Entering Chaos: Designing the State in the Information Age

The emergence of the information society has contributed to the increasing relevance of civil society issues, both directly by altering the relationship between the state and civil society, and indirectly by affecting other geopolitical changes that are also of importance to civil society. In the information age, those who hold to romantic conceptions equating the nation-state with states that emerged in Western Europe and North America over the past few hundred years today experience increasing uncertainty and the erosion of the effectiveness of traditional modes of power as vulnerabilities. 1 An alternative conception, however, can now be developed at the intersection of theories of organizational evolution, second-order cybernetics, and chaos. At this theoretical and historical conjuncture, it is possible to see the nation-state as an evolving organizational form or system ideally characterized by the self-amplifying causal loops of autopoiesis and morphogenesis and by the holographic distribution of information and decision making. From this perspective, today's turbulence in traditional social and political relations is to be viewed as an experimental period necessary for the transformation required for survival under rapidly changing inte1nal and external conditions. As part of this period of change, there are new ways for civil society to relate to the state.