Nonlinear causality in Castells's network society: disorder as problem and opportunity under globalization

In this article I consider Castells's network society trilogy as a key site for examining claims that globalization today is driven by a new paradigm, in which networks and digital technologies play a decisive role in producing revolutionary new forms of economics, politics, culture and society. To theorize this change I draw on a rich, explicit account of non‐linear causal processes found in far‐from‐equilibrium cybernetics, foregrounding the all‐pervasive, constitutive phenomenon of disorder, coming from below as well as above through a multiplicity of networks, old and new, digital and non‐digital.