the human network

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 next decades of the 21st century will be dominated by the rise of the human network, as “hyper people power” rises up in unexpected, unpredicted, and sometimes unwelcome ways. The collision of our oldest skills with our newest tools points toward a radical transformation in human behavior and human culture. The energy released in this collision will empower all of us, threaten many of us, and force some of us to rethink our lives. In some ways, we are finally returning to our tribal roots; in other ways, we are, at long last, becoming a global family.

After two hundred years, during which man used machines to amplify his strength, and so shaped the world, we have finally turned that power inward, to reshape ourselves. The Human Network: Sharing, Knowledge and Power in the 21st Century tells the story of this epochal shift in civilization, in behavior, in humanity itself. In its 250 pages, it will paint the compelling and accessible picture of the tremendous changes underway, everywhere, in every nation, to every person, as we all become fully-fledged actors in the human network.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 6:39 pm and is filed under book, hyperconnectivity, hyperempowerment, hyperintelligence, hyperpeople, hyperpolitics, publishing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.