Oo, another copy of a P3 comment following a brilliant one-liner from MT and Susan Anderson's skepticism about planetary management.
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"I have trouble with the fundamental premise of “we need to manage the planet”. That seems to be exactly where we have lost our way..."

“We need to thread a path between anarchy and fascism, maintaining an unstable balance between two devastating equilibria.”

These could be read as saying the same thing. Elinor Ostrom addressed the same issue in her final article. It's the subject of J.C Scott's Seeing like a State, which does better at identifying the problems than any solutions. Stafford Beer tried addressing it but just designed a different kind of centralised system.

There are already global networks and systems. Transnational companies are so effective because they can reduce transaction costs internally and do away with many uncertainties. They are doing many things politicians tell us are impossible or dangerously socialist/technocratic. It's just they're doing it for their own aims, which is apparently fine.

Fundamentally, no - we can't 'manage the planet', can we? But are there any other routes to take other than to throw our hands in the air, concurring with Agent Smith that we're no better than a virus - or:

So far, we’re not doing any better than cyanobacteria. We consume resources and reproduce until everything is filled up and used up. Okay, we have a few successes, for example in controlling acid rain and CFCs. But on balance, we don’t do much better than the bacteria.

That's result of the extreme freedom end of the spectrum - that we can all act according to our own wills and somehow the best of all worlds will result. This treats our social structures like mystical gods - "as if correctly sensing the importance of sunlight for life on earth, we were to merely worship the sun rather than study astronomy or photosynthesis" (Desai 1994, p.47, talking about Hayek's take on the price system).

J.C Scott's point is all about the logical conclusion of the 'gaze' of top-down state planning, which is the other end of the spectrum.

I have no idea how we get from all this theory to new systems that can help. The problem with successful systems (like successful cognitive algorithms) is that they generally have to evolve through trial and error in a high-cost environment. I suppose we are increasingly going to face such an environment.

Human nature has a good trick though - this is a key Jane Jacobs point when she talks about the 'logic' of productivity in dense networks: "the process is full of surprises and is hard to predict - possibly it is unpredictable - before it has happened." She likens it to art: an attentive feedback by those creating. "At any rate, messages - that is, suggestions - afforded by the parent work seem to be vital to the process." [p.59, Economy of Cities 1969]

So there's this process of deliberative creation, fumbling, mistakes, recombination - as humans, we get to benefit not only from the power of evolution but of our own ability to be discerning as we feel our way forward. We then need to build platforms on platforms on platforms as we find what works [got a bit of a thing about platforms after reading Steven Johnson]

That's my take on the middle way anyhoo.