Beyond Dystopia: Is It Time for a Seventh Base of Social Power?
When I wrote Beyond Dystopia: Crafting Characters with Diverse Social Power to Inspire Positive Change, I explored how John French and Bertram Raven's six bases of social power could help writers build richer ensemble casts. Looking at climate fiction through that lens revealed something fascinating: hopeful stories rarely rely on a single heroic protagonist, or purely evil antagonist. They rely on people with different kinds of influence learning to work together.
The framework itself has already evolved once.
When French and Raven first introduced their theory in 1959, they identified five bases of social power: coercive, reward, legitimate, expert, and referent. Years later, informational power was added as a sixth category because the ability to influence through access to knowledge was distinct enough to deserve its own place in the model. We could argue that in the wake of AI, that may no longer be the case. But, that's a question for another time.
That history raises an interesting question.
As our societies become increasingly interconnected, are we beginning to see another distinct form of social power emerge that is is significant enough to be included?
While developing the screenplay for The Exchange, which I'm entering into the XPRIZE Future Vision competition next month, I kept encountering characters who didn't fit comfortably into any of the existing six categories. They weren't primarily influencing through authority, expertise, information, rewards, punishment, or even charisma. Yet they consistently changed the trajectory of everyone around them.
Eventually, I realized what they were doing.
They were connecting.
Not simply introducing people to one another, but connecting disciplines, perspectives, generations, cultures, and seemingly unrelated ideas in ways that created entirely new possibilities.
I don't think this is simply a subset of referent or informational power.
Referent power asks us to trust the individual.
Informational power asks us to trust the knowledge.
Connection power asks us to trust what becomes possible between people.
I would define it this way:
Connection Power is the ability to create new possibilities by connecting people, ideas, disciplines, or systems that were previously separate.
Unlike the other bases of power, connection power doesn't diminish when it is shared.
It compounds.
Every meaningful connection creates the possibility for relationships that did not previously exist. A scientist meets an artist. An economist collaborates with an ecologist. A physician begins a conversation with a philosopher. The connector may never become the public face of the resulting innovation, yet without them, the innovation might never have emerged.
Nature has been demonstrating this principle for billions of years.
Forests are not governed by a single organism. They emerge from countless relationships among trees, fungi, microbes, insects, animals, water, and soil. No one species controls the ecosystem. The health of the whole depends upon the quality of the connections between its parts.
Increasingly, human innovation appears to work the same way.
The breakthroughs that shape civilizations rarely come from a single discipline. They emerge where disciplines overlap—where biology meets artificial intelligence, engineering meets psychology, economics meets ecology, or storytelling meets technology.
Connection power is not about possessing the best answer.
It is about creating the conditions where better answers can emerge.
This realization changed how I thought about every major character in The Exchange. Naomi doesn't simply lead a crew; she assembles the right combination of people. Maria connects faith and medicine. Isla connects ecology and civilization. Franco connects beauty and systems thinking. Tenzin connects artificial intelligence with human wisdom. Even MENA, the story's AI, ultimately evolves not by becoming more intelligent, but by becoming more relational.
Perhaps that is why these characters feel different to me.
Their influence is not measured by how many people they command.
It is measured by how many people become more capable because they found one another.
Whether connection power ultimately deserves recognition as a seventh base of social power is, of course, open for discussion. French and Raven themselves demonstrated that useful frameworks evolve as society evolves. My hope is not to replace their work, but to continue the conversation.
If the twentieth century rewarded those who accumulated information, perhaps the twenty-first century will increasingly reward those who can connect it.
And if that's true, then perhaps the most influential leaders of the future won't be those with the loudest voices or the highest titles.
They'll be the ones who help the rest of us discover what becomes possible when we stop asking, "Who has the power?" and start asking, "What can we create together?"