eSubsidiarity: An Ethical Approach for living in complexity

Haeckel’s 1874 version of vertebrate embryonic development

By: José M. Díaz Nafría (Universidad de León, Spain;  University of Santa Elena (UPSE), Ecuador; Munich University of Applied Sciences, Germany)

Chapter published as: DÍAZ-NAFRÍA, J.M. (2017). eSubsidiarity: An Ethical Approach for Living in Complexity. En W. Hofkirchner, M. Burgin (eds.), The Future Information Society: Social and Technological Problems, Singapour: World Scientific Publishing. DOI: 10.1142/9789813108974_0004.

Abstract: It is needless to insist on the significant increase of the complexity we are living in. Whereas the social order arisen with modernity encompassed – at the level of the nation-states – a reduction of social complexity through cultural normalization, the new social and political order is nowadays, as a consequence of globalization, to be intercultural, multilingual and even multi-national. We may encounter a different way of diminishing the complexity at the level of the human agency, but we have to do it in a different way as modernity did it. The management of information and complexity in biology provides some clues to this endeavor. As we see, living beings through its management of complexity enact the subsidiarity principle that can equally be applied to the organization of decentralized political systems. It enables the decrease of complexity at the level of the heterarchical organized agents, while preserving the complexity at the global level. eSubsidiarity was essayed in Allende’s Chile following Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model and in many other human organizations. Could it become a new ethical paradigm at the information age?

• Draft version (pre-print in PDF) 

 

The Cybersyn Project as a Paradigm for Managing and Learning in Complexity

By: Henry Mauricio Ortiz Osorio (University of León, Spain); José María Díaz Nafría (University of Santa Elena, Santa Elena, Ecuador; Universidad de León, Spain; Munich University of Applied Sciences, Germany)

Published in: Systema 4(2) : 10-19 (2016)

Abstract: During the government of Salvador Allende, Chile implemented a paradigmatic system of control and regulation of production, emerged from the need of controlling and knowing the Chilean nationalized industry concerning the needs to provide. Allende believed that the transformation pathway to socialism could be different to those that had existed, and he suggested a model of integration with the worker as the core of process management and decision making. In that sense the Cybersyn project was designed with the goal of having a decentralized state control of the industrial production able to attend real needs properly and timely. Starting on real-time information that would anticipate and correct potential incidents before they even occur. The project provided valuable information on the nationalized companies for coordination and operation, being a political tool of vital importance for Allende’s government for which decision-making issues reach the most proper level. Latin American current processes of social disruption allow us to analyze the historical perspective of this project to find parallelizing, similarities and common points that allow us to extend the analysis of industrial relevance of these cases. Furthermore, the current political, economic and social reality has evolve in such a way that the Cybersyn model requires an adaptation to new relevant complex features of the social system which challenge its practicality.

• Full article (PDF)

 

Opportunities of Change: An Economist’s Perspective

By Peter Karl Fleissner (Vienna University of Technology)

Included in: Coenen, Hofkirchner, Díaz-Nafría (eds.) New ICTs and Social Media: Revolutions, Counter-Revolutions and Social Change, IRIE, vol. 18

Abstract: As contemporary scientific images of the economy by mainstream economists neglect historical changes, a method is needed to deal with the opportunities and possibilities of qualitative change, in particular in a period of evident crises. This paper sketches a methodology of reflecting the economy as an evolutionary/revolutionary process. There are two main reasons for that: The first is that scholars should think of reality in a more appropriate way, taking the fact into account that qualitative changes of the type of the economic reproduction process happened in the past and there is no reason that they will not also happen in future, the second, that new political movements demand a better life for all, not only for one per cent of the people.

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• Presentation and video of the lecture held at the international event: Social Networks: from indignation to change (ethical, political and aesthetic aspects), 2012, León (Spain)