the human network

The Day TV Died

On the 18th of October in 2004, a UK cable channel, SkyOne, broadcast the premiere episode of Battlestar Galactica, writer-producer Ron Moore’s inspired revisioning of the decidedly campy 70s television series. SkyOne broadcast the episode as soon as it came off the production line, but its US production partner, the SciFi Channel, decided to hold off until January – a slow month for television – before airing the episodes. The audience for Battlestar Galactica, young and technically adept, made digital recordings of the broadcasts as they went to air, cut out the commercials breaks, then posted them to the Internet.

For an hour-long television programme, a lot of data needs to be dragged across the Internet, enough to clog up even the fastest connection. But these young science fiction fans used a new tool, BitTorrent, to speed the bits on their way. BitTorrent allows a large number of computers (in this case, over 10,000 computers were involved) to share the heavy lifting. Each of the computers downloaded pieces of Battlestar Galactica, and as each got a piece, they offered it up to any other computer which wanted a copy of that piece. Like a forest of hands each trading puzzle pieces, each computer quickly assembled a complete copy of the show.

All of this happened within a few hours of Battlestar Galactica going to air. That same evening, on the other side of the Atlantic, American fans watched the very same episode that their fellow fans in the UK had just viewed. They liked what they saw, and told their friends, who also downloaded the episode, using BitTorrent. Within just a few days, perhaps a hundred thousand Americans had watched the show.

US cable networks regularly count their audience in hundreds of thousands. A million would be considered incredibly good. Executives for SciFi Channel ran the numbers and assumed that the audience for this new and very expensive TV series had been seriously undercut by this international trafficking in television. They couldn’t have been more wrong. When Battlestar Galactica finally aired, it garnered the biggest audiences SciFi Channel had ever seen – well over 3 million viewers.

How did this happen? Word of mouth. The people who had the chops to download Battlestar Galactica liked what they saw, and told their friends, most of whom were content to wait for SciFi Channel to broadcast the series. The boost given the series by its core constituency of fans helped it over the threshold from cult classic into a genuine cultural phenomenon. Battlestar Galactica has become one of the most widely-viewed cable TV series in history; critics regularly lavish praise on it, and yes, fans still download it, all over the world.

Although it might seem counterintuitive, the widespread “piracy” of Battlestar Galactica was instrumental to its ratings success. This isn’t the only example. BBC’s Dr. Who, leaked to BitTorrent by a (quickly fired) Canadian editor, drummed up another huge audience. It seems, in fact, that “piracy” is good. Why? We live in an age of fantastic media oversupply: there are always too many choices of things to watch, or listen to, or play with. But, if one of our friends recommends something, something they loved enough to spend the time and effort downloading, that carries a lot of weight.

All of this sharing of media means that the media titans – the corporations which produce and broadcast most of the television we watch – have lost control over their own content. Anything broadcast anywhere, even just once, becomes available everywhere, almost instantaneously. While that’s a revolutionary development, it’s merely the tip of the iceberg. The audience now has the ability to share anything they like – whether produced by a media behemoth, or made by themselves. YouTube has allowed individuals (some talented, some less so) reach audiences numbering in hundreds of millions. The attention of the audience, increasingly focused on what the audience makes for itself, has been draining ratings away from broadcasters, a drain which accelerates every time someone posts something funny, or poignant, or instructive to YouTube.

The mass media hasn’t collapsed, but it has been hollowed out. The audience occasionally tunes in – especially to watch something newsworthy, in real-time – but they’ve moved on. It’s all about what we’re saying directly to one another. The individual – every individual – has become a broadcaster in his or her own right. The mechanics of this person-to-person sharing, and the architecture of these “New Networks”, are driven by the oldest instincts of humankind.

The New Networks

Human beings are social animals. Long before we became human – or even recognizably close – we became social. For at least 11 million years, before our ancestors broke off from the gorillas and chimpanzees, we cultivated social characteristics. In social groups, these distant forbears could share the tasks of survival: finding food, raising young, and self-defense. Human babies, in particular, take many years to mature, requiring constantly attentive parenting – time stolen away from other vital activities. Living in social groups helped ensure that these defenseless members of the group grew to adulthood. The adults who best expressed social qualities bore more and healthier children. The day-to-day pressures of survival on the African savannahs drove us to be ever more adept with our social skills.

We learned to communicate with gestures, then (no one knows just how long ago) we learned to speak. Each step forward in communication reinforced our social relationships; each moment of conversation reaffirms our commitment to one another, every spoken word an unspoken promise to support, defend and extend the group. As we communicate, whether in gestures or in words, we build models of one another’s behavior. (This is why we can judge a friend’s reaction to some bit of news, or a joke, long before it comes out of our mouths.) We have always walked around with our heads full of other people, a tidy little “social network,” the first and original human network. We can hold about 150 other people in our heads (chimpanzees can manage about 30, gorillas about 15, but we’ve got extra brains they don’t to help us with that), so, for 90% of human history, we lived in tribes of no more than about 150 individuals, each of us in constant contact, a consistent communication building and reinforcing bonds which would make us the most successful animals on Earth. We learned from one another, and shared whatever we learned; a continuity of knowledge passed down seamlessly, generation upon generation, a chain of transmission that still survives within the world’s indigenous communities. Social networks are the gentle strings which connect us to our origins.

This is the old network. But it’s also the new network. A few years ago, researcher Mizuko Ito studied teenagers in Japan, to find that these kids – all of whom owned mobile telephones – sent as many as a few hundred text messages, every single day, to the same small circle of friends. These messages could be intensely meaningful (the trials and tribulations of adolescent relationships), or just pure silliness; the content mattered much less than that constant reminder and reinforcement of the relationship. This “co-presence,” as she named it, represents the modern version of an incredibly ancient human behavior, a behavior that had been unshackled by technology, to span vast distances. These teens could send a message next door, or halfway across the country. Distance mattered not: the connection was all.

In 2001, when Ito published her work, many dismissed her findings as a by-product of those “wacky Japanese” and their technophile lust for new toys. But now, teenagers everywhere in the developed world do the same thing, sending tens to hundreds of text messages a day. When they run out of money to send texts (which they do, unless they have very wealthy parents), they simply move online, using instant messaging and MySpace and other techniques to continue the never-ending conversation.

We adults do it too, though we don’t recognize it. Most of us who live some of our lives online, receive a daily dose of email: we flush the spam, answer the requests and queries of our co-workers, deal with any family complaints. What’s left over, from our friends, more and more consists of nothing other than a link to something – a video, a website, a joke – somewhere on the Internet. This new behavior, actually as old as we are, dates from the time when sharing information ensured our survival. Each time we find something that piques our interest, we immediately think, “hmm, I bet so-and-so would really like this.” That’s the social network in our heads, grinding away, filtering our experience against our sense of our friends’ interests. We then hit the “forward” button, sending the tidbit along, reinforcing that relationship, reminding them that we’re still here – and still care. These “Three Fs” – find, filter and forward – have become the cornerstone of our new networks, information flowing freely from person-to-person, in weird and unpredictable ways, unbounded by geography or simultaneity (a friend can read an email weeks after you send it), but always according to long-established human behaviors.

One thing is different about the new networks: we are no longer bounded by the number of individuals we can hold in our heads. Although we’ll never know more than 150 people well enough for them to take up some space between our ears (unless we grow huge, Spock-like minds) our new tools allow us to reach out and connect with casual acquaintances, or even people we don’t know. Our connectivity has grown into “hyperconnectivity”, and a single individual, with the right message, at the right time, can reach millions, almost instantaneously.

This simple, sudden, subtle change in culture has changed everything.

The Nuclear Option

On the 12th of May in 2008, a severe earthquake shook a vast area of southeast Asia, centered in the Chinese state of Sichuan. Once the shaking stopped – in some places, it lasted as long as three minutes – people got up (when they could, as may lay under collapsed buildings), dusted themselves off, and surveyed the damage. Those who still had power turned to their computers to find out what had happened, and share what had happened to them. Some of these people used so-called “social messaging services”, which allowed them to share a short message – similar to a text message – with hundreds or thousands of acquaintances in their hyperconnected social networks.

Within a few minutes, people on every corner of the planet knew about the earthquake – well in advance of any reports from Associated Press, the BBC, or CNN. This network of individuals, sharing information each other through their densely hyperconnected networks, spread the news faster, more effectively, and more comprehensively than any global broadcaster.

This had happened before. On 7 July 2005, the first pictures of the wreckage caused by bombs detonated within London’s subway system found their way onto Flickr, an Internet photo-sharing service, long before being broadcast by BBC. A survivor, waking past one of the destroyed subway cars, took snaps from her mobile and sent them directly on to Flickr, where everyone on the planet could have a peek. One person can reach everyone else, if what they have to say (or show) merits such attention, because that message, even if seen by only one other person, will be forwarded on and on, through our hyperconnected networks, until it has been received by everyone for whom that message has salience. Just a few years ago, it might have taken hours (or even days) for a message to traverse the Human Network. Now it happens a few seconds.

Most messages don’t have a global reach, nor do they need one. It is enough that messages reach interested parties, transmitted via the Human Network, because just that alone has rewritten the rules of culture. An intemperate CEO screams at a consultant, who shares the story through his network: suddenly, no one wants to work for the CEO’s firm. A well-connected blogger gripes about problems with his cable TV provider, a story forwarded along until – just a half-hour later – he receives a call from a vice-president of that company, contrite with apologies and promises of an immediate repair. An American college student, arrested in Egypt for snapping some photos in the wrong place at the wrong time, text messages a single word – “ARRESTED” – to his social network, and 24 hours later, finds himself free, escorted from jail by a lawyer and the American consul, because his network forwarded this news along to those who could do something about his imprisonment.

Each of us, thoroughly hyperconnected, brings the eyes and ears of all of humanity with us, wherever we go. Nothing is hidden anymore, no secret safe. We each possess a ‘nuclear option’ – the capability to go wide, instantaneously, bringing the hyperconnected attention of the Human Network to a single point. This dramatically empowers each of us, a situation we are not at all prepared for. A single text message, forwarded perhaps a million times, organized the population of Xiamen, a coastal city in southern China, against a proposed chemical plant – despite the best efforts of the Chinese government to sensor the message as it passed through the state-run mobile telephone network. Another message, forwarded around a community of white supremacists in Sydney’s southern suburbs, led directly to the Cronulla Riots, two days of rampage and attacks against Sydney’s Lebanese community, in December 2005.

When we watch or read stories about the technologies of sharing, they almost always center on recording companies and film studios crying poverty, of billions of dollars lost to ‘piracy’. That’s a sideshow, a distraction. The media companies have been hurt by the Human Network, but that’s only a minor a side-effect of the huge cultural transformation underway. As we plug into the Human Network, and begin to share that which is important to us with others who will deem it significant, as we learn to “find the others”, reinforcing the bonds to those others every time we forward something to them, we dissolve the monolithic ties of mass media and mass culture. Broadcasters, who spoke to millions, are replaced by the Human Network: each of us, networks in our own right, conversing with a few hundred well-chosen others. The cultural consensus, driven by the mass media, which bound 20th-century nations together in a collective vision, collapses into a Babel-like configuration of social networks which know no cultural or political boundaries.

The bomb has already dropped. The nuclear option has been exercised. The Human Network brought us together, and broke us apart. But in these fragments and shards of culture we find an immense vitality, the protean shape of the civilization rising to replace the world we have always known. It all hinges on the transition from sharing to knowing.

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For at least the last thousand years, fishermen trawling off the southern Indian state of Kerala have faced a perpetual question: which market will bring them the best price for their fish? The fishermen have a broad selection of ports where they can unload and sell their catch, but if too many boats pull into a port, the market, oversupplied with fish, won’t pay the fishermen enough even to cover their costs. This market failure has kept the fishermen of Kerala perpetually poor, eking out a subsistence-level wage, despite the rich harvest from the seas.

In 1997, as India began its sweeping ascent into industrialization, the newly-deregulated telecommunications industry blanketed the country with mobile transceiver towers. Some of these towers, strung along the Kerala shoreline, could project their signals up to 25 km out to sea, well within the range of the fishermen on their sturdy dhows.

Although mobile telephony isn’t expensive in India, relative to incomes, it’s extremely dear. A typical cheap mobile telephone – such as the Nokia 1100, the most popular consumer electronics device in history – costs the equivalent of several thousand dollars. One wealthy fisherman did purchase a mobile telephone, and brought it with him to sea. At some point, he communicated with the mainland: perhaps a family call. During the call, he learned of a market desperately in need of fish. He set his sails for that port, and made a tidy profit. The next day, he made a few calls into shore, and again learned where he might sell his catch for the highest price. A seeing man in the kingdom of the blind, this fisherman very quickly earned far more money than any of his competitors.

More than any other species, human beings copy the behaviors of our peers; a recent scientific study showed that young chimpanzees scored better than toddlers on cognitive tasks, but that toddlers proved far more adept at ‘aping’ the behavior of others. We are wired to observe, learn from and copy the behavior of others. The Kerala fisherman noted the success of this ‘king fisher,’ and, despite the staggering cost – equivalent to a month’s income – purchased their own mobiles. Within a few months, all of Kerala’s fishermen used mobiles to coordinate their sales into the Kerala fishmarkets. Each market had just the right amount of fish, selling at just the right price, to guarantee each fisherman a tidy profit. A thousand year-old problem had been solved – and the fishermen now earn so much more money that those very expensive mobile telephones recoup their costs in just two months!

A decade ago, half the world had never made a telephone call. Today, over half the world owns a mobile telephone. Study after study indicate that the vast swath of the world’s medium poor (those who earn anything from a few dollars to a few tens of dollars a day) dramatically improve their earning potential with a mobile telephone. Microfinance organizations, such as Grameen Bank, founded by Nobel Peace Prize-winning economist Muhammad Yunnis, have established their own telecommunications companies, geared to serve the needs of the poor, knowing that connectivity is one of the keys to solving the perpetual problem of poverty. Meanwhile, across Africa and Asia, billions who had been left behind in drive to globalization, purchase a mobile knowing it to be their passport to economic advancement.

Why is connectivity so important to success? You may as well ask if a deaf-mute could participate in an auction. We need to be able to communicate to participate in The Human Network; as we better our ability to communicate, we reap the benefits of a deeper participation. All of this is old, old knowledge, buried deep within our cultures, our bodies and our brains, and it has suddenly accelerated and amplified, wiring us into The Human Network, connecting us directly to the rest of humanity.

We can alert the entire planet with a text message, create a market with just a word, scour the best minds on Earth in search of answers to our questions. All of this, unexpected by economists, sociologists or technologists, is now available to the majority of humanity, and – within just a few years – will have encompassed all but the billion most desperately poor individuals. As we pile onto The Human Network, exploring our newfound ability to communicate across every barrier nature and culture have placed in our path, we consistently increase our effectiveness, watching and copying our peers – just as the Kerala fishermen did.

We can chart our path to into this startling future by taking a good look at the present. Many of the forces shaping and benefits delivered by The Human Network have already appeared; some in embryonic form, some now fully grown. We can communicate, and share with one another; we can pool our shared knowledge resources to increase our intelligence, improving our ability to make good decisions; once smarter, we can band together – across nations, across cultures, across the world – to achieve our economic, social and political goals. All of this is already happening, and all of it will change everything in the human world.

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I.

I have always loved to write. As far back as I possessed the capability to scribble a coherent narrative onto a piece of paper, I’ve written stories. I remember writing a short story in third or fourth grade, about astronauts on the first voyage to Mars. Many words about the launch, a few words about the journey, then a quick, mysterious conclusion once they landed. It all ended rather badly, I recall, with just a last call for help coming across the twenty-minute delayed airwaves, before all went silent.

In my senior year of high school, when I took “advanced placement” English, I had a teacher who was both English and the mother of one of my good friends. In a small class – only about ten of us – unmercifully drilling the rules and structure of the essay into us, she points off for every misspelled word. As I have always spelled atrociously, I had to make up for it by scoring very highly on composition skills. (Thankfully, computers do our spelling for us now, which shows you the banality of the task – better automated than done by a person.) I learned to avoid the passive voice, learned to litter my texts with commas - to better approximate the cadence of the “inner voice”, and wrote a thirty-page research paper on T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, which, I now realize, I understood not at all.

At MIT, I had the good fortune to have Frank Conroy as my lecturer in a short story writing workshop. MIT, hardly known as a bastion of the humanities – except insofar as economics, the dismal science, falls under that umbrella – did have the money and the reputation to attract some of the very best writers and thinkers in the United States. William Irwin Thompson, whom I regard as one of the fundamental influences in my thinking, taught at MIT in the 1960s, if only so he could spend the next thirty years writing piercing critiques of managerial civilization. Frank Conroy, by the time I’d met him, had already received broad critical acclaim for his novel-memoire Stop-Time, which received a nomination for the National Book Award. A classic archetype of the humanities professor, with tweed jacket and pullover sweater and an unruly shock of graying hair and nicotine stains on his teeth, Conroy loved writing, and passed that love along to his students. At MIT, where most writing took place in LISP or FORTRAN, not English, that represented a Sisyphean task. Students enrolled in humanities courses not for any love of Proust or Picasso or Prokofiev, but because they had graduation requirements to fulfill. Resented as interruptions in the “real” work of mastering nature, the humanities continue thrive at MIT despite persistent institutional neglect. None of this seemed to bother Conroy; he took the shy freshmen who attended his lectures and drew them out, encouraging them to explore the world inside their heads on the written page.

That year, I won the Freshman Fiction Award at MIT – my only moment of academic distinction during my curtailed tenure there. Frank Conroy deserves the credit for that. He taught me to avoid the passive voice: “Look to Orwell. Read Nineteen Eighty-Four. You can go pages before you read a single sentence in the passive voice.” He taught me that the true stories, the best stories, come from experience. Write what you know, as clearly and capably as you can. Show, don’t tell; let the story expose itself.

I failed academically at MIT, missing many, many lectures – too depressed, some days, to get out of bed until after sunset. Nonetheless, at the end of term, writing prize in hand, I visited Conroy in his office, to thank him. He seemed genuinely surprised and touched. “I’m just sorry we didn’t have more time together,” he remarked, gently upbraiding me for my ever-more-frequent absences. “I’m leaving at the end of term.” Conroy had just received an appointment to head the Literature Program at the National Endowment for the Arts, a perch from which he would nurture an entire generation of American writers. That was the last time I ever saw him.

That last sentence, in the passive voice, marks the first you’ve read so far. Frank Conroy taught me well.

II.

Fourteen years later, following the invention of VRML, I received an offer from a technical publishing company, New Riders Publishing, to write the very first book on VRML. I’d never thought I’d have the opportunity to write a book on any subject; in the years since dropping out of MIT, I’d become a professional software engineer. With only a few small exceptions, all of my writing took place in assembly language or ‘C’. I poured my intellect into code, banging bits, breathing life into programs. But a book about a subject near and dear to me, a subject that I (arguably) knew better than any other person, that seemed tailor-made. I accepted, without really knowing what would happen next.

I procrastinated. And procrastinated. Something about facing not just a single sheet of blank paper, but two hundred of them, freaked me out. My publisher, growing worried, finally sent me an email which simply read:

Your house is burning down.

Meaning, I suppose, that unless I delivered a manuscript, more or less immediately, that’d be an end to it. No book, no deal, no nothing. I flew to my father’s house, just outside of Boston, sat down at my laptop, and cranked out the manuscript – all 350 pages – in just 31 days.

I know that’s considered extraordinarily fast, but I’ve always written quickly. Words either come or they do not, and I can gauge my own engagement with the subject by how quickly they come. (For example, I’ve written the last thousand-or-so words in an hour’s time. That’s just about my usual rate when I’m writing.) Writing can not be forced. If it takes days to write a single paragraph, I’ve learned to recognize that I’m simply not yet ready to write. Though never fickle, my muse won’t be hurried. But, when I’m ready to write, it becomes almost impossible to avoid. The words create a strange pressure within me, wanting to pound their way out of my head and onto the page. Over the years, that pressure has driven me to produce several thousand pages of written works: books, scholarly articles, opinions and commentaries, and many, many essays.

The essay is my preferred form. It feels appropriate and very natural. From the French for “to attempt” (essayer), an essay allows the author to mix the personal and subjective with the actual and authoritative. Joan Didion – perhaps the greatest American essayist of the 20th century (and, so far, the greatest of the 21st) – combined her own neurotic and apocalyptic visions of a culture in collapse with the observational techniques of a city desk reporter to produce Slouching Towards Bethlehem, perhaps the definitive assessment of the 60’s counterculture in San Francisco. William Irwin Thompson combined his own neurotic and apocalyptic visions of a culture in collapse with the observational techniques of a ethnographer to produce Getting Back to Things at MIT, arguably the definitive humanistic critique of late Industrial Era civilization. (As a student at MIT, I received a reprint of that essay no fewer than three times – on the first day of three different humanities classes.) Hunter S. Thompson, though normally thought of as a journalist, wrote as an essayist: personal, poignant, and angry. And neurotic and apocalyptic.

Neurosis, we’ve learned, consists of a state of anxious awareness. Neurotics, intensely aware of the world around them, fear it may suddenly strike against them. Apparently, this has survival value: in times of chaos, the neurotic is the seeing man in the kingdom of the blind, and lives long enough to pass his neurotic genes along to another neurotic generation. Neurotics are nearly always apocalyptic in their thinking; the interior landscape of imminent doom, amplified across the perceptions of the psyche, become the visions of St. John of Patmos, a current of literature that flows on down through the ages to the Quetzalcoatl prophesies of Daniel Pinchbeck.

I am a neurotic, and my penchant toward the apocalyptic, well documented on YouTube and through various other media freely downloadable on the Internet, leaves little to the imagination. That I have gone quiet about various apocalyptic scenarios (for instance, I have said nothing about “2012” since a talk given at Burning Man in 2006) does not mean that I no longer entertain them. I read my various blogs, each of which, in its own particular way, echoes my apocalyptic turn of mind. I can fantasy an oil crash, or an economic crash, a crash of civilizational over-complexity (as New Scientist did, just a few weeks ago), or dream of a sudden, machinic singularity. I can scare myself, grinning into the funhouse mirrors of my neurotic mind, and, in so doing, come back with some ideas, which, when clothed in the appropriate language, seem not so much scary as entertaining and enlightening. Neurosis as creative strength.

But it does not do to scare the horses. Although my fellow neurotics want to hear the rising winds of chaos battering at the flimsy walls of human culture, I do not want to be a prophet. Instead, reason prevails throughout my work. Although The Playful World closes on what could be read as an fairly apocalyptic note, a world where the tide of history reverses, and parents learn the new language of the world from their children (a vision which, I will note here, appears to be coming to pass), those last few pages present a vista broad enough to allow a multitude of different readings. I do not intend to scare, and if you feel your heart beating faster as you close the pages of that book, that tells you more about you than about me. I simply painted as honest picture as I knew how.

My next book – the current book – will definitively end on an apocalyptic note. I wrestled with this, for many months, until I accepted that if I tell the story in any other way, it will not feel true. The transformations in human behavior, cultural organization, and our sudden rise into hyperempowerment mean that things will be growing increasingly chaotic for some years to come. This does not necessarily mean we will be doomed to an endless “War of all against all,” as prophesied by Hobbes. Forces will rise to oppose the forces of chaos; this may well result in even more chaos, but I consider it equally likely that the dynamic opposition of well-matched hyperempowered polities will result in a new form of social stability – one which looks nothing like anything we’re familiar with today. Either way, that is apocalypse, because, whichever outcome, everything utterly changes.

I have been working toward the expression of this idea for quite some time. Looking back on Becoming Transhuman, a feature-length film/performance piece I created for MINDSTATES 2001, I can see some the themes of The Human Network in their embryonic form. This idea has been with me a while, but only now have I learned the language necessary to express it in terms comprehensible to a broad audience of people who do not share my own neurotic tendencies. The film is not the book, but points directly toward the book. The times have caught up with my own apocalyptic visions. And I have found the words which will allow me to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theatre – without starting a riot.

III.

The Human Network opens with a basic assertion: the more something is shared, the more valuable it becomes. I can demonstrate the truth of this statement, and will do so repeatedly throughout the first several chapters. I know full well that Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross and countless other writers have put the full texts of their work online, and that this has not cannibalized their sales, but increased them. I bought Stross’ Accelerando after I downloaded the entire text, read the first chapter on my computer, and realized I needed to have a printed copy of my own. I know this works. But can I convince any potential publisher to release The Human Network freely online at publication?

Publishing, hardly the most cutting-edge of industries, has mostly been immune to the rise of social media. Yes, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows showed up on file-sharing sites a few days before its international release, but that didn’t impact sales at all, despite the wails of complaint from Bloomsbury Publishing. A freely available electronic copy does not seem to interfere with physical sales of printed books. Whether most publishers know this, or care to know it, remains an open question. But how can I sign any publishing deal which constrains my work in ways which, given the points I make in the text, I consider both out-of-step with the times and actually detrimental to the long-term value of the work?

Yesterday, I posted the “Overview” section of the book proposal to this blog. That, in itself, was a remarkably bold act. Book proposals are regarded as “business confidential” material by all parties to a book deal – the author, the literary agent, and the publisher. The ideas contained within the proposal – which reflect the ideas explored in the book – are meant to be kept close to the chest, until the publisher’s marketing machinery cranks up the noise before an impending release. In this sense, book marketing is a carefully scripted, but utterly false drama: “Look at this new exciting thing!” A proposal revealed undercuts this sense of drama, even as it potentially builds up an audience interested in the book. I may have shot myself in the foot by posting this portion of the proposal. I may have made it difficult, if not impossible, to get a book deal. I knew this full well, and posted it anyway.

Now things get thornier. The next sections of the proposal – which I am meant to be writing today – are synopses of the various chapters of the book. They’ll all be short, perhaps a page in length, but will explore the ideas and the narrative structure of each chapter, noting how each builds on the chapter before, giving an interested publisher a good sense of how I’ll build the argument and carry it through to a successful conclusion. This is necessary for a publisher to read, but do I want to reveal it to my audience?

While I do firmly believe in transparency, I instinctively recoil from publicly providing a Cliffs Notes version of my text, which someone could scan through and feel as though they’d absorbed the key ideas in my work. This would not be true, because books always take weird and interesting directions in the writing, directions that even the author remains unaware of until the words appear on the page. But some might think, “Oh yeah, I read his chapter synopses, I know what he’s on about.” Perhaps I shouldn’t care; perhaps these people wouldn’t read my book in any case, freely available or purchased at the bookstore. Perhaps I should simply be glad that some of the space in their heads has been colonized by my ideas. And given that I do believe – and will demonstrate in the book – that sharing expertise results in an aggregate rise in the level of human intelligence, I should be satisfied with this. It is enough.

So here, at the end of this very odd essay – quite unlike any of the others posted on The Human Network blog – you have seen me argue myself into a reasoned position for complete, radical transparency. Transparency incurs costs: people can (and will) steal your ideas, your customers, the food from your mouth. But, in order to seal my ideas, you must first comprehend them, and in understanding my ideas you’ll realize that this kind of theft is impossible. Stealing my ideas only makes them more valuable, and makes me, as the originator of these ideas, more influential. Instead, absorb my work, improve upon it, then share those new ideas. In this way, you too will become influential, and I will find myself borrowing from your work.

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In March of 2008, someone – probably in India – bought a mobile telephone. By itself, that wouldn’t be particularly noteworthy, yet it represented a watershed: the halfway mark of humanity’s accelerating interconnection. Over 3.5 billion mobile subscribers, or one person in two, are wired into the global network. Most of these people live in the “developing” countries, where incomes average just a few dollars a day. Desperately poor by the standards of the “developed” world, why would these people waste their meager resources on something that, to most of us, seems little more than a useful toy?

In the developed world, mobile phones are completely ubiquitous: only toddlers, the very oldest seniors, and technophobes have resisted their allure. Parents give their children mobiles with global satellite tracking features, so they can search the web to find out where their kids are – and snoop into where they’ve been. Adults use mobile telephones to smooth the frictions of social life: in the age of the mobile, one can phone ahead. No one is late anymore, just delayed. Your productive business life can follow you anywhere – into bed, on vacation, even into the middle of an argument. We enjoy – and suffer through – a life of seamless connectivity.

This is new, and it is very important.

For the nearly two hundred thousand years of human presence on Earth, our lives have been bounded by how far we could throw our voices. Yodelers once scaled Alpine mountaintops to sing to the valleys below; today, a communications satellite, perched 25,000 miles above the equator, can reach half the planet. During the 20th century, radio transmitters (which, like yodelers, started off on mountaintops, but later migrated into orbit) transmitted one message to many receivers. We could hear and then see things that happened far away from our own ears and eyes, and know more about what happened in Washington D.C., on any given day, than what took place in the next town over. As we entered the 21st century, that comfortable (if paradoxical) relationship to the world beyond the reach of our own voices, which most of us had known for most of our lives, suddenly disintegrated. People began to talk with one another.

Nothing at all surprising about that: people have always talked with one another. Communication is arguably the defining feature of homo sapiens sapiens. We are the species that speaks. It is so much of what we are that vast sections of our brains are given over to the understanding of language. Children spend most of their first few years of life, their developing brains working overtime, intently studying every word that comes out of their parents’ mouths, learning to find meaning amidst all those strange sounds.

As a child practices her first few words, she receives encouragement and praise from her parents – who often can’t understand a word she’s saying, but nonetheless applaud every attempt. As she rises into mastery, first with a few simple words, then short phrases, then full-blown sentences, rich with meaning, she joins the “human network,” the age-old web of relationships which define humanity.

Communication shapes us in nearly every conceivable way. If we can not communicate, we are cut off from the common life of our species, and could not hope to survive. But, once we can communicate – with parents and peers – we begin to develop an ever-deepening web of connections with the people around us. This web, formally known as a “social network”, is so important to us that even more of our brain is given over to tending and managing our social networks than the parts used to understand language. Nearly all of our “prefrontal cortex” – the part of the brain which sits directly behind our foreheads – seems to be principally occupied with keeping us well-connected to our fellows.

Until about 10,000 years ago, we lived in tribes, groupings of several interrelated families who hunted and gathered their way across the landscapes of Africa, Asia, Europe and Australia. Tribes grew and shrank, through births and deaths, but never grew very large. A large tribe would divide into two smaller ones, along familial lines, and each would go their own way. The natural limit for tribes seems to be around 150 people – beyond that, the tribe always splinters. Why is this? That’s all the space we have in our brains. We can carry around a “mental picture” of about 150 people in our heads, but after that, we just run out of space. We can’t manage a social network any larger than that. We don’t have enough brains.

Fast-forward a hundred centuries: more than half of us now live in cities, not tribes. In our day-to-day lives we don’t feel immediately connected to a hundred and fifty other people. We have close relationships to our families, a handful of friends, and a few colleagues. We are more individual and more isolated than at any time in our common history as a species, yet the largest part of our brain tirelessly works toward building strong connections with others. Over the 20th century, we filled this vacuum with false relations: fans and stalkers, who so idolize their objects of affection (musicians, actors, politicians, etc.) that they built a false idol into their social networks. Ultimately unsatisfying, but better than a widening gyre of emptiness inside our heads.

Our ancestors in the family of man have used tools for at least 2 million years to increase our strength, and extend our capabilities. An obsidian knife is a far better cutting tool than our teeth, and a bone needle better suited to its task than the most nimble fingertips. We domesticated Aurochs (the ancestor of the ox) ten thousand years ago, using their strength to till our fields and carry our loads – and human capabilities took another huge leap forward.

Two hundred years ago, the steam engine multiplied human strength almost infinitely, and produced the Industrial Revolution. As railroads stitched their way across the planet, man could travel faster than a galloping horse; with a steam shovel, he could lift a load that all of Pharaoh’s slaves would have been crushed beneath; and with a telegraph, could he hear or be heard from one end of Earth to the other, in a matter of moments. Technologies are amplifiers; they take some innate human capability and reinforce it, far beyond human limits, until it seems almost an entirely new thing. However alien they might seem to us, technologies are simply the funhouse mirror reflection of ourselves.

Just now – within the last ten years, or thereabouts – we have invented tools which amplify our innate desire to strengthen our human networks. Our wholly human and ancient capacity for communication and connection, so long the poor stepchild of all our technological prowess, is finally coming into its own.

This changes everything, in utterly unexpected ways.

Fishermen in India use text messages to solve a thousand year-old problem with their fish markets, doubling their income; a teenager posts an party invitation to Facebook, and five hundred ‘friends’ show up to make trouble; repressive governments try to clamp down on dissent, only to find their latest outrage available for viewing on YouTube; a band of bloggers, undeterred by every dirty trick thrown at them by a slick bureaucracy, bring down the Attorney General of the United States. None of these singular events were in any way coordinated; no one at an imagined center was telling people to “do this” or “do that”. These things just happened, because our own capabilities as social beings in the human network are already so advanced, and so powerful that, when amplified – even the tiniest bit – we become potent almost beyond imagining.

The world’s vast swath of medium poor put mobile telephones to work and dramatically increase their ability to earn a living, using text messages to multiply the effectiveness of the human networks that we have all used, since time out of mind, to make our way in the world. That’s why a mobile phone is the new “must have” device for everyone on Earth: it’s a tool that helps the poor far more than it helps the rich, because, for the first time, they’re wired into the global human network. They already know how to use these networks – we all do – but the mobile telephone extends their reach, and amplifies their capabilities. This new “globalization” isn’t about spreading franchises of McDonald’s and Starbucks – it’s about a farmer in Kenya being able to call ahead to find out which market offers the best price for his maize crop.

Repeat that individual example a few billion times, and the startling power of the human network begins to reveal itself. We are finding new ways to communicate, connect and improve our lives, each of us carefully watching one other, each of us copying the best of what we see in the behavior of our peers, and applying it to our own lives. As our reach is extended, so is our ability to learn from one another. This global pooling of expertise – or, “hyperintelligence” – leads directly to the phenomenal success of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia created by millions of individual contributions, each giving the best of what they know, and, in return enjoying the fruits of a planet full of smart people. For just a small contribution, the rewards are so disproportionate (like putting a single chip down on a roulette wheel, and getting the whole casino in return) that Wikipedia defines the first new model for human knowledge creation in at least a thousand years. Wikipedia helps us all to become smarter and more effective, because, by sharing the wealth of knowledge in each of our heads, we help one another make better decisions.

The more we learn to share through the human network, the more powerful we become, both as individuals and in groups. This has a shadow side: a text message, forwarded throughout a community of White Supremacists, led to a race riot on a Sydney beach in December 1995; meanwhile, the loosely-affiliated groups who all call themselves ‘al Qaeda’ pool knowledge and resources in order to make their destabilizing acts of terror increasingly effective. Power is a two-edged sword, and most technologies can be used for good or ill.

At the same time, this new phenomenon of “hyperempowerment” – people using their newly-amplified capabilities in the human network – means that we’re not so easy to push around any more. Consumers can organize against nasty corporate behavior in moments; corporate executives nervously scan endless lists of comments on web sites, anxiously looking for signs of approaching trouble; governments regularly find their constituents running rings around them. The human network puts all of the power relationships that have dominated recent history into play; naturally, those with power are pushing back, but – as in the case of the record companies, who have tried to sue their customers into behaving legally – institutional power finds itself ever more effectively thwarted by diffuse and distributed efforts to oppose it.

The nex