivity and challenges of the age, we see that a lot of them are global in nature. Climate change is the obvious one, with challenges to biodiversity and plastics in the ocean, amongst many others. Then there is war, which can affect all sorts of people beyond its immediate participants. We need to understand this interconnectivity. We need an ethics that understands we are intimately interconnected with others, and that their misfortune is our misfortune as well. COVID-19 would be an excellent example of that. No, more the issues of the age. Moving forward, we need to have multiple views of the way things operate. Hierarchies quite often just have a single view. We have to have multiple lenses. It’s not that we want to do away with hierarchies. The book is more about the philosophical way to think, rather than ‘here’s a new way to govern’."