universal mobile technology and the architecture of the World Wide Web, have come from Europe or other parts of the world, their optimal business realization in software product form seems to have happened in the United States. Our central case in point is the propagation of Internet technology, which has been in recent years the major evolutionary factor in the percolation of new system architectures, following the general Darwinian rules that were themselves at the core of American democracy and capitalism. In fact, at about the same time that the Internet was emerging from its formative cocoon within DARPA and a select university culture within the United States, France introduced the Minitel network. It offered many of the same characteristics as the Internet. However, based as it was in the strict discipline of government control reflective of the Catholic heritage of France, it lacked the propagation impetus necessary to compete with the geometric progression of Internet dispersion during the decade of the 1990’s.

We see the emergence of democratic systems from a protestant Christian basis as one current boundary of the continuing evolution of group-selection mechanisms. Within the United States, one might speak of the separation of church and state, but conceptually we see democratic institutions as a direct refinement of religious systems and as specifically subsuming these systems. The primary difference is found in the basis of the trust infrastructures that are the natural boundary of state democracy. The religious preeminence found in the Declaration of Independence anticipates the ascendance of democratic control by the Constitution over church in a conscious decision by the founders of the United States. It was a decision that was subscribed to by the resident populations that confirmed the governmental foundation of the United States Constitution. The church exerts influence over policy in the form of the evaluation of moral values, but the authority over the structure of the policy framework lies with representative democracy.

In the context of our evaluation of the evolution of computer technology, we can compare this situation with other relationships between religion, church and state, as with Buddhism and Hinduism in much of central Asia, Confucianism in China and Shinto in Japan, Catholicism in Europe and South America, Judaism in Israel, and the same or other religions in other parts of the world. With Islam, for example, the relationship is typically one in which religion is either ostensibly superior to state or invokes very specific policy definitions within the state construct. In some instances, for example Iran, the state is an institutional theocracy; sharia effectively forms the basis for the law of the land. Within this social order, Islam is the superior trust infrastructure with the state being subsumed by it. Pakistan and Turkey are on a democratic spectrum defined in relationship with Islam. Should we then say that democracy is the sharia of Christianity, expressing in one formula the conflicting tensions on the trust infrastructure? (We are not alone is this question, as exemplified in Religion et démocratie, edited by Patrick Michel.) In all of these example situations, the central point of interest to us is how trust infrastructures are established and how they impact subordinate policy infrastructures. Specifically, how can these mechanisms and relationships be translated into a model for social ecosystems and, through this model, can we better understand the development and utilization of computers, computer systems and networks?

So, let us begin the process of extracting a model of social ecosystems through which we can then qualitatively examine the structure of human grouping mechanisms found within them; and, lest it be forgotten, the primary mechanisms through which group endeavors are effected are those facilities that we’ve previously termed trust and policy. To do so, we need to first examine the evolutionary stages of groups, what characteristics influenced their progression and the situation currently manifested by the resulting mechanisms.

Book available at Midori Press (regular)
Book available at Midori Press (signed)
Book available at Amazon (regular)