Because of this four-way assault on our existing societal institutions, even as good followers of Machiavelli, we have to expect dramatic shifts in how we do things in collectivities from the local to the global level. Many societal communities are already functioning according to such principles, most notably in open source development, global terrorism, political campaigning, or the alter-globalization movement. Networked forms of societies are becoming serious alternatives to modern societies and we need to better understand them if we want to succeed in today’s complex policy environments. So in 2010, Machiavelli would advise the prince to build her power base around open networked communities, transparency, standardized interfaces and a bold move to just sail unchartered waters to test their boundaries.

The Harvard International Review publishes an essay on The Fundamentals of Network Society by Alexander Schellong and Philipp Mueller.

Here’s the crux of the article:

“In the 21st Century the ‘network’ has transcended the academic context and entered the wider field of the political discourse. Policy networks, networked governance, peer production, massive collaboration, open government, and radical transparency have become part of our political vocabulary that we rely on to legitimize why and how we act collectively. With web technologies and social media, such as interchangeable data-formats, wikis, transparency, and social networking, network society has become part of the mainstream global public policy discourse.

The early 21st Century evoke a Machiavellian time—a time when new technologies and new forms of thinking and governance emerged. So, if we are living in times of transformative change, where Internet technologies and an understanding of society as a network of inclusive, some-how like-minded, outcome-oriented, collaborators emerges we need to ask, what the logic of network society is, to be able to explain our world and predict future developments. Dave Clark, one of the original architects of the Internet, argued in 1971: We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code.

There are two driving characteristics of the networked society: the ease to connect (technology) and the willingness to connect (social legitimacy) which redefine territoriality and increase complexity. The ease to connect stems from technologies that allow us to supersede territorial space and linear time. However, without a willingness to interact, the ability does not lead to a changed world. It is not technological determinism, but the interplay between new social practices and enabling technologies that have transformative potential. So, in a nutshell, there are four main principles and several corollaries that describe network society: the territoriality principle, the complexity principle, the technology principle, and the choice principle.”

The original article proceeds with formulating a series of four principles and subsidiary ‘corollary’ rules.