The unemployed truck driver, with nothing to fill his days, decided on a course of self-improvement. Clear on what interested him, he sought out others who shared his interests, connecting with them, then listened to everything they could teach him. Completely engaged, he spent up to twenty hours a day online, reading and researching and engaging those ahead of his own understanding, learning everything they offered up. An excellent student, Cecil soon felt qualified enough to apply his autodidactic efforts. That’s when the trouble began.

If Cecil had studied ‘bathtub biology’, learning how to catalyze the Polymerase Chain Reaction in order to do DNA amplification, he might have bred himself a superbug, a strain of E. coli capable of giving the whole planet a fatal tummy ache. If he’d briefed himself on nuclear engineering, he might have constructed a homemade particle accelerator, bombarded atoms, and perhaps created a contamination threat affecting his entire neighborhood. Instead, Cecil studied computer security, coming into an understanding of the techniques used to protect and secure networks, then used these skills to break into, subvert, and control the systems for a small Internet Service Provider.

It all ended badly: the ISP quickly detected his intrusion – Cecil didn’t know enough about how to cover his tracks – then shunted him off to systems designed as ‘honeypots’, which look inviting and potentially powerful, but which simply trap the attacker in a sticky dead end. After compiling a sufficiently large body of evidence, the police broke down Cecil’s door one morning, arresting him and impounding all of his computers. The neighbors seemed surprised; an unemployed truck driver with no particularly remarkable talents suddenly become an ‘evil’ hacker? It strained credulity.

Welcome to the age of connected intelligence.

Now that everything known is shared broadly and freely, now that everyone who cares about any given body of knowledge maintains a constant relation to it and to everyone else who cares about that knowledge, the entire world is composed of a continuously multiplying set of knowledge amplifiers. Any of us can place ourselves within one – or fall in, almost accidentally – simply by engaging. By being present, connecting and sharing, we shed our ignorance and quickly acquire a degree of mastery. We can know nothing and crash headlong into one of these knowledge amplifiers, emerging on the other side changed and potent.

Knowledge does not confer wisdom. That is a slower process. Cecil learned everything about how to penetrate and invade computer systems, but he never realized that to possess the capability is far more valuable than actually putting it to use. A well-qualified expert in computer security will earn two or three times as much as a truck driver, and can always find gainful employment. Drunk with power, blind to reason or even common sense, Cecil, guns blazing, charged into a buzzsaw.

This sort of behavior will become increasingly common, as we see individuals with hypertrophied knowledge reach out with their extended capabilities, grasping at things which they do not yet wholly understand. The step function between ignorance and arrogance has become so clearly resolved, communities are growing into an understanding of how those newly engorged with knowledge become a danger to themselves and others. Some communities may isolate these individuals behind a ‘blast shield’ of plausible deniability, others will seek to engage and bring these fledglings into wisdom. Neither approach will be wholly successful.

Imagine the secrets of the atomic bomb had been revealed not at Los Alamos, but within a kindergarten classroom, filled with the high and mostly thoughtless emotions of children still far from their full cognitive capability, and lacking any capacity to restrain themselves. ‘Knowing is doing, and doing, knowing.’ An uncontrollable chain reaction, created in a momentary fit of pique, vaporizes everything. The child has learned how to build the bomb, but has not learned they must never drop it.

Human knowledge in the era of hyperconnectivity has achieved ubiquitous dissemination, and as a consequence all human knowledge will be reframed around consequence. It is not that you can know something; with few exceptions that will be nothing remarkable. The entrapment of information no longer carries within it the seeds of power; rather, the application of information becomes the new wellspring of puissance. We can all know the same things – nothing any longer prevents this – but our application of this knowledge will be guided by wisdom. We can seek to self-aggrandize and destroy, or we can support and strengthen. The choice is always there for everyone, though not everyone will be able to see it.

In the next billion seconds, ignorance, presently viewed as a character flaw, a state of complete lacking, will be seen as something easy to ameliorate, more like a bruise that needs bandaging than a permanent and disfiguring scar. We will acquire (and perhaps neglect and forget) whole bodies of knowledge, transforming our understanding daily, as we become more expert at learning from those who know, and build tools more perfectly suited to the ways we want to learn from them.

Once again, this is no utopia, but actually a world more fraught with human dangers than any we have ever known. If the boy next door can brew up a superflu because he didn’t get a date to the senior prom, we will need to be more sensitive to both the moods and the capabilities of others, or confront pervasive, sudden annihilation.

Communities of knowledge must derive from within themselves the essentials of self-regulation that prevent these sorts of disasters. We are playing with matches while doused in petrol, and need to recognize this. Good fire control policies will prevent needless tragedies, lives ruined (like David Cecil’s) or even lost, merely because our knowing outstripped our sense of what is right. This is the new ignorance, the penumbra of wisdom. It is not that we do not know, it is that we do not know what to do with our knowing.

This informational asymmetry means the landlord always gets the better deal: he who knows most wins, and keeps winning. Each win adds momentum and capability, gradually cementing the winner into a fixed position of dominance in the relationship. Information confers power, and power amplifies the ability to gather information, a feedback that, if unchecked, leads to domination.

The world is broadly composed of instances where information has concretized into the forms of power. Sumer springs forth from the information inscribed on countless clay tablets; Rome ran on papyrus until Egypt left its sphere of influence, whereupon, unable to manage its information flows, it collapsed; every modern state seeks to sequester the flows of information, through censorship, military classification, or taboo. East Germany’s Stazi created a nation that spied upon itself, submitting this information to an authority that used every last scrap of it to maintain its dominance.

The grand dictatorships of state power and the petty dictatorships of landlords both draw their sustenance from information asymmetry, arbitrageurs of the truth. Where the facts can be withheld, this gamesmanship will inevitably take root and quickly comes to dominate all interactions. In the kingdom of the informationally blind, the well-informed is king.

Where asymmetries exist, pressure builds to equalize them. Vast asymmetries – such as the darkest secrets of state – consequently necessitate thick walls of law, force and culture to keep the outside out and the inside in. The existence of a wall implies something to defend, so attacks always occur, attempts to release the informational pressure stored within. The first strikes, crude clawings at the goal, nearly always fail, but each failure feeds back into a process of assault continuing unabated and undeterred for as long as the wall persists. Eventually the attack succeeds, the wall comes down, and its contents spill forth. Information, like energy, has entropy, and broad distribution in equilibrium is easier to maintain than tightly-held concentrations.

There is now another way.

Rather than penetrating the chamber of secrets, the chamber can be surrounded with information of equal salience and equivalent or even greater density. Instead of one bright spot in a sea of darkness, everything is illuminated. The asymmetry vanishes because it is no longer singular, nothing special. It might even reverse, as the environment surrounding the wall becomes more dense with information than anything held within.

Renters in New York now share information about the rents they pay using RentHackr. The website generates a map of each entry (together with its location and date) so that other renters can compare equivalent prices in a particular neighborhood, building – perhaps even the apartment itself, if the previous tenant submitted information to RentHackr. The prospective tenant now knows as much about prices for a given unit as the landlord does – probably even more, since RentHackr’s thousands of contributors offer up a much broader range of experiences and information than any single landlord would have opportunity to encounter.

This shift has been as sudden as it has been complete. Landlords have always bargained from a position of power borne from informational asymmetry. So have governments, banks, and nearly every other organization or relation that operates with power. All of those carefully protected islands of knowledge become indistinguishable and unimportant as the ocean recedes.

The sharing of specific knowledge domains by communities of hyperconnected individuals is a revolutionary act. It overturns power structures reinforced by informational asymmetry without firing a shot, staging a strike, or even raising one’s voice. Sharing is the antithesis of violence, yet it yields greater results than bombs.

We are just coming into an understanding of the relation between sharing, knowing and power. The massive realignment of human relations and institutions that is one key attribute of the next billion seconds begins with the sudden vanishing of all power structures, everywhere, as the energy which fed them loses its potential. In an information-rich world, information is not, in itself, power. Power has migrated elsewhere, and all those who use power will be forced to migrate with it, into lands both distant and foreign.

The collapse of any given informational asymmetries has been driven more by whim and luck than any intention; they occur randomly and serendipitously, but with each collapse something is learned of the conditions which precipitated that collapse, information hyperdistributed and imitated when the opportunity arises. Each instance of collapse carries with it everything learned to this point, and thereafter carries everything learned in the current instance.

These moments of collapse consequently have become more frequent and more pronounced. Within this half billion seconds they will transition from the exception to the norm, until no power structure of any consequence persists in its antique and redundant form. Everything once believed concrete is suddenly seen to be a castle made of sand. As this perception becomes pervasive, everything connected with power becomes provisional. Our hierarchical relations, which tell us our place in the order, are being supplanted by relations of affiliation, which tell us who we are by whom we know. Since this is already the way the world actually works, it shouldn’t come as much of a shock.

We no longer have the comforts (and terrors) of power to guide us. There are no lords and no masters, no governor anywhere. But this is not utopia nor mere anarchy. There will still be power, but differently constituted, drawn not from secrets and silence, but emerging as a quality of connecting and sharing.

To repeat: everyone is an expert. The dimensions of individual expertise vary widely. Some love sport, others cars, food, politics, soap operas, film, dogs, aircraft, videogames – the list goes on, more or less endlessly. There is no limit to the number of things that interest us, at least none we have found. There is no line that will not be crossed in the drive to know; even the most transgressive topics have their aficionados, keeping their fetishes to themselves except when surrounded by others who share their predilections.

Experts revel in their expertise, wishing for the whole world to share their passion and depth of knowledge. A certain pedantry comes with that expertise; we have all been the recipient of a long monologue from someone declaiming the breadth of their expertise on some topic which barely interests us but which entirely consumes them. And if we should share the same passion – something we quickly discover – each plumbs the depths of the other’s expertise, greedily adding to our own knowledge.

Groups self-identify so they can proselytize, spreading the love of their football team or religion or favorite musician as naturally and automatically as breathing. Standing on street corners, handing out tracts, or in front of the stadium, wearing team colours, they point to themselves in order to find the others, attracting everyone who shares their interest. Together they share, teach and learn, explore and enjoy, and occasionally they capture some stories, so that other people, beyond their reach, might learn something of what they know.

Except in these moments of sharing captured, our expertise has mostly remained locked within our heads. It comes out as needed or when invited, but after the conversation ends, the expertise vanishes. Useful but evanescent, we can connect and share around our expertise, but could preserve it only with great difficulty. Every beginner has had to find the others, learning from them, every single time. For this reason, expertise has always been slow and hard-won.

That barrier has come down.

Every expert can now express their knowledge permanently, sharing their jewels in a form that lets everyone – from absolute beginner to guru – find and benefit from it. As soon as it became possible to share in this indelible, digital, hyperconnected, hyperdistributed form, it became utterly irresistible to all experts everywhere.

Over the last half billion seconds we have witnessed a momentous transfer of knowledge: The insides of each of our heads vacuumed out, contents replicated and transferred to vast libraries, broad and deep, reflecting everything known to any one of us, on every conceivable subject. The topic could be quotidian or impossibly obscure – it makes no difference. As soon as someone shares what they know, it is available to every one of us. We all know what they know.

Everything known is now widely known. There are no secrets anywhere, nor any knowledge hidden because of obscurity or intentional efforts to evade capture and replication. The age of omniscience allows us to know not just where we all are, but what we all know. If our heads could stretch wide enough, we could know everything known to everyone everywhere. Something recently impossibly fanciful is, if properly stage-managed, within the realm of possibility.

When a question arises outside our expertise, we instinctively consult the device in our palm, connected to all the other devices everywhere which have collected, collated and made all of this knowledge instantly searchable. We quickly locate the answer we need, and move on until the next question arises. We have grown entirely used to this pervasive ability to answer any questions, finding ourselves surprised – and at a bit of a loss – when we stumble upon some corner too obscure to admit an answer. Or perhaps we do not know how to frame the question? We know the truth is out there, but we have not learned how to find all of it.

Everything is known, has been shared, and, now available instantly to all of us, this guides our actions. We can check the truth of something before we make a decision concerning it. We can always work from the best available information at every given moment. There is no need for any of us ever to make a guess, drawn from our own imagination and prejudices. The facts are known and are immediately at hand.

We now have the benefit of the most expert information on every subject. We can walk in knowing nothing, reach out to the device in our hand, and learn everything we need to know at that moment to make the best possible decision. We can maximize our knowledge in every situation, and the continuous application of that knowledge improves our lives. This improvement is both gradual and general: the next billion seconds will see human decision-making become progressively less error-prone, more and more perfect, because of this steady injection of everything known by everyone about every topic under the sun.

In those moments when we remember that we have nearly perfect knowledge to fall back upon, we become smarter. As that moment, continuously repeated, becomes automatic and instinctive, we acquire a second mind, outside our own, vast beyond comprehension, containing everything, sitting alongside our own, smarter and wiser and faster, continuously informing us of how to maximize every moment.

Welcome to the hive.

Experience has always been passed along by word-of-mouth. Periodically, a Thucydides or Marco Polo would commit experience to the page, so potent it would forever frame our understanding of the Peloponnesian War and imperial China. When books became commonplace, traveler’s tales from lands distant or imagined held a widespread allure, inviting us to immerse ourselves in the lived experience of another.

Books offer up a narrow channel for the delivery of experience, many filters between our lives and the printing press reducing the range of experience dramatically. We benefited from certain experiences, but not others, and these experiences would come to us filtered through just a handful of people. Seven billion people encompass an incredible wealth of experience; even if vitally important, only a minuscule portion of this ever became widely known.

How many mistakes have been needlessly repeated because we could not learn from others? Even where we might be willing and receptive, we have lacked the capability to know what others have experienced. This gap between experience and experience shared formed the greatest barrier to humanity’s forward progress.

That barrier has come down.

Hyperconnected, we immediately relay the details of every experience. We capture that experience and hyperdistribute it, so now it efficiently reaches everyone who shares our interest. If we need to know what it is like to change a diaper on a cranky baby, assemble the perfect Pad Thai, or suffer through a tax audit, someone has been there before us, sharing their experience for our benefit.

Every experience adds illumination to our own thinking. In the stories of what has happened to others, we anticipate what our own experience might be, gaining a sense of what to avoid and what to welcome. We can move away from error long before it becomes problematic, aligning ourselves to receive the maximum benefit within any given situation.

We have always done this. We learn the ways of the world and so do not fall down open manhole covers, or walk in front of moving automobiles; we inhabit a dangerous world, but benefit from a world of experience about how to live safely within it. We smile and offer generous warmth to others, knowing – from our own experience as well as the experience of others – that most often it will be reciprocated. We are not stupid: we flee the unnecessarily unpleasant, seeking out whatever delights the world has to offer.

Our capacity to learn from the experience of others, formerly slow, difficult, and narrow, has suddenly become fast, easy and pervasive. We share our experience and others have instant access to those experiences; when they share we immediately benefit. We record and receive these experiences on our mobiles, which come with us everywhere, always ready to capture and share. We look down into our devices and learn what others have done, those who have come to this place before us, and how that worked out for them.

We can walk into a restaurant and know precisely what every one of a thousand diners who have been there before us think of every offering on the menu. This experience invisibly guides our own choices, acting as a backstop and reference point. This tastes good; this does not. This is for the aficionado; this for the hoi polloi. Experience has more colours than simple black and white, so we do not simply all turn toward precisely the same thing, but operate within a range of excellence, driven by a combination of taste, experience and opportunity.

Where this once happened infrequently – perhaps we joined a foodie friend for dinner, who knew just what to order to create the perfect dining experience – it has now become a regular feature of our lives. We read online reviews as we stand before the entrance, debating whether to walk in. We throw out a question to our connections, some of whom have passed this way before us, harnessing all of their experience to inform our own choices in the moment. We use our hyperconnectivity to collectivize our experience: this collectivization protects us from the worst and often delivers the best in any given situation.

We like this. Our regular flow of experiences, formerly unmediated by the collective experience of everyone else, encompassed both the bitter and the sweet. Live and learn. As we grow more comfortable with and rely upon this wealth of experience, we refer to it more and more often, moving into a state of continuous peak experience. Only the best for us, because we have all of humanity to separate the gold from the dross.

Tastes differ. The peak for one could well be the depths for another. When we maximize every experience, we encounter both outer bounds more frequently. The middle, meh and lukewarm, gets abandoned in the climb up the mountain. During the next billion seconds, we will have more memorable moments, crowding out far fewer unimpressive ones. We are coming to expect the best, and it will seem perfectly quotidian to be thoroughly assaulted by excellence, from every quarter.

Experience is the best judge, and this judgement, shared and amplified, hyperconnected and hyperdistributed, provides us with the opportunity to maximize every act and every choice. We are all Epicurean now.

‘First we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.’ We have never rejected any tool which improves our capability to make the best possible decision. We now possess a tool a billion times deeper in experience than any we have ever used, a thousand times faster in action than the tools of half a billion seconds ago. We have now placed this tool in everyone’s hands.

In A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick’s dystopian science fiction novel of addiction and redemption, the protagonist – a drug enforcement agent – wears a disguise to prevent anyone from recognizing (and thereby betraying) him. The ‘scramble suit’ creates an everyman projection; in place of a single person, the whole population is represented:

As the computer looped through its banks, it projected every conceivable eye color, hair color, shape and type of nose, formation of teeth, configuration of facial bone structure – the entire shroudlike membrane took on whatever physical characteristics were projected at any nanosecond, then switched to the next…

Looking upon the scramble suit reveals nothing of the person within. Even the voice, transformed in real-time, splices together the words of people of every age and from every culture, resulting in speech full of meaning but lacking any identifiable characteristic.

Overloading ourselves with particulars, we represent nothing. Preference becomes impossible, a meaningless attempt to empty the oceans with a sieve. When everything about us is everything, we become invisible.

Therein lies our escape from the land of the shadow.

Everything that we share in common with others subtracts from our specificity. We connect and share and refine our sharing, to find our interior lives leaking away, expressed and examined and critiqued, but no longer ours. With the loss of privacy comes the loss of uniqueness. We are not defined by what we share, but rather, by what we withhold. It is the things we will not say which make us significant. Hard, secret, and often cruel, these secret stones are the making of us. Creatures of language, we are closest to that which we dare not utter.

If we are to have any of ourselves left in a hyperconnected world, we must learn to keep quiet, drawing lines around our lives, determining which parts we will choose to expose and have bleached to whiteness in the intense light cast by four and a half billion others, deciding which parts we will keep close, telling no one, not even our closest relations, lest these secrets find their way into their sharing and thereby undermine all our efforts.

The simple quiet of the Zen master provides inadequate defense against the mechanisms of the age of omniscience, where actions speak louder than words. Tirelessly watching, our machines faithfully construct their simulacra from a study of our movements; the only silence they could not penetrate would be the absolute stillness of the yogi who holds a single pose for years. Everything else points to a truth we dare not speak, but which speaks for us.

Thoroughly surrounded, we must find another passage to freedom, blinding the machines in a surfeit of light. We need to maintain connections not with a hundred and fifty others, nor even with ten thousand, but with ten million, sending messages to all of them as frequently as our channels allow, so that no pattern can be discerned within the overwhelming flood of connection. Where data can be abstracted, analyzed and applied to the simulacra, there it must be amplified, and shared as broadly as possible, without regard to recipient. Everything we say must be shouted from the rooftops, into as many ears as will hear.

This is our scramble suit: If we say everything to everyone, we say nothing of importance to anyone in particular. It must be this way. We can not simply dissemble, pretend to be other than what we are, because our actions expose our connections. We must be connected to everyone in order to move beyond the reach of the simulacrum. Hyperconnectivity is more than a condition; it is a necessity, stripping away our privacy even as it hands us the tool to restore it.

Each of us, receiving a continuous stream of communication from millions of others, would immediately lose all meaning and all contact, it being impossible to discern a whispered signal within a roar of noise. But within ourselves, in the never-revealed sanctum of the soul (and the soul’s little machines), we keep a list of those whom we choose to attend. These communications are the ones which we interpret and acknowledge. We assign importance, and so construct the screen to prevent the light we generate from dazzling us.

The filter between ourselves and our closest relations lies within ourselves, not out on Facebook or Google or Twitter or in any other system where it becomes fodder for our simulacra. It must lie within, part of our essential self, because who we know is who we are. When a simulacra faithfully models who we know, we have become simulations, programmable and easily controlled.

The joy of sharing is immediate, evident, and completely natural. Amplified across the entire planet sharing also becomes its shadow: hidden and artificial. The way down is the way forward, into an overwhelming and chaotic construction of connectivity which purposely surrenders any extrinsic meaning in order to preserve its occult intent.

Let us then embrace noise and randomness, seeing them not as problematic but as beneficial, the keys to our release. Noise resists analysis, and can not be used to fortify simulacra. Randomness confounds computers, providing no clear picture, only a Rorschach-like exploration of the interiority of the observer, not the observed.

Turning the tables on the observer, we will use our scramble suits as mirrors, turning them to face the shadow machinery of simulacra, which, lacking real data, will feedback upon their own inbuilt hypotheses, producing monstrous projections, a carnival funhouse utterly divorced from reality. What they look for they will find, but it will always be a phantom, the exteriorization of the observer’s own desires and fears, a hall of mirrors filled with hungry ghosts.

We must connect. We are compelled to share. We must no longer discriminate: Everything for everyone, everywhere. If they know us, they will listen; if not, they will thank us for the disguise.

Everywhere we go, these questions come to us, surrounding us like a magnetic field, our hyperconnected movements creating lines of force, as the world aligns to our presence, like so many iron filings. It makes no matter how we answer either of these challenges, for our actions betray us completely. We make a dent in the world just by observing it. Presence alone is entirely enough.

Like finds like. You can lie about your name or age or race or nationality or political persuasion or sexual preference or culinary taste or fashion peccadillo, but incongruent with your actions, that falsehood will be ignored, thrown out as noise amongst the growing body of data. Queers know queers. Liberals know liberals. Foodies know foodies. Jews know Jews. Our network of relationships tells anyone who cares to look everything they would ever need to know about who we are. Things we would never willingly reveal to another human being resolve into unmistakable clarity, because our relations speak louder than our declarations.

This information, captured and recorded, becomes the foundation for a simulacrum of the self. Who we know is who we are, so relationship provides the key that answers all other questions. We can not help this, nor can we prevent it; wired to communicate, compelled to share, we define ourselves in greater detail with each act of sharing.

Those who watch – and they are watching – know more about us than we do about ourselves, for cool and dispassionate, they do not ignore the uncomfortable truths that our unconscious elbows aside. Warts and all, they see us as we are, in our relations and actions. Their simulacra, more honest than we ourselves can choose to be, takes on a life of its own, because it is more faithful to reality. Shadow overwhelms substance.

Who are you? What do you want? Someone else knows. Someone else cares because possession of your simulacrum turns you into a puppet of sorts. Where you are known, your actions can be predicted and your needs met. At the scale of the individual, this is basic social grace. Hyperconnected, this becomes a force in its own right, a sort of governance that is not outward directed, nor democratic, but seeks to envelop and control through a perfect knowledge of appetites and fears.

Everything that Edward Bernays began comes to its culmination in Facebook. Where crowd psychology gave birth to modern public relations, Facebook amplifies and inverts the process, disaggregating the crowd into individual simulacra, each such a faithful representation that responses can be known with perfect accuracy. Behavioral targeting isn’t a side-effect of the digitalization of our network of relations; it is the entire point.

Nor is there any escape in withdrawal. Delete your Facebook profile and leave other traces, just as distinct, in Twitter and text messages. All of our communication betrays us. All of it flows through Facebook and Google, either through search requests and the constant indexing of web pages, or the ubiquitous ‘like’ buttons, which serve as the smiling outposts of a global force of secret police.

The Stasi never had it so good.

Carefully tended, our simulacra, like hungry ghosts, have endless needs. They require food, clothing, shelter, the gadgets and accoutrements of hyperconnectivity, and endless entertainment. We act, and they express our needs to those who seek to satisfy them. We never get precisely what we want, but rather, what they care to offer. Caged, we are not allowed to see the world as it is, instead provided a narrow view that fulfills the commercial imperatives of those who have incarcerated our shadows. Nailed down and boxed in, we lose the freedom to move.

This is the paradox of cyberspace, the high price of sharing: the more we are known, the less free we become. This unbounded environment for human expression has become the perfect cudgel, a velvet glove covering an adamantine fist.

That shadow of our collective selves has many of the same qualities of our individual simulacra: it has both appetites and fears, centering on the same phantom: control. With a population of billions of hyperconnected simulacra, a type of practical psychohistory becomes possible, a dream beyond the grasp of Bernays, but well within reach of Zuckerberg. The masses can be driven to buy, driven to fear, driven to believe. It can all be done far more dependably – on an individual basis – simply by redecorating the bars on the cage.

Imagine a smoker who, under the influence of friends, decides to quit – then faces a deluge of images of attractive individuals, smoking? Or an obese person, confronted by an unending vision of delicious food? Consider the believer, losing faith, reminded constantly of the pain of hellfire? This is all possible, and this is all happening right now, if with less obvious maliciousness – the goal generally being to get people to consume something. When it acquires a political dimension – as it has in Syria and Iran – it becomes something more obviously repugnant, though no different in essential nature.

We must connect and share. It is who we are. Yet these profoundly human acts open us to dangers we find ourselves unprepared for. Not very long ago, our simulacra existed only in one another’s heads. Today they sit in databases, the private province of those driven to control, hungry ghosts tending feedlots of hungry ghosts. We can not withdraw without sacrificing our essential nature, but engagement inevitably leads to entrapment.

Gilmore’s Law points the way forward: no censor can withstand hyperconnectivity. But our hyperconnectivity itself creates the conditions for this censorship. To be connected is to be observed, and this feeds the simulacra. We appear to be trapped in a loop of our own making, products of a process of accelerated nature, dragged down to earth by our shadows.

Somewhere during this conversation something else comes up – a mention of a child, a visit to a faraway land, or a favored pastime, immediately seized upon as broader common ground, a platform for further conversation. This exploration of what each knows begins with a series of confirmations of knowledge shared (we both know these things) but as conversation deepens it sharpens, reassurance transforming into exploration: what do you know? What can you teach me? What can I share with you that will surprise, delight or amaze you?

Under the right conditions, all of this can happen in a minute or less. We are spectacularly good at detecting and zooming in on the things that unite us (and, unfortunately, those that divide us), prepared to go deep in order to display our own prowess (thereby gaining in social standing), and equally prepared to become the student, when we stumble upon a true master.

A behavior this immediate and casual forms a template we repeat throughout every corner of our lives. All of our relations have this quality of discovery, where we assume one of three postures: master; student; or exploring together. Where several people come together to share, we will assume all of these roles simultaneously, teaching some, learning from others, and joining in open-ended endeavors.

From tribe to megalopolis, every grouping of humanity has seen us mix and match ourselves into these human networks of sharing. The antecedents of our schools, we have always come together in numbers to learn from one another, to teach one another, and to delve into the unknown. Most of our relations can be characterized in these terms: elders teaching the young; young learning from the experience of the old; lovers and friends striking out together on life’s great journey.

This, more than anything else, might be humanity’s defining quality. A recent study compared young chimpanzees with human toddlers on a range of intelligence tests. The humans blew past the chimpanzees because they learned from one another, teaching one another, pooling their knowledge to solve the tasks set before them. Chimpanzees, although very much as bright as those toddlers, did not share what they knew, and so had to re-invent the solution, every single time.

We share, and so take the shortcut, leveraging all previous experience into the present moment, sharpening the blunt instrument of our intelligence against the whetstone of learning. For time beyond measure, human culture has been so rich that we need to become learned in its ways, and we sustain this complexity only because we have developed effective techniques to cram all of it into the heads of the young. If we learned nothing from one another, we would still be arboreal foragers in the Rift Valley of East Africa, like our chimpanzee cousins.

Instead, we have schools, where we gather together in formally acknowledged roles of student and master, codifications of relations that existed informally but pervasively within the tribe. Yet the previous patterns persist, innate, immediate, and natural. In or out of school, we can not help but learn, nor can we stop ourselves from teaching.

Schools have always required the proximity of the city, students gathering together with masters in the Academy. In the tribe we were all together all the time, always available for any moment when knowledge could be shared. In our new-found hyperconnectivity we have recovered that moment, amplified with all of the tools and techniques of ten thousand years of school. We are always available to learn or to teach, but now we can learn from four and a half billion, and be taught by any of them, freely associating ourselves in common pursuit.

We share and thereby ‘find the others’ who share our passions and our pursuits, associating with them online and in the flesh, forming communities of ‘gurus’ and ‘n00bs’, each with a role to play. The student must sit at the feet of the master and learn. If they refuse to endure the necessary rites of passage, they will be heckled and ridiculed and excluded until they accept their place within the hierarchy of relations which characterizes all such groups.

Prized to the degree they choose to commit to the teaching of those less advanced, the teacher must balance teaching with learning, lest they fall behind in their own expertise, losing their place of prominence within that hierarchy of relations. Withdraw too completely and be considered selfish; give too willingly and lose one’s position. Those who can must do and teach.

The number of peers-in-expertise decreases as one approaches the pinnacle of craft. The more expert one becomes, the greater the pressure to demonstrate that expertise. These demands slow forward progress, and where nearly everyone is less expert, those demands become onerous. The most expert withdraw behind a cloud of mystery, and a guild materializes, a barrier between initiates and the hoi polloi.

A thousand years ago, that withdrawal would have kept knowledge hidden away, locked securely within a community of experts, but that withholding – a form of censorship – can not be sustained in the age of omniscience. Experts can remove themselves, but they can not remove their expertise. You can no longer take your toys and go home. Even where someone stops playing the game, the game goes on.

With a constant pressure from beneath to improve, there is no escape into expertise, only an increasing acceleration into greater expertise. Association becomes the only way to maintain expertise; there’s simply too much for any one mind to absorb. Communities spontaneously differentiate, relying upon individuals to be reservoirs of particular expertise within a greater body of expertise, knowing that all can be called upon as required, providing collective capacities far greater than any of its individuals.

This book is a shared pursuit – not just of the two co-authors, but of all readers interested in the topics explored in these hundred chapters. For this reason, we are now making public all of our research links – collected over the last 12 months – so we can more broadly learn from one another, and explore this collective sharpening of our minds.

As is customary for mobile carriers globally, Indian customers pay nothing if their calls can not be completed, but the recipient of the call knows who had called – their mobile records the caller’s number. It didn’t take long for someone to figure out that this ‘missed calling’ could be used as kind of signalling.

Many years ago, when interstate calling was still very expensive in the United States, I remember visiting aunts and uncles making missed calls to our home phone, informing us they’d arrived home safely. A single ring (on the single household phone), then silence. It saved them a few dollars, and saved us all some worry. For as long as direct dialing has been available, people have been missing calls intentionally, signalling one another. One ring: safe. Two rings: call me. Three rings: emergency.

India went from very little wired infrastructure – one phone per hundred people – straight into hyperconnectivity. At least half of all Indians now own a mobile. But without a wired history, how did the practice of missed-call signalling develop? Someone might have invented it on their own, but more likely it came via a visitor from a country where missed-call signalling was already commonplace. As soon as missed call signalling is practiced in front of someone else, it is understood, and begins to replicate. When a behavior is practiced on the network, it replicates quickly and broadly, soon becoming pervasive.

Human beings are excellent imitators. From our birth we imitate everyone around us, beginning with learning how to talk – an inconceivable feat of intellectual accomplishment, listening to and imitating our parents and older siblings. We learn so fast because we imitate one another so well. Wired for mimesis – imitation – we embody ‘monkey see, monkey do’.

If imitation has any boundaries, we haven’t found them. Harvard researcher Dr. Nicholas Christakis has spent the last decade studying how behaviors spread through our relationships. First, Christakis learned that tobacco smoking (and the decision to quit smoking) follows from our social connections. The more smokers we are in relation with, the more likely we are to smoke ourselves. The more of our friends decide to quit, the more likely it is that we, too, will stop.

More than just like finding like, Christakis showed that these behaviors actively spread through our connections. One person deciding to smoke makes it more likely their connections will smoke. One person deciding to quit makes it more likely others will follow. Christakis then found that this also characterized obesity: you are more likely to be obese if your connections are with the obese, and more likely to go on a diet if those around you have made that decision.

Our capacity to imitate one another so well makes us peculiarly susceptible to the actions of others. Everyone has heard a lecture on good behavior from their mothers that culminates with, “If everyone else jumped off a cliff, would you?” The answer, as it turns out, is probably yes. Our innate desire to imitate one another will even wrestle against the drive for self-preservation: we know that smoking and obesity are bad for us, but, under the influence of our connections – peer pressure – we surrender.

It goes deeper. Studies have also revealed that divorce spreads through our connections. If a couple you’re connected to breaks up, your marriage is in greater peril. Why is this? Does a close-to-home divorce get couples thinking about the dissatisfactions of marriage? Or is it simply a desire to imitate one’s friends, in sickness and in health?

Seen in this light, our connections have an almost epidemiological quality, acting as carriers for diseases of the body (obesity) and heart (divorce) which can infect us and leave us changed. Parents and mentors warned us to ‘be careful who you hang out with’; it’s common knowledge that maintaining connections with ‘the wrong crowd’ can be ruinous. Now we understand why. We are in each other’s heads, the best and worst parts of us always leaking out, or leaking in.

As we research how behaviors spread through the human network, we may attempt to medicalize our connections, creating a cordon sanitaire for ourselves and our children, places beyond the reach of these socially-transmitted diseases. This reaction – typified in the growing number of gated communities – only moves the threat, but never removes it. When you pick your friends, your colleagues, and your neighbors, you adopt their minds.

Humans have always been a colony organism, moving in sync together. The closer our connections, the closer our minds. Half a billion seconds ago, those connections, limited by speed and proximity, gave infections-of-the-mind a natural range. They could not spread quickly, nor very widely. Hyperconnected and disseminated at lightspeed, behaviors now go from unknown to ubiquitous in a few days. Half a billion seconds from now, it will all happen in a matter of seconds: hypermimesis.

Some behaviors – such as missed-call signalling – become immediately pervasive because they offer an improvement in connectivity, spreading through hypermimesis. Demonstration of a behavior over the network allows billions to observe and imitate that behavior. Every improvement in our connectivity (text messaging and missed-call signalling are but two among many) also improves our ability to imitate one another, via the network. Showing is doing, and doing, showing.

If you’re doing nothing wrong you have nothing to fear from a ticket inspector — or so the saying goes. Still, so many of us have little idea of whether we’re wholly in the right at any point in time (I had no idea I had to dip my ticket twice until I got fined) we tend to avoid close observation. No one is innocent. Everyone has something to hide. Hiding is the natural response; the ticket inspectors know this, placing themselves in difficult-to-avoid positions, monitoring the gates and doorways which shape the flow of bodies. As we pass through the checkpoint, and see an unlucky few people receiving citations, we feel a surge of sympathy – there but for the grace of God.

That sympathetic anguish easily bridges the gap of relevance to become a shared moment, a warning to all who might follow in your footsteps. My friend Matthew had just such an encounter while riding the tram in Melbourne, and posted it to Twitter:

Tram inspectors sighted on Collins st - at the Spencer st end.
#publicserviceannouncement

That self-tagged ‘public service announcement’ reached quite a number of people – all 1544 of Matthew’s followers on Twitter, and the tens of thousands connected to them, if they chose to forward that information along. Matthew’s casual moment of sharing produced a much broader awareness of the activities of those ticket inspectors — whose power of surprise had been thwarted from the moment Matthew sent his update. Exposed, inspectors can be avoided. Knowing they lie in wait, people will choose different trams, exit through different gates, avoiding their critical gaze. All of this followed from a casual and almost insignificant act, sharing amplified by hyperconnectivity.

If those fines had been set terrifically high – thousands of dollars – Melbourne’s population of four million would soon be drowning in sightings of ticket inspectors. People would have sufficient motivation to keep those inspectors under very close surveillance. Every sighting would be shared, every movement becoming common knowledge.

Attention paid to something is commensurate with its perceived threat – or benefit. When a lot of attention gets paid to something, and those observations become broadly shared, it creates ‘situational awareness’. Everyone knows as much as needed to keep themselves out of trouble, because everyone is watching for everyone else.

When drug-sniffing dogs show up at Sydney’s rail stations, many people share warning messages – the fines and penalties for infractions being so severe. Protesters throughout the world use text messaging, Twitter and custom tools like Sukey to keep track of police movements against them. In the London riots of August 2011, BlackBerry Messenger was the favored communication tool of looters, who shared information about the most unpoliced areas to rob. Sharing has consequences, acting as a force in its own right, establishing a zone of influence where other powers, however potent, have difficulties.

In a world where everyone, hyperconnected, shares everything of interest with anyone who shares that interest, it has become impossible to operate in secret, beyond view. The possibility of invisibility has been supplanted by a new ‘age of omniscience’, where anyone can know anything that’s happening, anywhere, provided they generate sufficient interest in it. The secret police have been surrounded and exposed by a hyperconnected polity framing their every movement with a hailstorm of sharing. Everything once hidden is now shouted from the rooftops.

The surveillance state of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has mutated into the sousveillant mobs of the Arab Spring, using hyperconnectivity and sharing to build situational awareness and thereby defend themselves against the monopoly on force which is the prerogative of the state. Even when the technology of those networks falls away – as when former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak shut down all of the nation’s mobile and Internet providers – the human networks forged in shared moments of sharing persist and strengthen. Technology amplifies and extends, but is not the essence of the network, which remains entirely human. People always find other ways to share what they know, from scrawled graffiti to repurposed billboards to chains of whispers. There is no censor, anywhere, when everyone at every point around the censor is fully prepared to share what the censor would withhold.

SUN Microsystems co-founder John Gilmore once quipped that ‘networks regard censorship as damage, and find a route around it’. The wires and radio waves of the network know nothing of censorship, but the people connected through them draw upon all of their resourcefulness to stay one step ahead of the censor, constantly probing and testing the limits of sharing . Wherever people are sufficiently connected, they will route around the censor, sharing everything of importance, whether media (to the frustration of copyright holders everywhere), secrets (the bane of governments), or anything else deemed taboo. Nothing can be kept out of reach in the digital realm; everything is copied and shared as widely as needed.

The age of omniscience confounds power and produces a conservative reaction which seeks to rein in the reach of the networks, but that could only be effective if the physical network were the source of the age of omniscience. It is not. We are. We have learned something new about how to share what we consider important: we distribute it so widely that it becomes a pervasive part of our awareness. Human behavior has changed, wrought by sharing amplified by hyperconnectivity, and in that change we discover a capacity for a universal awareness.

As they probably had.

My two friends emailing me reside on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, Dan in Boston, Philippe in the Canary Islands. They do not know each other, and it seems unlikely they will ever meet. Yet both of them know me well enough to know that I’d like to read something about Project Glass. Years of sharing have forged the bonds of relationship around shared interests, which include an abiding interest in virtual reality technologies such as Google’s experiment in ‘heads-up-displays’. Neither of them needed to consider whether I’d be interested in such an article; they knew without thinking, because years of experience (23 in Dan’s case, 15 for Philippe) have taught them everything they need to know about me to make them confident enough to hit the ‘send’ button. Both do — within a few hours of one another.

Even if I had no access to the Web, if I didn’t obsessively check my news feeds for anything new and interesting, if I didn’t have nearly the eight thousand people I follow on Twitter feeding me things that interest them, I would have learned about Project Glass, and I would have learned about it within a few hours of it hitting the wires. I am too well connected to too many people who know my interests for something like this to pass me by. The news would enter the network of individuals who know the individuals I know, and would be forwarded along, like the baton in a relay race, making its way from hand to hand until it found its way to me. Which is precisely what happened – though the New York Times accelerated this process somewhat by publishing an article for its millions of readers. But should the Times have been silent, I would have heard through someone, somewhere, who had heard it from someone else, somewhere else, who heard it from someone they knew. And so on.

This is no less true for any one of us. We go out in search of the things that interest us, but it’s just as likely that those things will flow to us through our network of relationships built from shared moments around shared interests. We no longer need to seek out the news – news comes and finds us. Each of us sits at the center point of a vast network of individuals, every one of whom, constantly on the lookout for any new shiny thing to catch their eye, shares a stream of novelty.

If everything every one of the hundred-and-fifty we know well came to our immediate attention, that would be difficult to digest. If we tried to take in everything shared by the ten thousand who know well those we know well, we’d be overwhelmed. And if we tried to encompass everything of note to the million who know well the ten thousand who know well those we know well, we’d immediately immolate, vaporized by too much light.

We are already directly connected. We don’t need better connections. We need better filters, something to stand between us and the impossible intensity of observation that comes from four and a half billion minds sharing whatever tickles their fancy. We need to be able to screen the light, reduce the pressure, ease back, and in the dim find a space for thought.

Fortunately, we have one another. Humans make excellent mirrors, reflecting the lights shone by others, but we can also block this light, or share it very selectively. We hear a lot, but don’t repeat all of it all at once to any one person. We select and choose, directed by the memories of the relationships that have grown up over shared moments of sharing. Each shared moment has the potential to reinforce or weaken the bond of relationship, so we become very careful with our strongest relationships, working to keep them strong by refreshing them constantly with the best we can find. Everything not immediately relevant to that relationship is ignored, or saved for a time when it might prove relevant.

We rely on our relationships to provide us with everything they believe we might need to know. Those closest to us will forward something along because it has made its way past the filter they use to keep that relationship strong. We do the same, sharing ourselves judiciously in the quest to keep ourselves well-informed.

This parallel ‘human network’ has grown up alongside the broadcast and print media, uses them, but would experience surprisingly little disruption if every television channel went dark and every printing press stopped. We are the network now, and everything we need to know finds its way to us, precisely because we express our interest in it. Nothing more is required, no subscriptions or sophisticated sharing technologies. These accelerate the human network, and amplify it, but even if all the sharing tools we know and love simply vanished, our human network of sharing and filtering would prove sufficient for all of us to have as much awareness as desired of anything that we consider salient.

Everyone asks these questions simultaneously.

The mobile network, overloaded, begins to stutter. Text messages fail. Calls cut off in mid-sentence. There is signal – you can see the bars on your mobile’s screen – but no connectivity. Not knowing, not being able to connect and learn, amplifies the sense of crisis. Something bad is happening. And you don’t even know how bad.

Seismologists set to work, read their graphs, make some calculations, and form a prediction. The seafloor has been sufficiently disturbed to produce a ‘harbour wave’ – in Japanese, tsunami – spreading out from the epicenter, across the Andaman Sea and Indian ocean. Supercomputers generate a visualization of the spread of this wave, based on the size of the temblor and the topology of the ocean floor. That gets published to a website, and is immediately copied and posted to Twitter, where it is shared a few hundred more times:

The international news networks, CNN and BBC and Al Jazeera, begin rolling coverage of the earthquake. They show the visualization, calling out the predicted landfall times of the tsunami, one after another. Aceh. Phuket. Andaman Islands.

It all has a horrible feeling of deja vu, because the sequence of events appears eerily similar to the Boxing Day earthquake and tsunami of 2004, when a magnitude 9.0 temblor produced a wave up to 15 meters high in some places, killing well over three hundred thousand people. People died in such numbers because no one knew the tsunami was coming. Even after the prediction had been made, there was no way to warn everyone in the tsunami’s path.

In 2004, little more than a billion people owned mobiles, and most of those lived in the developed world, not the Indian Ocean basin. Not yet connected, they could not be reached. They could not be warned.

A quarter of a billion seconds later, more than four and a half billion own mobiles, many of these new owners concentrated in India, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and Sri Lanka – precisely the countries most affected by the devastation of the last tsunami. Systems have been deployed, both to detect a tsunami, and to spread the alarm. Text messaging – originally developed to provide a channel to send emergency messages to many mobiles simultaneously – shares news of the predicted tsunami with great rapidity. Anyone who doesn’t get the message – or doesn’t have a mobile – learns of the prediction from someone who got the message.

The authorities issue an evacuation order. Everyone within a few meters of sea level must relocate to higher ground. There is no resistance to the command; memories of 2004 are too fresh. People begin a relatively orderly migration away from the shoreline, into the hills. Numerous signs – installed after the last tsunami – direct people toward specific evacuation zones. Someone uses their mobile to snap a photo of the evacuation in Phuket, posting it to Twitter, where it is quickly shared around:

No one knows if the tsunami will come; some earthquakes, lifting the earth up, produce monster waves, while others, shuffling the crust from side to side, do little more than stir up the water. Seismologists seem confident this earthquake belongs to the second (and less dangerous) category, but reports come in over Twitter, shared and shared again, sightings of vast areas of exposed seabed in Phuket. The drawing back of the sea is a sure sign of an incoming tsunami; everyone knows this. But reports are not proof, and the reports conflict. Eyewitnesses report one thing, government officials report another. Finally, someone shares a photo of a Phuket beach, taken with a mobile and uploaded to Twitter, then shared and shared and shared:

It looks as though the sea has vanished. But who can say? The debate rages, even as people continue making their way to the designated evacuation areas. Some of the evacuees use Twitter to share their own observations – how orderly it seems, how there is no real fear, just a sense of urgency.

Newscasters blithely report that – according to predictions – the tsunami should have already engulfed Aceh. They’re waiting for word, running the same few seconds of video from Aceh, taken in the moments following the earthquake: people running from buildings, standing in the street, waiting. But they’re not just waiting. At least half of them are talking on their mobiles, or staring down into them, connecting. Each using their own connectivity to build an awareness of everyone and everything of importance to them:

CNN International, waiting for news from Aceh, begins to show some of the photos people have shared on Twitter: evacuations, traffic jams, long lines of people on the move. “You see everyone in these pictures on their phones,” the newscaster adds. “They’re getting information about what to do.”

No great wave destroys Aceh again, nor Phuket, nor the Andaman islands. No buildings have come down, either in the initial quake, nor in the aftershock – so big that by itself it will be one of the biggest earthquakes of the year. Another tsunami warning follows the aftershock. People continue to wait, and share:

Eventually, the all clear comes, and people climb down from their high places, breathing a sigh of relief. Was this just a mass fright, shared at the speed of light across a hyperconnected planet, or simply sensible behavior? No one died, but no one was in any real danger. Better to be safe than sorry, surely. Now that we are all connected, we know that others will share with us when we come into danger.

Each of these sharing moments become the shape of our relationships. Moments become memories, and eventually these memories acquire a life of their own, a rendering of the relationship into a miniature version of someone whom you’ve shared with and who has shared with you. This model grows more complete as these shared moments of sharing accumulate. From our point of view at the center of our personal universe, these shared moments compose that person – or at least all of that person we can ever know.

Everyone you know well, you know well precisely because of the accumulation of those sharing moments. Sharing is how we come to know one another. Our infant minds fill themselves up with mom and dad (mostly mom). Only gradually do we learn how to sort all of those other people out. Our circles of connections grow wider as our minds find the room to house a battalion of individuals. Without memory of the shared moments of sharing, all human contact would exist within an eternal present, a Memento-like state where no one could ever matter. Without memory, there is no relationship, and without sharing, there is no memory.

Each of our relationships grows from sharing, conforming to the boundaries established by that sharing, and tends to reinforce that we already know. Like shares with like. If we want to talk about the latest movies, we know whom to turn to. If we want to gripe about our employer, we know who will provide a sympathetic ear. And if we want to speculate about our own possibilities, we know who’s willing to join us on our flights of fancy. The ‘echo chamber’ of human culture — which recirculates the same truisms endlessly between like-minded individuals — did not begin with the Internet; it is as old as speech. We need to have our beliefs confirmed, fears soothed and secrets held. We focus upon the relationships which provide these.

We grow from knowing nothing about one another to knowing everything needed to breathe life into a simulacrum, a mind’s-eye version. We know a handful of people exceptionally well, sharing with them continuously. We know a larger number reasonably well, certainly enough to find some excuse to share something with them as desire or opportunity presents. We know enough people well enough to share something in common with them. These three levels of intimacy emerged from the familial and tribal bonds of our common heritage. We have always needed to share ourselves with those in the tribe: sharing means survival.

Our ability to share meaningfully defines the boundaries of the tribe, and limits it. Relationships nourish and tax in equal amounts. Time and attention and dedication keep our relationships fresh. Friends ‘drift apart’ when they forget to feed their relationship, eventually becoming estranged. We all know the odd feeling of meeting someone we once knew well, but now hardly know. The memory of relationship remains, like dried bones. This happens and needs to happen because we can not feed every relationship equally. Some people enter our lives to stay, some only drift through. We retain something as they depart, but most gets lost as we plow over the ground of that relationship to make room for another. We have limits, and can only sow our minds with so many simultaneous relations.

Estimates vary, but something between one hundred and fifty (the so-called ‘Dunbar Number’) and two hundred and fifty seems to be the upper limit on the number of active and well-fed relationships we can manage. This conforms to the size of tribal groupings known from the study of paleoanthropology and prehistory, as well as examinations of the hunter-gatherer cultures still with us today in Amazonia and New Guinea. Tribes make manifest the limits of memory and relation, never growing beyond the natural confines of our ability to hold everyone within our heads.

Ten thousand years away from the tribes, we carry these same boundaries in our modern minds, but whereas once everyone within a tribe held the same set of individuals in their heads, no one today has precisely the same array of relations. Even husbands and wives, in a lifetime together, maintain separate social spheres. We overlap and intersect, but instead of a single unit of blood and tribe, we span multitudes. Each of us knows one hundred and fifty others well, and each of those know one hundred and fifty well. Even with a fair bit of overlap, you and the people you know well know more than ten thousand people well. Those ten thousand know a million well. The million know a hundred million. That hundred million know everyone. This ‘six degrees of separation’ emerges from the relations of sharing and memory which once kept our horizons narrowly focused on the tribe, but which now (with a little mixing and connecting) spans the species.

Every one of us, everywhere, resides in the embrace of this ‘human network’ of relations built from shared moments of sharing. This network presents us the opportunity to share our experiences, or learn from the experiences of others. Above the broad physical network of communications – the wires and waves of Internet and mobile – an invisible but pervasive, highly mediated, but entirely human network reinforces our relationships with every act of sharing. The sphere of our relations has grown to encompass the whole world.

At just that moment in time – the middle years of the 2000s – television audiences gained a power that had been tightly held by broadcasters – the ability to distribute a program. A broadcaster raises an antenna (or buys a cable channel), then has the right – a monopoly, really – to use that bandwidth as they see fit. If they want to fill the airwaves with home shopping, car crashes, or haute couture catwalks, that’s their privilege. Scarce, bandwidth had to be meted out carefully, with some lip service to the public interest – hence the public broadcasters – but inevitably creating an interlocking ecosystem of corruption, as broadcasters and public officials worked in lockstep to keep bandwidth a strictly limited resource. Audiences wanting to watch these programs accepted that broadcasters controlled the only mechanism to distribute them.

In 1999, changes in distribution methods emerged on college campuses throughout the United States. Shawn Fanning, a student at Boston’s Northeastern University, developed software that allowed his friends to share their music collections across the campus broadband network. Nicknamed ‘Napster’ after Fanning’s curls, the software quickly mushroomed in popularity, not just at Northeastern, but at every other American university offering high-speed Internet access.

Napster scanned a user’s hard drive, compiling a list of all music files, sending that list off to a central computer. When another user searched for a particular piece of music – perhaps the fourth movement of Beethoven’s 9th symphony – they would be presented with a list of the different users who offered it as part of their music collection. A Napster user could then click on a particular user, and the track would be copied directly from the user who offered to share the music to the user requesting it. Napster’s superdistribution essentially converted the Internet into a gigantic disc drive, with the contents of any one computer available to every other computer. This ‘file-sharing’, as it became to be known, created a unified, global platform for the exchange of any type of media.

Napster did not last long. Although each individual user had purchased their music, the recording industry sued Napster, claiming it provided tools which enabled and encouraged widespread copyright violation. Unsurprisingly, the courts agreed, and Napster – that is, its centralized database – went dark in August 2000. Over fourteen million people used Napster in the days before it disappeared, each of whom experienced the exhilaration of a vast catalog of music available for their enjoyment. Although much of the file-sharing involved the most popular music of the day – Metallica, for example – many users shared recordings too rare or obscure to be widely available. Napster briefly became a treasure trove of audio gems, and sensitized a generation to the power of sharing.

Just days after Napster closed down, Gnutella launched. In contrast to Napster’s centralized – and vulnerable – design, Gnutella’s users searched one another’s computers directly, forming a ‘peer-to-peer network’, each asking all the others for music. Without a center to sue into oblivion, the recording industry took to suing individual file-sharers, an effort akin to boiling the sea. Since its introduction, peer-to-peer file-sharing has seen a steadily growing volume of content distributed, despite intense efforts to shut them down, disrupt or poison them.

Gnutella’s peer-to-peer networks had one weakness: they could not deal well with high demand for an item in short supply. If a user had a the only copy of a particularly prized song, they would be flooded with requests answered serially. If you were toward the front of the request queue, you’d be fine, but if you arrived after a few thousand others, you’d be waiting a very long time for that song. As people began to share television programs and movies – hundreds of times the size of songs – this problem became acute.

An ingenious solution to this problem came from bright programmer named Bram Cohen, who realized each copy of an item could be used as a source for subsequent copies. Let’s say, for example, I’d like to share a copy of this book. I have a copy machine which I can use to make copies, and as each person queues a request, I make a copy of the book, hand it to them, then start making a copy of the book for the next person in the queue. Lengthy, laborious — and the way Gnutella works.

With Cohen’s insight – known as BitTorrent – I would break the book up into individual pages, make a copy of each of these, and give one page to each person in the queue. Once each person has a page, I tell them each about one another. They also have copy machines, so they start to share furiously with one another, asking one another for copies of the pages they don’t have. In short order, everyone has a complete copy of the book.

A resource shared is a resource squared. With BitTorrent, sharing becomes a shared task, squaring the power of sharing, transforming superdistribution into hyperdistribution. Hyperdistribution means anyone, anywhere can share a file of any size with everyone, everywhere. The restrictions on bandwidth which effectively barred individuals from acting as broadcasters have fallen away.

Once the public learned of hyperdistribution, they began to self-distribute all sorts of media: music, movies, television, software, databases – anything that could be digitized was now freely and widely distributed — including episodes of television shows such as The West Wing and Game of Thrones. Freed from being the whipping-boys of television programmers, Australians became the most profligate downloaders of television on the planet. Audience-driven distribution – sharing via hyperdistribution – had supplanted television broadcasting.

Sharing as a species hearkens back to our beginnings, and ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: we can watch as sharing behaviors emerge in children. From our earliest moments, fresh from the womb, we begin to share ourselves. Babies move their arms and legs in syncopation to mother’s voice, dancing to her soothing tones. The infant freely offers up their internal, inchoate emotional state with smiles and gurgles and cries and screams, and continue sharing for the entire span of our lives.

Ask a small child to share a favoured toy — and prepare yourself for a battle of wills. Ask that same child to share the details of their day, then sit back as a stream-of-consciousness flow of associations, impressions and memories pours forth. We must be taught to share our things, yet must learn restraint when sharing our thoughts. Such is our need to speak our minds, keeping secrets requires almost superhuman reserves of willpower and fortitude.

In the beginning, we share with those most closely related to us: mother and father, siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles. As we grow into greater independence, capable of forging our own connections, we share with friends, neighbors, and classmates. By the time we reach adulthood, that circle of sharing extends out to colleagues, acquaintances, and the community.

Ten thousand years ago sharing reached its natural limits at the boundaries of tribal kinship. Five thousand years ago, the walls of the city would have framed our span. Five hundred years ago, we could write our thoughts into a book, send it to the printers, and see ourselves eventually shared throughout the world.

In the age of hyperconnectivity sharing becomes immediate, instantaneous, and universal. Everything we share always goes global, even if it only rarely becomes pervasive. We share ourselves freely, believing our sharing bound by the gravitational forces which have always dragged our thoughts back to earth, but everything has now become weightless photons, and travels without interruption at the speed of light. There is no barrier, anywhere — not even within ourselves.

The hyperconnected leak information, always sharing something. At a minimum we share our presence on the network, this being the first sin that leads to a multitude of transgressions, revelation by derivation: Presence becomes location. Location becomes movement. Movement becomes activity. Activity becomes intent. Everything, from barely anything at all.

Revelation is the common, persistent and continuous condition of the four-and-a-half-billion-and-counting hyperconnected. It is not that there is no privacy anymore; rather, the performance of any act becomes its broadcast, traced out in presence, and, once shared, drawn into a world of meanings attached to our actions. We neither surrendered our privacy nor had it taken away: privacy and connectivity are fundamentally oppositional. Satisfying both simultaneously has proven impossible.

Since we did not give up our privacy, we are not aware that it has vanished, except in those still somewhat rare but increasingly common moments when we become wholly visible to one another. We can generate a peculiar quality of light, where everyone is revealed, all the connections we assumed in innocence casting menacing shadows.

A telephone carrier knows where each of its subscribers are (or at least their mobiles) at every moment. Mobiles, aware of their location, share this information with various services, together with any other relevant information. This sharing expands our awareness. We can know when our friends approach, or a taxicab, or a potential employer. Sifting through this sharing, taking from it the bits most relevant to the present need, reveals the hidden. A recent example: Girls around Me.

Creepy on first sight (an obvious playground for stalkers) the deeper one looks, the more interesting it becomes. Why women? Why not footy fans, car hoons or budgerigar fanciers? Why not Jews? Or skinheads? Or anyone who in any way differs from me enough to present a threat? The shout that once alerted us to a predator on the African savannah has become an message on the screen of our smartphone.

No one need explicitly share themselves in order to be thus captured, qualified, filtered and portrayed. All becomes apparent from connections, associations, movements and activities. Like attracts like, and this reveals more than we would ever willingly provide. Connection is the only light required to reveal absolutely everything.

We find ourselves utterly exposed, sharing everything without hesitation and without volition. We are completely known but do not yet know this. We believe we encompass mystery, that something can be withheld. The space for secrets has grown miniscule, as every act, connected, shared and broadcast globally, tells others more about us than we dare admit to ourselves.

Believing ourselves shy, we nonetheless desire to know the minds of others, longing to learn who to connect with around the topics of importance to us, and who we must avoid in order to preserve ourselves. Threat and opportunity: human drives have changed little in ten thousand years, but now everyone hears our moments of crisis and triumph. These moments act as beacons, allowing us to find one another.

Yet when we connect with another person, we conform to the needs of a dynamic created whenever we come together. Communication is a dance, and like any dance requires the full engagement of both parties. Otherwise, someone might trip and spill to the floor. Two people, connected, can be quite intense. When it becomes three, four, or more, it becomes a party. Parties are hard work: when you’re at a party you’re only thinking about the other people at the party. It becomes your whole world.

Now the whole world has become a party. The moments when we are not connected to at least one other person have grown vanishingly rare. Most often we connect to many others, via SMS and chat and Twitter and Skype and Facebook and Google+ and Yammer and Foursquare and, and, and… The ways we connect have multiplied as we grow more connected, a process accelerating as we come to understand how to use our connectivity toward specific ends.

We can spend all of our waking hours connected. For the generation born and raised during the last half billion seconds, that isn’t even a choice: it’s simply the way things are. Connection is the default posture for Homo Nexus, even at the expense of the real. People stare into their mobiles while they wait at bus stops; pedestrians walk into traffic, obliviously absorbed in their mobile; drivers get into accidents trying to send or read a text message at speed. Connectivity is pervasive, and connectivity is addictive. Once we have it, we will not willingly do without it. Yet we must.

When we connect and involve ourselves immediately in the lives of others, we surrender the ability to be involved within ourselves. This is no mere narcissism, but rather its opposite: the capacity to be with oneself, and within oneself, to reflect and meditate, is the root of our private experience. Without the silence that comes from solitude, there is no self.

We find ourselves in a perilous situation. We have embraced hyperconnectivity and the constant companionship of others, but in order to be authentically ourselves with others, we need to pull away, nursing within ourselves our own distinctive qualities – emotional, intellectual, physical, and spiritual – that come only when we face ourselves alone. The self itself is under threat, not because of the erosion of privacy, or the inversion of public and private spaces, but because we can not find the time to tend it.

We need to strike a balance between the power and joy of connection and the internal strength which comes from solitude. Neither is wholly good, nor entirely the answer: our future lies somewhere between the hermit and the hive. We know that we need to cut our connections in order to focus our thoughts, but we must extend this obvious truth into a broader recognition of the importance of feeding both halves of our nature.

We must admit that we are not very good at managing the ‘hygiene’ of our connected selves. Our parents taught us to brush our teeth and wash behind our ears, but no one has shown us how to pull the plug, or why we should. This is all brand new, and it is all brand new for all of us. There was no vanguard of Homo Nexus who could pass along the lessons they learned. We became this new thing all together, and all at once. We have been robbed of the most fundamental form of mimesis – the imitation of our parents and elders – because there are no parents, no elders. We must learn from one another.

Our children, who have grown up constantly connected, have no role models to show them that disconnection will make them great. They look to us, see us fumbling through emails at the dinner table, reaching for the phone every time a text message arrives, recognizing us as captives of connectivity. This is the behavior they reproduce – doing as we do, not as we say – and for this reason we can not rely on them to develop the habits of healthfulness around connection. They have no innate sense of the importance of solitude, nor any external examples of its value. We must first teach ourselves, and only then can we presume to teach our children – by example.

Our predicament is not a matter of fault, or blame. It is as if a car we were driving along suddenly acquired a rocket engine. For a while we zoom along dangerously, but eventually we learn how to tap the accelerator pedal gently, so that we can keep within the speed limit, and avoid a wreck. Now that we are connected, our first most important task must be  to master the balance between our drive to connect and our need for solitude. We must develop the skills to nurse ourselves – every day – for our own good. At present, we’re like overexcited toddlers, filled to overflowing with all of the day’s events, and unable to go to sleep. We must soothe ourselves, and we can only do that in solitude.

Solitude is not the opposite of connection, but its complement. Turning the mobile off and putting it away – for an hour, an evening, or a day – does not separate you from the body of Homo Nexus. We are all so well connected that none of can easily slip through the common net of connection. But we have neither protocol nor etiquette for the practice of solitude. We must be able to slip away gracefully, leaving others with the understanding that this brief parting will only deepen the moments to follow. We must look forward to solitude, embracing ourselves. For many, solitude feels unfamiliar, unfriendly, and unpleasant. We need to share the joys of solitude, so they, too, tug at us, when we have been away from ourselves for too long.

For the last half billion seconds we have gorged ourselves at the banquet of connection. Now we need some time to digest what we have taken in. Pausing will only make the meal more delicious, when we return to it. Some have launched their own “Technology Sabbath” (invoking the strict Jewish practice of no work from sunset Friday through sunset Saturday), putting aside their mobiles and computers for one day in seven, using that time to focus themselves in prayer or meditation, in uninterrupted playtime with their children, or anything else that brings them into quiet and reflective contemplation.

The specifics may not work for everyone, but all of us need something like this. We need to be able to draw a line around our connected selves, containing what we have become before it leaves nothing of us. That line evolves from strict to supple as we become comfortable moving back and forth between connection and solitude. Like children, at the beginning we require boundaries. As we mature, and internalize the new rules of Homo Nexus, we will be better able to decide for ourselves the space we make for being.

A half billion seconds ago, we knew solitude well, and were not afraid of it. Today, aware only of continuous connection, we have almost forgotten this other side to ourselves. It must not be lost as we turn this corner. It is the seat of our soul.

Staring at the woman, dumbfounded, I realize she wants to be cut open, perhaps behind the ear, with all of the delicate electronics that enable connectivity laced into the space underneath the skin, tucked up against her cranium like an ivy scaling an old brick wall. She wants to link – to think, and be connected.

She finds this idea irresistible.

The only way I can confront this unexpected lust for the future – rushing to embrace a wave of annihilating change – is with the unvarnished truth. “Where is your mobile right now?”

“Here,” she says, gesturing at her handbag.

“And where is it when you go to sleep at night?”

“On the bedstand, right next to me. It’s my alarm clock.”

“When is your mobile ever more than a meter away from you?”

She considers this. “When I’m in the shower, maybe. That’s about it.”

“Why do you need to get an implant? It’s already effectively part of you. What do you gain by putting it inside of you?” She wrestles with this question for the brief moment it takes her to accept that she has already arrived at her destination. She already has an implant.

Nearly all of us carry our mobiles with us nearly all the time. The vast majority of us sleep next to them, restoring ourselves as they recharge. We are no longer ever alone, not even for a moment.

This loss has gone unnoticed. We grow alarmed at a loss of signal, but seem unable to recognize the absence of a penumbra of quiet which had always been available to us, before hyperconnectivity. We could step away from the world, away from the interruptions and influences of others, away from their thoughts and feelings, and be wholly in ourselves.

We immediately adapted to the continuous presence of others, moving from an empty mansion into a crowded, noisy hostel without missing a beat. We wear the close connectivity of the tribe as comfortably as an old pair of shoes. The oldest parts of us instinctively understand how to be within relations that endure without interruption. We evolved as creatures always within a convenient cooee. Now that call has gone global, restoring everything lost in the flowering of civilization. In hyperconnectivity we have both the anonymity of the mob and the definite identity of the tribe. We may have no particular location, but we are noticed the moment we disappear.

Emergency services have recently seen a sharp uptick in the number of hikers needing a quick recovery from the bush. Hikers stroll into Australia’s substantial parklands, never bothering to file a route plan with the relevant authorities, as it never occurs to them that they could find themselves many kilometers from the nearest cell tower, at the bottom of a ravine, lost, and needing assistance.

Confident in their connectivity, laden with GPS and mobile maps, thinking themselves the equal of any situation, they reach for their mobiles — only to find them useless — and encounter, perhaps for the first time, absolute solitude. The connection gives way to silence, and their confidence collapses. Never having been alone, they confront solitude without any resilience wrought from prior experience.

This same has become true for all of us: the sting of hyperconnectivity. The price we pay for being connected is a certain helplessness in its absence. Every time we reach for the mobile, turning to one another for assistance, we lose some innate capacity to confront the world by ourselves. These losses accumulate until, with half a billion seconds left to go, we could only turn back to our prior, disconnected selves with great difficulty and enormous resistance. We could choose to repent. Instead we accelerate toward this new combination of mutual aid and individual weakness.

Our actions as individuals become the movements of a global culture. At the end of 2008, when, for the first time in history, half of humanity became urban-dwellers, half of humanity owned their own mobile, a synchronicity revealing the alignment of old and new ideas of connectivity. The urban revolution took ten thousand years; the main body of Homo Nexus arrived in less than half a billion seconds, two cultural transformations intersecting in a shared conception of proximity.

The network collapses space to a single point, but, like the city, connectivity has its center, boundary, and areas beyond its reach. As they have always been, cities remain centers of connectivity, with some attention paid to the sprawling suburbs separating them from the vast and sparsely populated regions beyond. Eighty-five percent of the human race lives within range of a mobile signal (more than have access to clean water) but this coverage represents less than sixty percent of the Earth’s surface.

The lure of connectivity has been drawing us together for a hundred centuries. Hyperconnectivity draws a sharp line between the extensive capabilities of Homo Nexus and the rural, agrarian humanity out of signal range. During the next half billion seconds, the boundary will grow more distinct as this new urban form manifests itself in an explosion of capacity. Rural depopulation will accelerate as connectivity becomes irresistible and its absence unimaginable.

We will develop techniques to extend connectivity beyond the urban cores, satellites and longwave subsumed within the preeminent demand for continuous coverage, but the quality of that connection will be inversely proportional to the distance from the hyperconnected center. Some will adapt to life at the margins, but few will embrace that life willingly. We have surrendered our singular selves to the communion of others, and do not mourn the loss.

Cameron wrote the screenplay for Avatar in the mid-2000s, just when the mobile had become a fixed feature of life in the developed world. Science fiction frequently serves as a mirror into the present (Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was actually about the Britain of 1948) and Cameron gave our new-found hyperconnectivity a physical basis in Pandoran physiology, making those implicit connections tangible and visible.

The climax of Avatar involves the defense of the ‘Tree of Souls’, portrayed as a vegetal nexus, bridging the gap between the ‘Na’vi’ (Pandora’s indigenous humanoids) and ‘Eywa’, the Pandoran world-soul. The Tree of Souls connects the Na’vi to their ancestors, to the Pandoran biosphere, and the divine. The resource-hungry human antagonists realize that the destruction of the Tree of Souls will reduce the Na’vi to a broken people, refugees on their own world, cut off from the greater life of Pandora, from their history, and from one another. Cameron highlighted the dread we feel when disconnected from the network, cleverly crafting a situation every hyperconnected individual could sympathize with.

Our connections are emotional. In our hearts, we feel their presence and absence. The emotional quality of our first connection – with our mothers – colours all others. That bond becomes the bridge to love, flowing unconditionally from child to mother. Every other connection carries within it the expectation of that unconditional love, and even if we never again achieve the surrender and innocence of our earliest moments, it remains our deepest wish. Adults frame these wishes against their experience of connection – complicated, fraught, often clumsy – while adolescents, closer to their origins, believe every connection will reproduce the love they learned from mother. Time teaches them to lower their expectations.

The mobile has become the visible manifestation of the emotions evoked by our connections. Although, unlike the tendrils of the Pandorans, they have not burrowed their way beneath into our biology, we carry our mobiles everywhere. We use them to link with one another, consult the spirits of the ancestors (through their writings), and, as we watch feeds and updates scroll by, tune into the whispers of the global mind. We may imagine ourselves separate, but we yearn to link with all, dissolving in a sea of love.

Tribal humanity, constantly connected across a lifetime, knew this connectivity intimately. Take a tribal human out the tribe and, stripped of the emotional presence they have always known, they lose their resilience, like toddler abandoned. The urban revolution brought the focus to smaller units of extended families, then the industrial revolution shattered that extended family into a spare, tiny nucleus. Just as this process reached its uttermost extent – with absolute individuation – the mobile created a new quality of connection. We now recover our original tribal connectivity, but at global scale.

The bond between mother and child has been touched by this hyperconnectivity. Dr. Genevieve Bell, Intel Fellow and Anthropologist-in-Residence, recorded an unexpected instance of this transformation in a South Korean classroom. Interviewing students whose parents had given them mobiles with GPS-tracking features – so parents could know precisely where those children are, every moment of the day – Dr. Bell asked these children if they felt comfortable under the steady gaze of constant parental surveillance. One child pointed toward another child in the room, saying, “She doesn’t have one of these phones. Her parents don’t love her enough to care where she is.” The child instinctively located the emotional relationship within the device.

Dr. Sherry Turkle, who has studied the relation of children and computing for a generation, has noted that children no longer differentiate from their parents as quickly or completely as before, and points to the mobile as the cause. When a child heads off to university, they now call the parent every day (sometimes several times a day) seeking information, advice, or just a sympathetic ear. The hard boundaries which previously marked entry into adulthood have grown fuzzy, because mobile omnipresence places the parent everywhere the child has a need.

Although Turkle believes this most recent phenomenon might represent a retardation of the processes of adulthood and individuation, it actually marks a return to the prelapsarian state before the utter individuation of late urbanization. Until quite recently – perhaps a hundred years ago – parents rarely separated from their children. Everyone remained within the same village – often within the same household – throughout an entire lifetime. This relation has been suddenly recovered, a reversal of a century of cultural patterns which created the knife-edge of instant adulthood. Children and parents now reside in a connection mediated by the mobile, omnipresent and continuous.

Because it is now possible, continuous emotional engagement has become an option in all our relations. We are seeking to recover the undifferentiated acceptance of our relation to our mothers, looking to every contact as a path back to this unity. Inevitably, we will be frustrated. From that frustration we are learning how to modulate our emotional boundaries on a global scale.

A decade ago we never looked at our mobiles unless making a call. Five years ago we stared at them only while we carefully prepared a text message. Today we gaze into them constantly, almost continuously. Something has changed.

The most obvious change concerns the device itself, which evolved from a very simple alphanumeric display – 3 or 4 lines of 20 characters – into something more akin to a videogame console than a telephone, bristling with processing power, colorful, high-resolution graphics, stereophonic sound, and a surface sensitive to the slightest touch. This ‘smartphone’ realizes the Star Trek vision of the handheld communicator/tricorder (two hundred years ahead of schedule), a flexible, personal device capable of being put to work in practically any situation.

That’s certainly part of what’s going on, but even in the areas of the world where the smartphone hasn’t begun to penetrate (three and a half billion of the planet’s four and a half billion mobile-owning individuals do not own a smartphone) the behavior persists. The smartphone provides plenty of excuses to look down into the device, but they aren’t necessary.

Everyone else – and even those with a smartphone – stares into the device because they’re engaged in conversations, 160 characters at time, in the form of text messages. Over seven trillion text messages were sent last year, a thousand for every person on Earth, with a good percentage of people sending or receiving a hundred messages a day. Teenagers think nothing of spending spare time connecting and communicating with friends through text messages; easily sending and receiving three thousand a month.

These sound like huge numbers, almost as if texting represents a habitual, addictive behavior, but reframed it becomes less scary: What if these teenagers spoke five thousand sentences a month? We’d wonder what had made them so quiet and withdrawn. Texting carries our conversations across space, completely natural to teenagers who have never known anything but hyperconnectivity.

The first mobiles with text messaging features did not tout this capability. In the beginning, few saw any real value in text messaging. Mobile hardware manufacturers added text messaging into their products as an afterthought, buried behind a confusing array of menus. Nothing about first-generation text messaging was easy: Most people had no idea they could send a text message until they received one, when they would learn both how to read the message and send a reply.

Despite all these difficulties, people learned how use text messaging, then taught their friends to do the same, by sending them messages. As messages shot around, more people began to send messages, in a loop of positive feedback which brought us to the trillions of the present day.

Carriers were soon earning more from text messages (which cost almost nothing to send) than from voice calls. Mobile handset manufacturers transformed their devices into messaging machines, demoting the mobile’s voice call capabilities in favor of an interface geared around text messages. The users of the mobile had changed the design of the device, by their patterns of use.

These next generation messaging machines removed most of the barriers to effective messaging. People could manage many more conversations – serially and concurrently – and the number of text messages sent began to accelerate, because people had a platform which reflected their own desire to reach out and connect with others. Texting grew from a rare activity into an occasional practice, eventually becoming a nearly continuous behavior.

Text messages have well-known shortcomings, including message length, lack of rich media, and clumsy keyboard interfaces. (While it is possible to use a 10-digit telephone keypad to type a novel, it often can be and infuriating experience.) People wanted to be able to communicate without any of the constraints of text messages (because of the design of the carrier networks, these constraints were set in stone), so demand grew for more flexible messaging tools.

The immediate and overwhelming popularity of Research In Motion’s BlackBerry platform, seamlessly integrating electronic mail into the mobile experience – with a full, if tiny keyboard – demonstrated the pent-up desire to move beyond text messaging. Other devices, such as Danger’s Hiptop, effectively positioned the mobile as a device that was all about messaging, handling voice calls as an afterthought. Once again, users had driven design changes in mobile devices, making these devices more useful to them, leading to higher levels of usage, and more attention paid to the device. Gradually, we were being drawn in.

By the mid 2000s, the mobile had become more message center than voice communication, with SMS, email and a growing number of new messaging environments, such as Twitter, Facebook and AIM. In order to accommodate so many different conduits for communication, the mobile had to become a general-purpose communications platform: a fully-functional and openly programmable computer. Nokia introduced the first of these highly flexible devices – known as ‘smartphones’ – in 2007, soon followed by devices developed at Apple, Google, and Microsoft.

The smartphone can perform any function of a desktop computer and any function of a mobile, marrying the rich experience of desktop Internet and pervasive wireless hyperconnectivity in a single point of contact, producing an explosive growth in the range of messaging options available, and exponential growth in the number of messages being delivered across all formats. The smartphone continuously offers up a stream of messages. As a result, the smartphone has become nearly impossible to ignore for more than a few moments.

The smartphone itself – metal, glass, plastic and silicon – is not the source of this seductive glamour, unworthy of such dedicated attention. Its surface – the ‘black mirror’ of the display – acts as the individual’s portal to the connected world. Shaped through trillions of messages and half a billion seconds of directed engineering, our hyperconnectivity has produced a nearly ideal tool for communication. From their comfortable homes within our hands, mobiles shine a light so alluring we can no longer look away.

That’s exactly what the fishermen in Kerala realized. One fisherman with a mobile is omniscient – a seeing man in the land of the blind. A thousand fisherman, each with their own mobile, become a single, emergent, efficient market supply. The space between these two states – the single fisherman and the mobile as fisherman’s essential tool – is incredibly brief. Everyone within the market simultaneously recognizes that in order to realize their greatest profits, they must connect.

In villages and cities throughout the developing world, one scene has played out in endless repetitions over the last half billion seconds: an individual with a bit of money purchases a mobile. That mobile connects this individual to the marketplace, opening them to a range of economic opportunities, some of which the individual takes advantage of, improving their economic position. This individual is connected – in the flesh – to family and friends and colleagues, each of whom observe how the mobile has created new-found wealth for that individual.

Poorly educated people are not stupid; we are all born knowing how to imitate the behaviors of others, especially when that behavior confers tangible success. People save or borrow to acquire a mobile, and put that mobile to work for them, increasing their economic success. As a significant percentage of the population get mobiles, the advantages become more and more obvious, until everyone understands the relationship between the market and the mobile, and everyone migrates into mobile ownership.

This process of observation and imitation on a mass scale – hypermimesis – explains the unprecedented growth in the number of individuals owning mobiles. Barely sixty million owned a mobile in 1995; the end of 2012 will see us closing in on nearly five billion with at least one mobile device, a growth of nearly ten thousand percent in half a billion seconds. While many assumed adoption rates would slow after most of the world’s affluent bought a mobile, the adoption rate actually shot skyward, buoyed by the growing realization that future success depends upon connectivity.

In February 2012 China surpassed a billion mobile subscriptions, with nearly eight hundred million Chinese – greater than half the population – using a mobile. India, far poorer than newly-industrialized China, has nearly six hundred million subscribers. Africa – with less wealth than either Asian giant – has well over half a billion. Everywhere we look we see the mobile making inroads, but particularly in the poorest corners of the planet. People who barely have money for food will find the money to buy a mobile, because it represents the best opportunity they have ever had to increase their earning power.

Connectivity equals success. This has been demonstrated beyond any doubt. We sit in an in-between time, with the billion seconds following this discovery, but before it becomes the baseline behavior for our species. At the end of this billion seconds, being connected and being human will be seen as synonymous.

We are the species whose success relies upon our ability to communicate what we know to others around us. We put what others communicate to work. Some of what we communicate concerns how we communicate. When someone learns something about how to improve the connectivity between individuals, that information is shared. If it proves successful, those with whom this information was shared will share it again, radiating it through their own connections until the entire network – all five billion of us – act from this new understanding.

This new knowing expands the scope of our capabilities. We find that we can do more. We treasure these new powers, guarding them jealously, and mourning their loss in those situations – with a lost phone or a lost signal – where we can not put them into play. Rightly or wrongly, we tend to see our capabilities as us. As our capacities evolve, so our understanding of and expectations for ourselves change. We are locked into a loop of knowing and doing, with each of us directly connected to five billion others, every one of us intent on growing our own capabilities.

We hear the voices of others telling us things we need to know, sometimes whispered, sometimes repeated at deafening volumes. We whisper or shout, as need and opportunity allow. With everything we hear, we learn, and we do. This is all of us now, everywhere. We are all getting smarter, learning to do more, and as we learn and do, we learn better and do better, and learn to do better. We have plugged ourselves into an amplifier, turned to 11.

The most remarkable quality of the current moment is the pervasive whine of feedback, coursing through every human institution. Homo Nexus, locked within this amplifier, orients itself to the rising rush of power, so heady and seductive that it has already colored and now begins to drown out every other experience.

We are in too deep to turn back, swept up into a vortex of connection and empowerment, but past is merely prologue. Now inside the amplifier, each of us focuses on how to make it work for us, and with every thing we learn, our capabilities increase. It is ripping us away from what we were, half a billion seconds ago, thrusting us – collectively, connectively – into an entirely inescapable future.

If I had been using a smartphone, the process would have been slicker and more visual. I would have launched an app that would locate me – using GPS – then place me on a map, showing all of the nearby available limousines. After I my pickup request had been received and accepted, all of those limousines would disappear from the map, except the one coming to fulfil my request. As the car drew closer to me, I’d see it approach, allowing me to meet it precisely as it arrived. Seamless coordination, courtesy of the mobile.

Even though it costs a fair bit more than a taxi, with this kind of convenience Uber has been blessed with raging success. People like the feeling of control – real or perceived – that comes from watching their driver approach. While they stare down into the screen, Uber gives its users a sense of ominpresence. They know, if not everything, much more than ever before. That knowledge allows them to do more, giving them a small taste of the freedoms enjoyed by the very wealthiest.

Limousine drivers like Charles love Uber, too. Before the service launched, those drivers would spend half their time doing nothing, idling their hours while waiting for the next pickup call to come in. Drivers now add Uber jobs to their regularly scheduled pickups, nearly doubling their earning power within the same eight-hour shift. Mobiles have given limousine drivers the same economic acceleration that mobiles gave the fishermen of Kerala fifteen years ago – creating a highly efficient market which satisfies an increased demand, dramatically improving the earning potential of everyone connected.

Economists recognize that when a sudden change in market dynamics produces a burst of new wealth it encourages people to enter the marketplace. A ‘gold rush’ begins, as everyone looks for a way to vacuum up some of the new-found fortune. Most markets have ‘barriers to entry’ – to be a fisherman, you need a boat and rigging and nets and a crew; to be a driver you need a rather pricey limousine. These barriers make it difficult for the market to become immediately overcrowded, but the lack of competition increases the incentive for everyone already participating in the market to maximize their productive behavior. The more productive you can be within a closed but growing market, the more you will earn.

For Uber drivers, this means putting their limousines where they’re most needed. But they’re not alone in this, so the busiest parts of the city are also those with the greatest supply of drivers, which means drivers still have to wait for jobs. Even closed markets can be locally oversupplied – particularly where participants within a market can smell all the money to be made.

Uber drivers run a companion version of the smartphone app that Uber customers use. This app allows them to bid on pickups, but does not reveal the location of any of the limousines around them, competing for the same business. Uber’s drivers have less information than Uber’s customers. As a consequence, limousines tend to cluster, because drivers don’t know that they’re all converging on the same small – and presumably lucrative – area.

My driver Charles has a solution for this dilemma: he owns two mobiles, and runs both Uber apps. The driver app delivers pickup requests, while the customer app reveals the locations of any limousines nearby. “One evening I came into the city,” Charles reports, “and there were four limousines within a block.” Knowing this, Charles moved on, finding another, under-served area of the city, and got plenty of work.

Uber may not want its drivers to know about the location of other drivers, but it wants to reveal that information to its customers, so drivers simply poke holes in the wall that separate the two sides, peering through, and learning where to position themselves for greatest profit. The drivers use all information on offer – from every source – to give themselves the greatest advantage.

Charles says he’s one of the few Uber drivers using his smartphone to give him the inside track with a degree of omnipresence. It’s a technique new to him, and he doesn’t say whether he thought it up himself, or if he copied it from another driver. Either way, as Charles’ success becomes more visible, his peers, watching what he does, will copy his keys to success. What he knows will be replicated throughout the fleet of drivers until this exceptional behavior becomes pervasive and normal.

Soon, Uber will either need to provide drivers with all of the information drivers provide to Uber, or every Uber driver will use two mobiles, one for orders, and another for omnipresence. As drivers learn more about one another, they learn how to avoid economically damaging behaviors, such as clusters. The drivers self-organize, spacing themselves throughout an area in a way which generates the greatest economic advantage for each individual. They will act as a unit – as if they all answered to a common mind – although they have no central command, accept no controlling influence, and simply work to maximize their own financial interests. This emergent behavior – seen first along the Kerala coast – is the inevitable consequence of connectivity.

The information flows of connectivity move back and forth, never just in one direction, looping through us, out into the world, and back again. At every step, this information, transformed by the individuals it passes through, also transforms those individuals. “All knowing is doing, and all doing, knowing.” To connect is to know, to know is to do, and doing carries with it the opportunity to connect.

This never stops, nor ever slows.

The teacher, quick to notice this student’s poor performance – far from the first time this has happened – walks over to his desk, stands over him, leans in a bit, and begins to let him have it. This storm has been brewing for a while, and has found the perfect opportunity to let fly.

In the midst of the tirade, underneath the stream of invective, the student reaches into his backpack, fishes around a bit, withdraws a mobile, taps a few buttons, waits a moment, and then – once the connection has been made – says, “Hey. You listen to the bitch,” then holds the mobile out, capturing every calumny heaped upon him by his teacher.

The classroom as we know it, invented by the Prussians a hundred and fifty years ago, and adopted across Europe and America as Germany rose to world power status, features a teacher sitting before a chalkboard while the pupils sit and face the teacher. As the center of attention – and the master of the environment – the teacher has absolute power, controlling, containing and managing the behavior of the students under supervision. This close control ensured the classroom did not descend into chaos. Order created the space for learning.

As the seat of all authority, the teacher not only mastered the classroom, but possessed an acknowledged mastery of the material. Students did not question the teacher. But they do, now. Science teachers regularly confront students who (from perches safe in the back row of the classroom) consult Wikipedia or Wolfram Alpha, correcting all of the instructor’s mistakes, in real-time. The know-it-all teacher, center of the pedagogical universe, has been stripped of all power, revealed as the know-nothing.

Both of these examples show how the mobile can rapidly destabilize any environment reliant upon isolation as a technique of control. The kind of abuse teachers regularly deliver to students had never had an audience outside the walls of the classroom. Suddenly, every student walks through the door with parents in their pocket, and those walls no longer exist. The teacher no longer faces a younger, smaller, and weaker student, but the whole set of connections that student brings with them, via mobile omnipresence.

The power relations of education have reversed. The student can instantly summon parents – or any professional – to support any efforts to resist the teacher’s negativity. Teachers can’t throw their weight around anymore, because students can now hold those power games in check with powers of their own.

Where a teacher is trying to hector a student into learning, but encounters resistance – as might be the case with that underperforming student – this new balance of powers brings the educational process to a halt. The teacher has lost any ability to coerce, which means the student could now freely revel in ignorance. This deadlock persists for as long as the student’s relations are willing to countenance that state of affairs. We can be dumb with power.

Conversely, teachers can no longer pass their own ignorance off as truth. Another set of relations connects students to bodies of knowledge far greater than those which any teacher could ever hope to encompass, the collected wisdom of the species.
Omnipresence veers close to partial omniscience.

Inside the confines of the classroom, with a restricted range of curriculum material under study, it has become possible for a student to be at least as well informed, moment-to-moment, as the teacher. “All knowing is doing, and all doing knowing.” A student who knows more than the teacher will inevitably act on that knowledge, pulling aside the curtain of pretense, revealing the small and frightened Wizard of Oz beneath.

The classroom is microcosm and rehearsal for all of the power relations of public authority. Employers, police officers and religious leaders each embody different aspects of this power relation. Although these power relations are generally less obvious than the alpha-male / alpha-female of other hominids, they are no less significant. We like to know where we stand in relation to others, so we can present ourselves accordingly.

The instant omnipresence of the mobile has scrambled all our power relations, overthrowing some while rewriting others. Since the broadcast of the video of Rodney King’s beating by the LAPD, all police have evinced a hostility to videography, because revealing power undermines its authority. Connection pierces the veil of power, removing its mystery, rendering it impotent.

The new power relations of the classroom already extend throughout the entire world. Now that perhaps a billion and a half people carry networked video cameras in their pockets, the opportunities for a sudden turning of the tables have multiplied furiously. Each connection holds within it the possibility of a challenge to authority. The mobile provides a lever long enough to move the world.

This fundamental reconfiguration of power relations has been even less remarked upon than the sudden upswing in human connectivity. This redistribution of power comes as the inevitable consequence of our sudden omnipresence. The teacher can not control the students; the dictator can control the restive populace; no one will do as they are told. There is no control anywhere. When we picked up the mobile we had to surrender the cudgel.

We want to believe our power relations have remained as they always have, unchanged for many thousands of years. Top and bottom. Inside and outside. Elect and damned. A mobile, transmitting a faithful reproduction of a teacher’s angry words, tells us everything has already changed.

Ten minutes before the appointed hour, I stood in front of the theatre, waiting for my friends to arrive. They drifted up, in ones and twos, but by quarter to seven, only half had shown up. The others — well, wherever they were, they weren’t with us.

Coordinating a large party has always been a nightmarish exercise in logistics. As more people become involved, everything gains viscosity and congeals, unless predefined processes lubricate the ambiguities surrounding any sort of mass action. If people know what to do when the unexpected eventuates, they will respond accordingly, continuing to move toward the goal of the group. Corporations have perfected this flavor of necessarily routinized, bureaucratic activity, and so can harness the energies of hundreds or thousands of individuals in a common task.

Going out to dinner is a task of an entirely different sort. Its informality makes inflexibility anathema; dinner is not work, nor do people willingly confuse the two. There are no rules to follow, so when plans fail, they can fall apart completely. That’s pretty much what I believed, that evening in Darling Harbour, as I waited for the rest of my friends to arrive. Either we would go on without them, and would not see them, or we would wait (who knows how long?) for them to arrive.

While I sat, stuck on the horns of this dilemma, one of my friends pulled a mobile from his pocket – a smallish thing in bright blue plastic – dialed one of the missing party-goers, and arranged to have them meet us at dinner. Crisis resolved instantly, smoothly, and effortlessly. The evening was saved, all friends eventually united.

This story has two points worthy of note: the first is that this episode is utterly quotidian. These days, this sort of thing happens so frequently, we barely even notice that now adjust our social schedules on-the-fly, because we can. Individuals connected are individuals coordinated, capable of adapting themselves to any eventuality. The connected act not as two, but two-as-one, because in the act of communication, each becomes responsive to the other. Each surrenders a bit of their own desire in pursuit of a common goal.

In itself, that surrender is nothing new. The dance of connection has always been about surrender: the trusting surrender of the child listening carefully to the parent; the anxious surrender to authority; the playful, back-and-forth surrender in love. We listen and learn, we talk and teach, we commune and collaborate, inhabiting all three of these worlds simultaneously, bound together through relations and connections.

These relations had always been bounded by space; even the landline telephone, tied to a particular spot, only extended the reach of the individual’s ability to connect. The mobile made space an obsolete element in relationship, removing all constraints of where. The only determinant now is who we choose to connect with and relate to.

This shift from place to person marks a fundamental transformation in human relations, but one which has gone almost entirely unnoticed. Although human connectivity it may be the single most significant quality of the 21st century, it is also among the least remarked upon. We are so comfortable with human relations that amplifying them enormously provokes little more than a sigh of relief and (occasionally) a squeal of delight.

We now inhabit a world where no one is late anymore, just delayed. You can always phone ahead, or send a text message, keeping everyone informed and aware of your progress toward the common goal. There are no gaps or rough edges of ambiguity where others have no idea, in your absence, what should be done. The mobile has given us a very tangible taste of omnipresence. It may not be a bodily, pantheistic omnipresence, but we can put our ears, minds and voices together with others wherever and whenever needed. We can act omnipresently, and that is enough.

The second remarkable feature of this Australian story concerns my own reaction to the situation. As an American, I had no understanding of the mobile, nor any experience of the omnipresence it provides. I could not imagine any action to solve the dilemma of the missing friends. I believed nothing could be done about it. My ignorance limited my potential. In this, I was similar to the rest of my countrymen: we did not yet understand how the mobile transformed human relations.

For that understanding to dawn, enough of the population must possess a mobile that movements toward omnipresence are reinforced by repeated experience. You must connect – again and again and again – before you can truly comprehend this sudden omnipresence. Until there is sufficient uptake within a given group of people – a community or a nation – the mobile is useful, but not fundamentally transformational. When enough people have enough mobiles in enough numbers, people begin to accept the reality of omnipresence and act upon it.

The Australia I came to visit in 1997 had just passed the halfway point in mobile adoption. Over fifty percent of the nation carried mobiles with them. Meanwhile, in America, barely one in six used a mobile, and it would be another four years until mobiles connected half of the population of the richest nation on Earth. Already equipped with an excellent wired infrastructure, America came late to the party, and late to an understanding of omnipresence.

The rest of the world took rather less time to find their way into this new state of affairs.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove:

Few couples had a more perfect match, aligned in their minds, bodies, emotions and spirits. Enjoying the same things. Practicing the same hobbies. Sharing the same dreams for the future, built around a common love of fire-spinning. The ancient Maori art of poi, practiced for centuries by the Polynesian settlers of New Zealand, became the central focus of their relationship. Expert fire-spinners themselves, they traveled around, teaching others how to do it (safety first!), bringing their love of poi to people across America. They moved within an intense and close bubble of love: for one another, for their life together, and for poi.

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

“Then he bought a BlackBerry. We’d be together – traveling somewhere, maybe on the train, or a bus, or even in a car. And we’d be talking. But the whole time he’d be looking down, into the Blackberry. Reading or typing. Typing and reading. And every so often he’d look up and say, ‘I’m listening’.”

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor any man ever loved.

You only say ‘I’m listening’ when it’s obvious you’ve tuned out, after you’ve turned away from the object of your affection, and toward something else. Homer Simpson once pronounced television, “Teacher, mother, secret lover,” but television has been supplanted – overrun – by another. The temping devil in the palm.

“We traveled together, but it wasn’t the same. We were close, physically, but he was somewhere else. Always looking down. Always listening to other voices.”

Each of them now had to contend with the demands of another. He divided his attention between the real, immediate and embodied presence of his love and the alluring, seductive pleasures of connection. She had to fight back feelings of rejection, that she had been cast aside for a new – and more interesting – relationship.

“We flew to Peru to teach fire-spinning. We got off the plane, and there was no mobile service. Anywhere. For a whole week. It was like getting him back again. All of him. It was wonderful.”

Beyond the reach of the signal, old connections can reassert themselves. Where the chorus of voices ceases, it becomes possible to listen to the softer sounds of hearts. In the silence, older voices can be heard, just as demanding, and far more important.

A few years ago, I walked down the street, heading off to lunch with friends. I pulled my mobile out, and typed a text message, without really giving a thought to the fact that I was at that moment walking into an intersection, and across a street. Not until I heard the rumble of car wheels (over the music playing through my earbuds) did I look up and see a taxi, with a somewhat vexed-looking driver behind the wheel, waiting for me to make it to the opposite curb. I had walked into an intersection, across the street, in front of a taxi, all without thinking. Too bound up in the task at hand (literally) to notice the danger I had put myself in.

Many of us have done something this stupid, either on the street, or behind the wheel. Something about the mobile has burrowed its way past all of our rational self-defenses, the things we learned when very small (look both ways when you cross the street, pay attention when others are talking to you), leading us to act like idiots, or children who have not heeded any of our lessons on how to behave. We have abandoned social nicety – and self-preservation – because our mobiles demand it.

Another time, I saw a mother with a toddler in a stroller. They waited on the opposite corner of an intersection as we all waited for the crossing signal. Once that signal came, this mother rolled the stroller off the curb – and nearly dumped her child into the street. If that child hadn’t been strapped into the stroller, it would have hit the pavement, hard. Undeterred, the mother reversed direction, backed her stroller onto the curb, and attempted the maneuver again – with precisely the same results.

At no time during these abortive efforts did this mother ever take her mobile away from her ear. It absorbed her attention, so much so that she put her own child in peril – repeatedly – rather than simply putting the mobile aside long enough to negotiate the crossing.

The desire of a mother to protect her young is fundamental, instinctive behavior, not just in humans, but all the hominids, primates, and mammals. Mothers nurse their young, keep them safe, and defend them with their own lives, if need be. Or did, until the mobile came along, and provided the perfect interruption to two hundred million years of evolution.

Something about the mobile is so potent, attractive and demanding, that we abandon our loves, our lives and our children to it. It speaks so loudly that we have no choice but to listen, orienting ourselves around attending to its needs. It demands our attention, and in so doing, drains us away from the world within arm’s reach, for the world we hold in our hands.

That handheld world encompasses all of the rest of us. Against this totality, nothing could hope to complete. Instead, we find ourselves drawn apart from those closest to us. We’re listening to other voices. We feel guilty about this, but find ourselves helpless to resist.

It’s too late to turn around, and you won’t be home for hours. You’re stuck. The panic fades, replaced with something else, a tug with a very specific quality, like the pulses of a phantom limb, coming in close succession as you realize you can’t tell your co-workers you’ll be late to a meeting, or arrange drinks with friends that evening, or be reached, if needed. You can not reach out, if needs be. You are alone – even in a crowd of people. If something should happen, no one you know would know. You have already disappeared.

Life flows on without you. People call and leave voice mails. Others send text messages. The impatient send petulant follow-ups, as their messages go ignored. You walk through the day in half a daze, continually feeling the absence of your mobile: as you wander up to a bus stop (what time is the next one?) – look at the skies (will it rain soon?) – or enter a supermarket (what should I bring home for dinner?). Everyone and everything within arm’s reach just a few hours ago has become almost impossible to manage. You muddle through – it’s not the end of the world, after all – but when you make it home, your mobile goes right back into your pocket, with a pat and a relieved sigh. Once again, you’re connected.

Something like this has happened to all of us, because we all have mobiles, and because mobiles have had the same profound effect on all of us. Seduced by the connected comforts they provide, we live in a world where every day it becomes more difficult to imagine life before we all had these magical, handheld lifelines bringing all of us exactly what we need, every single moment.

We can reach into our pockets and pull out a person, access millions of services, and gather more information than any of us could hope to digest. We do this all day, every day, an act so commonplace it solicits no reaction at all, except in its absence, when we lose track of our mobile, or when the network fails to work as we expect. The frustration we experience in those moments tells us this connection has become essential. We can live without it, but not as well.

The emergence of Homo Nexus – Connected Man – happened virtually overnight, like mushrooms springing up from a damp paddock. The ground had been well sown with the electric technologies of the 19th and 20th centuries: telegraph, landline telephone and radio all converged in 1980 within the first cellular telephone. Big, heavy and very expensive, the first mobiles became popular with the ultra-wealthy, who could afford both the mobiles themselves and the exorbitant usage fees they incurred. Wealth buys freedom, and the rich immediately understood the freedom afforded by the mobile, using the gadget to transact business and manage their own affairs, wherever they happened to be.

A similar transition happened with the introduction of landline telephony, during the last years of the 19th century. The wealthy brought landlines into their homes and businesses, using the telephone to extend their reach. The landline, however, connects to a place: an office, kitchen or bedroom. Ring a landline from a landline and you bring one place closer to another.

The mobile telephone dispensed with the importance of place. Where a landline connects to a place, a mobile connects directly to a person. There is no ‘where’ for the mobile. There is only ‘who’. When we ring someone on their mobile, and an unexpected voice answers, we experience a brief moment of displacement, as though we’d dialed Europe and gotten through to Mars instead. We suspect body-snatching: we’ve dialed a person, how could someone else answer? It’s as though the connection lost its way and connected to someone else.

What we lost in place we recovered in community, no longer suffering under the tyranny of distance. People who live far apart – or even just beyond a comfortable cooee – now enjoy as much intimacy as they care to allow. We live within each other’s pockets, available with a few pokes of a fingertip. We may not know where we are, but we know how we are related. Lost in space, but not alone, we are everywhere, even if we don’t quite know where.

It seems that place now matters less – and has always mattered less – than relation. We value our connection to others more than anything else, because that connection forms the foundation which brings us everything else. Don’t know where you are? It doesn’t matter: as long as you’re connected, you’re never truly lost.

The city shares everything it knows about anything it finds interesting, from gossip to business to politics to natural philosophy. Some of what the city shares with itself speaks directly to the wire: it’s nature, design, and improvement. A culture wired together shares what it knows to improve its wiring. The point-to-point of the telegraph quickly mutated into the hand-switched fabric of the telephone exchange. The true innovation of the telephone is not the transmission of the voice, but the network which connects any two telephones together. The telegraph stitched the world into a cohesive whole, but the telephone connected any two points in space, bringing them together through the action of the network. More than simple connectivity, the telephone fostered collaboration, sharing between minds, across space, giving the individual voice global reach.

The fabric of the telephone network, first powered by vast numbers of human ‘switchboard operators’, yielded eventually to mechanization, wire working to improve wire. But these switches grew too big, too power hungry and complex, forcing a studied search for a solution. The scientific method – and the judicious application of funds – led to the hybridization of the wire with the digital capabilities of the computer. Just as the wire created the preconditions for the digital, so the digital later relieved the overburdened wire. These first ‘computers within the network’ (routers, as they’re known today) took signals from one part of the network and replicated these signals within another part of the network. The network is by definition a replicating machine, and a computer network is its amplification into a flexible, responsive and resilient replicator.

These digital networks, connecting computers – these newest telephone switchboards were actually computers – joined the discrete, two-way ‘holes in space’ into a larger unity. Every point now could simultaneously connect to every other point, recovering to the original unity of the wire. But this new unity needed no center, no master switchboard, through which all messages must pass. Every point could reach every other point, directly.

These points began to connect, and as they did, each point of the network explored its corresponding companion in connection, learning about it, recording that knowledge, and then sharing that knowledge when it connected to another point. The entire network began a process of self-discovery, an investigation of its shape, scope and capabilities. This sharing led to the improvement of the network. A culture networked together shares what it knows to improve its network. Some of these improvements concerned sharing – sharing about sharing – and with that, the World Wide Web was born. The Web created a platform for sharing, in an effort to provide the growing collection of documents within the network within a universal framework, making it as easy for people to share a book, photo, or song as they could share a conversation.

Once anything can be shared with everyone everywhere, the automatic next question is ‘with whom do we share?’. This layer of individual desire sits across the physical manifestation of the network, an intersection of relationship and capability. Once we can share, we become choosy in our sharing, and we begin to share about the ways that we can refine that sharing to suit our particular needs.

This is the core of the idea behind digital social networks – services such as Friendster, MySpace, Facebook and Twitter. These tools marry the capability of the network as a replicator to the relationships which we all carry within us. But these digital social networks, powered by computers and amplified by the reach of the network, carry us far beyond the limited set of connections we bear in our minds and bodies.

Just as the city took us beyond our biological limits, out of the tribe and into vast populations, so now digital social networks propel us beyond the comfortable boundaries of relationships, gathering us in new configurations of community. Facebook is a city of the mind; where we could not know everyone in the city, neither can we know everyone we connect to on Facebook – not in the same intimate way our tribal ancestors could. Yet we can now maintain relations with vast numbers of others, a different kind of knowing, neither intimate nor distant, but somewhere in between. This ground feels as new to us as the space within the city walls must have seemed to our ancestors.

Digital social networks amplify our social capabilities. Just as the telegraph, radio and television amplified our eyes and ears, giving them global reach, so now our web of relationships – the defining characteristic of our species – spans the planet. We connect and share with tools modeled from the contour of our minds, but which give us vastly more power. We are only in the first generation of these tools, using them to share what we know in an effort to make these tools better. A social network shares what it knows to improve its social network.

Humanity has always been a network of minds, connecting through the technology at hand. We have always put our minds to work to improve our connectivity. That has brought us to the threshold of universal hyperconnectivity.

The library is the visible manifestation of this cultural wormhole, where the works of all the sages, gathered together, provides a common mind unlike any previously known to humanity. Thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of volumes so extended the scope of knowing possible for any single person that a new creature – the scholar – came onto the scene. By definition well-read, the scholar assumed the roll of the ‘storyteller of the cities’, distilling the wisdom of the ancients into utility. Alexander the Great kept Aristotle close at hand, finding in Plato’s student a living encyclopedia of the known, knowledge Alexander put into practice to conquer the ancient world. As a king, Alexander could command scholars to serve him, and this, as much as any technology of war, gave him advantage.

One of Aristotle’s students founded the famed Library of Alexandria, the greatest collection of books in the ancient world. No one today knows how many texts the library housed – estimates range from several tens of thousands to half a million. By today’s standards, the most important library in history was no bigger than an average city or university library. Yet scholars spent entire lifetimes reading through the works, learning everything others had learned about the world. Much of this fell into history, poetry and rhetoric, but some works concerned themselves with observations of the ways of the world – natural philosophy.

The ancient Greeks knew of the peculiar properties of a substance they named electrum, which we today call amber. When rubbed against fabrics and furs, amber creates an electrostatic charge that can be literally hair-raising — and capable of mysterious attractions. Greek natural philosophers knew none of the whys, but knew how to make it happen, an observation passed down in their writings, and carried along in works which survived the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, the Fall of the Roman Empire, and the collapse of the Classical world. Within a few hundred years, Islamic scholars in Baghdad had recovered the thread, translating Ancient Greek texts into Arabic, which, as a result of the Crusades, soon made their way into Europe. (War spreads more knowledge than it tramples underfoot.)

These texts reached Europe in the years just before the technology of movable type turned a repurposed wine press into a replicating machine. Gutenberg’s printing technology automated the task of writing, making books reproducible in vast quantities, and, for the first time, easily affordable. Libraries, both institutional and personal, exploded, with an average gentleman’s library containing two hundred volumes. The printing press transformed every reader into a scholar. Readers with a thirst for natural philosophy quickly absorbed everything the ancients had written, moving on to the more recent Islamic scholars (who gave us Algebra and optics, among much else) using their writings as a springboard for their own investigations into the characteristics of the natural world.

These Europeans scholars used a common language (Latin) to communicate their results with one another, developing a methodology which demanded they share both the results and the process of their investigations, so that those results could be reproduced by others. Results that could not be reproduced would not be accepted as discoveries. This ‘scientific method’, a specific and refined form of sharing, made it possible for natural philosophers to quickly build upon the experimental results of their peers. Sharing across a common framework of scientific methodology amplified and accelerated the overall rate of discovery, improved the effectiveness of experiments, and lead to a huge growth of the amount known about the world, knowledge which would then be put to work in new experiments, leading to new discoveries, and so on, in an accelerating ‘virtuous cycle’ of reinforcement.

By the early eighteenth century, the ancients’ experiments with electrum had grown into a full investigation of the attractive and repulsive qualities of ‘electricity’. Benjamin Franklin identified lightning as electricity, while André-Marie Ampère established the relationship between electricity and magnetism, a relationship fully quantified, first by Michael Faraday, then by James Clerk Maxwell in his eponymous equations. In the years between Ampère and Maxwell enough had been learned that experimenters could create simple circuits, built from batteries, wires and magnets, circuits that could transmit a signal from one point to another, almost instantaneously.

In 1837, Samuel Morse conducted the first successful experiments in telegraphy, using the magnetic field created by a closed circuit to carry a signal. Suddenly, the field of human communication, no longer bounded by the reach of our voices or the speed of our horses, extended across the entire surface of the planet, bringing everyone, everywhere into a‘global village’. The whole planet united into a single city. This collapse of space and time transformed knowledge, enabling a sort of universal library, where information from anywhere could be delivered everywhere, immediately.

Until the modern era, human connectivity stopped at the city’s gates. Only a very few powerful individuals or institutions, able to afford their own messengers, could expect to have connectivity beyond the confines of a given urban area. The telegraph gave connectivity global reach, and collapsed the time for message transmission from months to moments. As distance collapsed, the amount of knowledge coming to each one of us increased: the telegraph led to the newspaper – which printed the articles ‘off the wires’ – then to radio and television.

All of this knowledge, continually presented to us, produced a corresponding pressure to preserve what had been learned. Just as the concentrated social sharing of the city heated the social crucible, and led to writing, so the electrification of communication created the preconditions necessary for digitization. We think of the first century of electrification as hopelessly ‘analog’, yet the dashes and dots of Morse code are the first binary encoding system. From the beginning, electrification has been essentially digital.

The digital is the response to the electric, just as writing was the response to the city.

]]> http://thenextbillionseconds.com/2012/02/21/13-wire/feed/ 0 http://thenextbillionseconds.com/2012/02/16/12-wall/ http://thenextbillionseconds.com/2012/02/16/12-wall/#comments Thu, 16 Feb 2012 01:00:02 +0000 mpesce http://thenextbillionseconds.com/?p=227 Continue reading →]]>

Language allows us to share what we observe within the world: the passing of the seasons, the behaviors of animals, the stars in the skies above. Over thousands of years, a study of grasses led to an understanding of the relationship between seed and plant. Seeds could be sown, multiplying the number of plants. The Agricultural Revolution has its roots in language and the ability it confers upon us to transmit our experience and experiments.

Agriculture provides the caloric foundation populations far denser than the widely-disbursed hunter-gatherer tribes roaming the continents. People could be fed, but could they live together in vast groups? We have fixed physical limits for the number of individuals we can hold within our minds; for nearly two hundred thousand years, this kept the upper boundary of human groupings below the critical value of one hundred and fifty. Beyond that, you weren’t in one another’s heads – and this, for any primate, is an unacceptable state of affairs. We instinctively distrust strangers. Xenophobia may be shameful, but it is also perfectly natural, the visible echo of the limits of our ability to know others.

How could cities ever come to be? We find it nearly impossible and literally inconceivable to tolerate the presence of unknown others. There must have been an internal, psychological conflict, as we confronted our fear of the other. Yet we inexorably drew together, compelled by something so powerful it overwhelmed our innate reticence.

Before language we knew only what we carried within ourselves. Once we acquired the ability to talk, we knew everything worth telling to anyone within the tribe. Language gave us a weak group-mind, broadening of our knowing, producing an amplification of capabilities, propelling us into an understanding of the world wrought in stories and myths. The linguistic tribe triumphed, and established a precedent: coming together in a shared mindspace conferred obvious benefits.

These benefits acted as the lure to draw us out of our tribal selves and into the new social configuration of the city. The division of labour that is a defining characteristic of urbanization trades intimacy for capability, a bargain that leaves us vastly more powerful and consequently more isolated. The city has always been anonymous, precisely because it transcends our ability to know everyone within it. In reaction, we withdraw within ourselves and draw together within tight groupings of consanguinity. We put up a wall, both within ourselves, and around our families.

The city is defined by the wall. Both defensive technology and psychological boundary, the city wall separates the elect from the exiled, echoing of the close familiarity of the tribe, but at a greater scale. People gathered within the wall share an identity as residents of the polis, and the wall stands as the visible marker of their affiliation. Within those walls, overwhelmed individuals found sanctuary and meaning as they turned to something outside the province of their personal and intimate experience. The city-dweller defines himself in relation to the culture of the city.

This culture brings with it capacities impossible for and inconceivable to the tribe. Tribes can wage war, but cities raise armies – vast and highly organized – to raze other cities. The properties of the army portray, in miniature, the defining characteristics of the city, with its faceless anonymity, division of labor and amplification of individual capability.

With thousands of inhabitants, the city represented a wealth of human experience too great for any single person to apprehend. Each member of the tribe can know the important stories of their tribe, but there are a million stories in the city. Our capacious memories can not contain them. Where stories are lost, or forgotten, some of the meaning of – and justification for – the city disappears. In order to preserve itself, and maximize its own advantage, the city had to create its own form of language, one that could facilitate the sharing of minds beyond our individual capacity to encompass the stories told by others.

From this pressure to cohere, language concretized into writing. Although the earliest texts from Sumer are scribes’ accounts (here accuracy perfectly maps onto success) the first narrative work – the oldest written story – the Epic of Gilgamesh, both begins and ends with a meditation on the walls of the city of Uruk:

Go up on the wall of Uruk and walk around,
examine its foundation, inspect its brickwork thoroughly.
Is not even the core of the structure made of kiln-fired brick,
and did not the Seven Sages themselves lay out its plans?
One league city, one league palm gardens,
one league lowlands, the open area of the Ishtar Temple,
three leagues and the open area of Uruk the wall encloses.

The story of an urbanized humanity is the story of walls, and a walled-in humanity, stewing in its own stories and experiences, people who need writing to make the experience of the city something commonly accessible. Writing becomes the speech of the city, the mechanism through which each generation passes along what it has learned. Writing is the vehicle of city culture, defining the psychological walls which separate residents from foreigners. Without writing, there can be no law. Tribes function on lines of custom and tradition, but cities have edicts, ukases, and commandments. The Decalogue are specifically indicated to have been written by the hand of God. The law may be ‘written on men’s hearts’, but it is always written.

One of the few surviving fragments attributed to the Presocratic philospher Heraclitus goes, “The people should fight for the Law as if for their city-wall.” The law of the city is the culture of the city, the internal representation of belonging. Just as the walls protect from invasion, the law protects against a cultural disintegration. Laws hold our innate xenophobia in check, bound by cultural prohibitions, compelling us to accept those we do not know, so long as they adhere to the same rules.

We wage a constant war within ourselves. Our oldest parts want to be clannish, insular, and intensely xenophobic. That’s what we’re adapted to. That’s what natural selection fitted us for. The newest parts of us realize real benefits from accumulations of humanity too big to get our heads around. The division of labor associated with cities allows for intensive human productivity, hence larger and more successful human populations.

The city is the real hub of human progress; more than any technology, it is our ability to congregate together in vast numbers, sharing what we know, that has propelled us into modernity.

Impossible to conceive of a time before language, because to conceive thoughts requires the articulation of language, we can not project ourselves backward into the minds of forbears before speech. Even where we can not talk, every gesture we make and every grunt we sound has been shaped by a mind that thinks in words.

Creatures of language, we both master and become captive to the flow of ideas that spring forth from our mouths. The fish swims, the bird flies, and the human speaks. We do not know how this happened, nor when, though perhaps we now know where — on the plains of southern Africa. We have never asked why we speak. The answer has always been obvious.

The pressures of survival drive all living things to explore the full range of their innate capabilities. For human beings, survival has always been a social skill, thriving by working together. Across tens of millions of years we watched one another closely, and used that observation to get into each other’s heads. That was powerful – because we were smart. As we grew more social, we learned to wage war and raise children far more effectively.

We had always grunted, signaling with our voices – just as all primates do. Within the depths of our minds, already hypertrophied from managing our social relationships, we expanded this repertoire, modulating and clarifying these sounds. Each refinement made it possible to share our own mental state more concisely and completely than ever before. The drive to speech is its own reward: the more clearly you can make yourself understood, the more closely you can work together, and the more successful you will be as a group. Even a little bit of speech improves things so much that the advantages of a fully-developed language follow along immediately.

“Ontogeny recapitulates philology.” The transition from simple words – perhaps something close to ‘baby talk’ – into the full, and infinitely flexible creative tool we use as our principal means of communication, likely took less than a billion seconds.

Within a few generations we had become inseparable from our linguistic skills. Speech had become synonymous with being human, because it conferred upon us far greater depth in our social relations, now populated not just with feelings and actions, but with the thoughts of others. Speech allows us to know the minds of those around us; though we don’t equate speech with telepathy, those very first linguistic humans wouldn’t have recognized any difference. Speech is the first technology of connection, bringing minds together, and improving the performance of both the individual and the tribe.

With language comes the capability for a distributed coordination: “Go there and do that.” Working together no longer necessitates working in close quarters. There is safety in numbers, but there is another kind of strength in the distributed intelligence of a tribe verbally coordinating their activities in pursuit of a specific goal. Much of that strategic capability would have been applied to martial pursuits, crafting a battle plan wrought in words. The endless chatter of women, seemingly so casual and frivolous, serves to continuously reinforce the web of social relationships, and thereby ensuring that these women and their children will have resources to draw upon.

It is impossible to imagine a wordless myth. Chimpanzees may dance about in a thunderstorm, but without words, this act remains a reflection of the present, and can never be a frame around the past, nor a presentiment of the future. Words are the vehicles for myth. “In the beginning was the word.” As soon as we learned to speak, we began to tell stories of origin, of great deeds, of the eventual and the eternal. We learned these stories, passing them down the generations.

Most of these stories contained within them some information which helped those who heard the story to understand their world. This useful bit of knowledge made life somewhat easier for those who knew these stories, each story distilling hard-won human experience into a digestible and memorable form. Those who knew many stories had more experience to draw upon, and act upon. “All doing is knowing, all knowing and doing.”

The stories we tell ourselves act as encyclopedias, telling us everything about how the world works. Those who know more will do better and will be more successful, on the whole. Language increases capability, and stories – memorized language – further amplifies those capabilities. Just as we are driven to speak, so we are driven to learn and tell stories.

From the Paleolithic through to the present, every culture comes with its own set of stories, carefully conserved and passed down through the generations, inviolable and immutable because the words themselves hold the culture together. The ‘dreamings’ – mythologies – of Australian aboriginals have been preserved, coherently and without significant change, for fifty thousand years. These stories present a specific, cultural map of the known world, an encyclopedia of facts framing a landscape that did not change in any significant way until the arrival of British settlers in 1788.

Stories alter the people who hear them, changing behaviour, forming expectations, and setting limits. Just as language has become both a liberation and a prison, stories release and constrain us. As the generations pass, these stories accrue, usually quite slowly, reflecting a mostly-unchanging world. In times of threat or disaster, these stories might grow by leaps and bounds, as traumatic events faded into a past of mythological dimensions. At other times the stories themselves might even transform the storytellers, taking them outside of themselves, and into a different world.

]]> http://thenextbillionseconds.com/2012/02/14/11-word/feed/ 0 http://thenextbillionseconds.com/2012/02/09/10-womb/ http://thenextbillionseconds.com/2012/02/09/10-womb/#comments Thu, 09 Feb 2012 01:00:20 +0000 mpesce http://thenextbillionseconds.com/?p=206 Continue reading →]]> Enter the world of women, who have been here, all along, gathering food, giving birth and raising children, and mourning the dead lost to wars. As women have done for millions of years. Somewhere in the past two million years, something changed for women, as the perfectly natural became utterly dangerous. All because of our drive to socialize.

Human birth is a singular thing in the animal world. Among the primates, human babies are the only ones born facing downward and away from the mother. They’re also the only ones who seriously threaten the lives of their mothers as they come down the birth canal. That’s because our heads are big. Very big. Freakishly big. One of the very recent evolutionary adaptations in Homo Sapiens is a pelvic gap in women that creates a larger birth canal, at the expense of a woman’s ability to walk. Women walk differently from men – much less efficiently – because they give birth to such large-headed children.

There’s two notable side-effects of this big-headed-ness. The first is well-known: women used to die in childbirth, regularly. Until the first decade of the 20th century, about one in one hundred pregnancies ended with the death of the mother. That’s an extraordinarily high rate, particularly given that a women might give birth to ten children over their lifetime. Now that we have survivable caesarian sections and all sorts of other medical interventions, death in childbirth is a hundred times rarer – perhaps 1 in 10,000 births. Nowhere else among the mammals can you find this kind of danger surrounding the delivery of offspring. This is the real high price we pay for being big-brained: we very nearly kill our mothers.

The second side-effect is less well-known, but so pervasive we simply accept it as a part of reality: humans need other humans to assist in childbirth. This isn’t true for any other mammal species – or any other species, period. But there are very few examples of cultures where women give childbirth by themselves (even in these cultures, solitary childbirth is considered aspirational). Until the 20th-century medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth, this was ‘women’s work’, and a thriving culture of midwives managed the hard work of delivery. (The image of the chain-smoking father, waiting nervously outside the maternity ward for news of his newborn child, is far older than the 20th century.)

For at least a few hundred thousand years – and probably a great deal longer than that – the act of childbirth has been intensely social. Women come together to help their sisters, cousins, and daughters pass through the dangers of labor and into motherhood. If you can’t rally your sisters together when you need them, childbirth will be a lonely and possibly lethal experience. This is what it means to be human: we entered the world because of the social capabilities of our mothers. Women who had strong social capabilities, women who could bring her sisters to her aid, would have an easier time in childbirth, and would be more likely to live through the experience, as would their children.

After the child has been born, mothers need even more help from their female peers; in the first few hours, when the mother is weak, other women must provide food and shelter. As that child grows, the mother will periodically need help with childcare, particularly if she’s just delivered another child. Mothers who can use their social capabilities to deliver these resources will thrive. Their children will thrive. This means that these capabilities tended to be passed down, through the generations. Just as men had their social skills honed by generations upon generations of resource warfare, women had their social skills sharpened by generations upon generations of childbirth and child raising.

All of this sounds very much as though it’s Not Politically Correct. Today, men raise children while women go to war. But our liberation from our biologically determined sex roles is a very recent thing. Yet behind this lies hundreds of thousands of generations of our ancestors who did use their skills along gender-specific lines. That’s left a mark; men tend to favor coordination in groups – whether that’s a war or a football match – while women tend to concentrate on building and maintaining a closely-linked web of social connections. Women seem to have a far greater sensitivity to these social connections than men do, but men can work together in a team – to slaughter the opponent (on the battlefield or the playing field).

The prefrontal cortex, that part of our brain sitting immediately behind our foreheads, and freakishly large in human beings when compared to chimpanzees, seems to be where this magic happens, where we keep these models of one another. Socialization has limits, because our brains can’t effectively grow much bigger. Big brains already nearly kill our mothers. Big brains consume about 25% of the energy in the food we eat, and our big brains aren’t even done growing until five years after we’re born – leaving us defenseless and helpless far longer than any other mammals. That’s another price we pay for being so social.

But we’re maxed out. We’ve reached the point of diminishing returns. If our heads get any bigger, there won’t be any mothers left living to raise us. So here we are, caught between war and womb, power and affection, coordination and affiliation. Ten thousand years ago, human tribes covered the planet, with each tribe circumscribed within population boundaries determined by the limits of our minds to know the minds of those around us. Caged by our capacity, it might have seemed as though humanity had reached a steady-state. The generations passed, but the social order never changed.

Then someone built a city.

]]> http://thenextbillionseconds.com/2012/02/09/10-womb/feed/ 3 http://thenextbillionseconds.com/2012/02/07/9-war/ http://thenextbillionseconds.com/2012/02/07/9-war/#comments Tue, 07 Feb 2012 01:00:32 +0000 mpesce http://thenextbillionseconds.com/?p=198 Continue reading →]]> A warm late afternoon, hanging out in the trees in Africa’s Rift Valley. Just you and your friends – probably ten or twenty of them. You’re all males; the females are elsewhere, mothering and gathering. At a signal from the chief, all of you drop out of the trees, fall into line, and begin a trek that takes you throughout the little bit of land you call your own, with your own trees and plants and bugs that keep you well fed. You go all the way to the edge of your territory, to the border of the territory of a neighboring tribe. That tribe – about the same size as your own – is dozing in the heat of the afternoon, all over the place, but basically within sight of one another.

Suddenly – and silently – you all cross the border. You fan out, still silent, looking for the adolescent males in this tribe. When you find them, you kill them. As for the rest, you scare them off with your screams and your charges, and, at the end, they’ve lost some of their own territory – and trees and plants and delicious grubs – while you’ve got just a little bit more. And you return, triumphant, with the bodies of your enemies, which you eat, with your tribe, in a victory dinner.

This all sounds horrid and nasty and mean and just not cricket. The scourge of war, as familiar to us today as it would have been to our most distant human ancestors. But war begins before we did, an inheritance which came to us from those species which came before us.

How do we know that ‘war’ stretches this far back into our past? A paper published in Current Biology and reported in THE ECONOMIST described how primatologists have seen this precise, coordinated, warlike behavior among chimpanzees, in their natural habitats in the rain forests of central African. The scene I just described isn’t ten million years old, or even ten thousand, but current. Chimpanzees wage war. This kind of tribal warfare is exactly what was commonplace in New Guinea and the upper reaches of Amazonia until relatively recently – certainly within the last few billion seconds. War is a behavior common to both chimpanzees and humans – so why wouldn’t it be something we inherited from our common ancestor?

War. What’s it good for? If you win your tiny tribal war for a tiny bit more territory, you’ll gain all of the resources in that territory. Which means your tribe will be that much better fed. You’ll have stronger immune systems when you get sick, you’ll have healthier children. And you’ll have more children. As you acquire more resources, more of your genes will get passed along, down the generations. Which makes you even stronger, and better able to wage your little wars. If you’re good at war, natural selection will shine upon you.

What qualities make you good at war? You’re good at war if you and your tribe can function effectively as a unit. To do that, you must be able to coordinate your activities to attack (or defend) territory. We know language skills don’t go back millions of years, so our pre-human ancestors did this the old-fashioned way, with gestures and grunts and an ability to get into the heads of the other members of the tribe. That’s the key skill: if you can get into one another’s heads, you can think as a group. The better you can do that, the better you will do in war. The better you do in war, the more offspring you’ll have. That skill, reinforced by natural selection, transforms, over thousands of generations, into evolution. With every generation you get better at knowing what your tribe is thinking.

This is the beginning of the social revolution.

All the way back here, before we looked anything like human, we grasped the heart of the matter: we must know one another to survive. If we want to succeed, we must know each other well. There are limits to this knowing, particularly with our small-brained ancestors. Knowing someone well takes a lot of brain capacity, and soon that fills up. When it does, you can’t know everyone around you intimately. As that happens the tribe grows increasingly argumentative, confrontational, eventually fracturing into two independent tribes. All because of a communication breakdown.

There’s strength in numbers; if I can manage a tribe of thirty while all you can manage is twenty, I’ll defeat you in war. There’s pressure, year after year, to grow the tribe, and, quite literally, to stuff more people into the space between your ears. For many generations that pressure leads nowhere; then there’s a baby born with just a small genetic difference, one which allows just a bit more brain capacity, so it can manage one or two or three more people — a small difference with a big impact. Genes that lead to success in war get passed along very rapidly; soon everyone holds a few more people inside their heads. But that capability comes with a price. Those pre-humans have slightly bigger brains, within slightly bigger heads. They need to eat more to keep those bigger brains well-fed. And those big heads would eventually prove very problematic.

]]> http://thenextbillionseconds.com/2012/02/07/9-war/feed/ 0 http://thenextbillionseconds.com/2012/02/02/8-origin/ http://thenextbillionseconds.com/2012/02/02/8-origin/#comments Thu, 02 Feb 2012 01:00:48 +0000 mpesce http://thenextbillionseconds.com/?p=189 Continue reading →]]>

Mammals are social beings. Reptiles spawn, bury their eggs, and crawl away; mammals give birth, and mother their offspring. This isn’t a quality unique to mammals – many birds do a fine job of raising their egg-hatched young – but it is completely pervasive among the mammals. The mother-child bond sits as the center of all social relationships, the foundation for all future behavior.

Some mammals – lions, for example – share the child-raising burden. A pride of lions generally includes a creche wherein the females collaboratively and collectively preserve the welfare of all of the lion cubs. This pooling of labor frees the mother for the hunt: a lion with a new-born cub and without a creche faces the unenviable choice between starvation and leaving her cubs undefended among all of the dangers of the veld.

Other mammals, such as wolves, use highly practiced social skills to function as a single and highly effective unit. Wolves were once the top predators within many ecosystems, their focused sociability making them fierce, relentless, and very dangerous. This ‘pack behavior’ – which we harnessed as a tool when we domesticated wolves as dogs, thirty thousand years ago – emerges from a deep social awareness: wolves are always conscious of their peers.

Bats live in crowded colonies that can number in the millions. Elephants have “families” that live together throughout their decades-long lives. Dolphins frolic in “pods”, using play both to teach and to reinforce social bonds. The bison of the American Great Plains once gathered in numbers to great to be counted, making the annual migration as a single, vast body. The wildebeest of Africa and reindeer of the Arctic still do so today.

There is strength in numbers, and safety.

A few insects – most notably, ants and bees – exhibit highly social behavior. But rather than a quality of their behavior, their social nature has become the whole of the thing. Bees exist to serve the hive, ants to provide for the nest. Everything characteristic of the social insects, from metabolism to reproduction to communication, subordinates itself the social order. This social organization has made both species impressively resilient; ridding your house of an ant infestation is no easy task, nor can you simply scare away a hive of bees. A more holistic approach must be taken, considering all the ants, and all the bees. Move the hive carefully and the bees won’t mind — much. Upset those bees, and you’ll find yourself the target of a distributed yet coordinated, painful and possibly life-threatening attack. Social animals – whether insects or mammals – have a peculiar ferocity that their non-social cousins lack.

Our particular branch of the mammal tree – the primates, and within them, the smaller and more familiar group of hominids – has social qualities utterly familiar to all of us. The family forms the basic unit, and a group of families form a troupe (or tribe). The specific social dynamics of these families and tribes differ from species to species: chimpanzees are all about power and dominance; bonobos use affection and sex to maintain their relationships; gorillas sit somewhere between the two. We humans get the full menu, using power and love in equal measure as we make our way in the social world. A good parent tempers the use of power with a larger dose of affection. Both are indispensable, both parts of the behavioral ‘kit’ that came down from our ancestors.

Looking back down tree of life to the last common ancestor of the hominids, long before Homo Sapiens, or the proto-human Australopithecus, before we evolved away from the chimpanzees, (five million years ago), or the the gorillas (ten million years ago), we find a creature known as Pierolapithecus, a true ‘missing link’ connecting us to our nearest cousins. We know very little about the species – just a few bone fragments found in Spain. Smaller than us, certainly, and not yet walking upright – that comes along much later. If you squint and imagine some sort of mash-up of the characteristics of humans, chimpanzees and gorillas, you might be able to get a glimmer of what Pierolapithecus looked like.

We can say with certainty that Pierolapithecus was a profoundly social species, because all of the species descended from Pierolapithecus – including humans – live in communities rich with social signalling. Pierolapithecus lived in family units, just as gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and humans do. Pierolapithecus explored the same boundaries between power and affection which frame our own family lives.

While Pierolapithecus could not speak, if transported back across the ages to observe their behavior, we would understand it – because that behavior has been retained within us. Whether human or Pierolapithecus, we don’t do well on our own. Alone, we make an easy meal for a lion or wolf. A troupe, on the other hand, can mount a common defense, keeping watch, alerting others, protecting the women and children. Pierolapithecus’ social skills helped them survive in a hostile environment, filled with big and toothy predators. The troupes with the best social skills had the best chance to survive long enough to raise children to adulthood, children who learned and practiced the same social skills.

In this way, natural selection pressures have consistently honed our social nature. Long before we were human, we were social. From the moment we first expressed any social capability, those skills were put to the test, refined, applied, tested again, refined again, and reapplied endlessly, a sort of Groundhog Day of repetition which leads inevitably to gradual improvement – or extinction.

Since we’re still here, we can rest assured we learned our lessons well. The line of mammals, perhaps 200 millions years long, provided ample opportunity for trial-and-error, extinction and success. When we recognize familiar social behavior in a meerkat, we are reflecting upon that shared evolutionary process. Our social nature, beaten into us by time and testing, has fashioned all mammals into creatures capable of succeeding through cooperative effort.

As the world grows more connected, it grows more tumultuous. Fifty years ago, Marshal McLuhan described electric media as extensions of the human nervous system. In the same way that our nerves signal pain, heat, or a gentle caress by the transmission of an electric signal, so our devices – telegraphs and telephones, radios and televisions, laptops and mobiles – carry signals from distant points. The greater our connectivity, the broader our sensitivity. We might desensitize from constant exposure to a particular image or sound, but we remain alert, continuously bombarded by new stimuli, perpetually off-balance as we struggle to take it all in.

The world beating down our doors has an immediacy that McLuhan termed the ‘global village’. Everything happens in our own backyard, or feels as though it does, even when it occurs on the other side of the world. Without an ‘over there’, it becomes difficult to maintain the illusion of otherness we have always used to reinforce our innate xenophobia. We can turn away, unplug, and reinforce ourselves with comfortable, oft-told tales of who we are and our place in the world. But the world itself has become relentless, unceasing in its presentation of everything, all the time.

Some of the stories we hear resonate with our own experience. We learn that others’ tastes match our own, or of a shared, secret hope, or that what angers us also angers them. An anger which had been hidden – by social constraint or threat of force – becomes an acknowledged part of lived experience. It comes ‘out of the closet’, and, once made public, begins to shape our actions. Freed from self-censorship, shared understanding motivates us to act. “All doing is knowing, and all knowing is doing.”

What is to be done?

The same network sensitizing us to the anger of others carries within it the seeds of a response. These responses range from a politically bruising joke, spread by text message, to smartphone software that automates a boycott, all the way to detailed instructions on how to build an explosive device. The network faithfully copies the responses of any point in the network to all other points that find this response sufficiently interesting. The network becomes the replicator of responses, and as these responses proliferate, people become more capable.

Capacity-building leads to action. Every new capacity changes the possible scope of our actions. Even if we practice perfect restraint, an awareness of our capabilities pervades every act. Where restraint has been overwhelmed by anger, capability finds expression. An uprising begins. It could be as mild as a boycott against a monopoly publisher of scientific papers, or as convulsive and comprehensive as Egypt’s January 25th Revolution. The pattern of connect -> share -> learn -> do sits at the core of each of these moments of acting together.

These uprisings become white-hot moments of hyperconnectivity. Everyone looks to one another, watching and learning from one another, learning how to act most effectively in pursuit of goals. Tips and tricks spread like wildfire. Failures propagate just as quickly, so mistakes made once are rarely replicated. Everything moves quickly as many minds buzz with shared possibilities, some of which finds consensus and moves into the actual.

There is no center, anywhere, no leader, no puppet master pulling the strings. There are no conspirators who can be removed to break the back of the movement. There are no officials to corrupt or blackmail. This confraternity of the angered must soothe itself.

Some inevitably see the network as the engine of the discord, mistaking the messenger for the message, attempting to smother the uprising by pulling the plug. But networks are not machinery. The instrumentation which implements a network is distinct from the network itself. Remove the machinery and the network – the connection between individuals – remains. Once created, networks are very, very difficult to destroy.

Networks respond when attacked, learning from their enemies, deepening their resilience with every battle. A network which has never been assaulted likely contains great vulnerabilities, while a network that has gone to war against a great power emerges from that conflict as a power in its own right.

Dependable for five thousand years, in this billion seconds the logic and rules of power have become wildly perverse. Individuals hold almost unfathomable power while the state loses its ability to reign in the capabilities of those it seeks to govern. At the end of this billion seconds, that kind of control will belong to history.

Even if we felled every cellular tower, pulled up every meter of copper and glass fibre, and wrecked every bit of network machinery, we could not change this, because this change has already happened to us. It was accelerated by our machines, but that machinery is no longer essential. We know what we know, so we do what we do.

We know what we know, but we do not know that we know. Our actions are clumsy. We sleepwalk, stumble, and lash out, unaware that we can perfect our coordination and act with precision. We daydream our way into hyperempowerment: although we draw our power from our networks, we do not yet understand how.

The whole point of this book is to show us how our networks have driven us inexorably into hyperempowerment, how it arises inevitably from hyperconnectivity, and how we can put this radical extension of human capability to work. “Revolution without revelation is tyranny. Revelation without revolution is slavery.” We are in the midst of revolution. Things will only grow more chaotic as more individuals, drawn into networks of interest, express these extended capabilities. Revelation is the only option left to us: we must learn who we are.

To do that, we must begin with who we once were.

Why a billion seconds?  

It begins with a heartbeat, the very first sound we hear.  As we knit together in our mother’s womb, our hearts form within just a few weeks.  That tiny organ beats hundreds of times a minute.  We are intimately familiar with its sound.  

Our mother’s heartbeat was the the first thing we came to recognize, the first constant, its beat creating time, taking the eternal warm darkness of the womb and dividing it into discrete units: lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub.  An anxious baby often can be soothed by placing its head against its mother’s chest, where it will be reminded of the the reassuring rhythm of her heartbeat.

Adults have heart rates averaging 70 beats per minute.  A second is a bit more than a heartbeat, a heartbeat is not quite a second.  Time, which seems external to us (and, as we grow older, inimical), is actually tied to the primary experience of our bodies.  Man is the measure of all things, and our beating heart measures the seconds, minutes, hours and days of a lifetime.

From the gigantic Blue Whale to tiny Etruscan shrew, all mammals have hearts similar to ours, differing only in how frequently they beat.  Smaller animals lose heat faster than bigger ones, so the heart must beat faster to keep the warmth circulating.  A hamster’s heart flutters 450 times a minute – nearly seven times ours – while a whale gets by with a paltry 20 beats per minute.

Yet all mammals, great and small, all seem to be granted the same number of heartbeats.  From birth to death, mouse, man and moose all have an allotment of a billion beats – give or take.  A cat, whose heart beats 150 times a minute, lives on average fifteen years – just over a billion heartbeats.  An elephant, at 30 beats per minute, lives for seventy.  It’s not that our hearts fail after a billion beats; that’s simply when mammal bodies wear out, overcome by life’s battles.

Those of you good at math have probably noted that the human lifespan – about eighty years throughout the developed world – doesn’t fall into this pattern.  We get almost three billion heartbeats.  That’s a very recent thing.  Until we started to work out the germ theory of disease, one hundred and fifty years ago, the average human lifespan had never been more than thirty-five years, and often much less.  That’s just a bit over a billion heartbeats.  

Thirty-one years, eight months, eight days, one hour and forty-two minutes make up a billion seconds.  Thanks to modern medicine, almost all of us will live two billion seconds, and an increasing number will see all of a third billion.  Longevity scientists believe that four billion seconds – more than 120 years – is not beyond the realm of possibility.

Generations once came thick and fast – every twenty years.  As people live longer and grow more affluent, the span between generations has lengthened.  Women in the developed world now have their first child while in their early 30s.  A generation has become a billion seconds.  

These billion-second intervals provide markers for our passage through life.  The first billion seconds encompass childhood, adolescence and young adulthood.  The second billion seconds represent full adulthood, parenting, and the high points of a career.  The final billion seconds see us move into a gradual retirement, increasing senescence and eventual death.

Cultures develop along similar lines.  Something is being born and something matures, even as something else passes away.  The march of the generations is not simply a passage of bodies, but the flow of ideas which we operate within, the assumptions and truisms which make up our world views.  New ideas are born, have their hour in the sun, then fade from memory.

These billion seconds lie both before us and behind us.  A billion seconds ago, IBM released its PC, and we began the march into a civilization where computing has become ubiquitous, a world in which information both fuels and shapes our lives.  That revolution has entered its full adulthood, a mature industry still bright with potential, but with a growing sense of its limits.  

Within the billion seconds (spanning 1995 – 2026) we are witnesses to the birth of a connected species, the emergence of something that little more than a hundred years ago would have been confused with telepathy.  This bright childhood has become a chaotic and anxious adolescence, as we test our limits against the powers which both nurture and restrain us.  

Finally, the post-war culture of ‘big is beautiful’ industrialization, based on models of centralized control, winds toward its end, exhausted and overwhelmed.

Each of us lives in these three cultures: the connected culture being born, the computer culture now thriving, and the centralized culture passing from the scene.  There is no way to entirely inhabit one of these cultures to the exclusion of the others, any more than we could choose to ignore a few of our limbs.  We belong to all of them.  As the new shoves its way into prominence, we lose the familiar touch of the old, witnessing an entire world view becoming increasingly feeble as it heads toward an eventual end, and before we have any clear idea of what will replace it.

A billion seconds encompasses enough time to utterly transform the world.

]]> http://thenextbillionseconds.com/2012/01/24/4-duration/feed/ 0 http://thenextbillionseconds.com/2012/01/19/4-replication/ http://thenextbillionseconds.com/2012/01/19/4-replication/#comments Thu, 19 Jan 2012 01:00:44 +0000 mpesce http://thenextbillionseconds.com/?p=130 Continue reading →]]>

No one remembers learning to speak.  We can sympathize with a parent as they endure a toddler exploring the capacity of their vocal cords, hooting and howling in joyous cacophony, everywhere: during the middle of a religious service, in a movie theatre, on the subway.  Something about the voice feels so alluring the child finds it impossible to remain quiet.  We must speak: something between our voice and our ears demands stimulation.

Our earliest memories tie themselves to the words of others: something our mother said to us, our father showed us, or a sibling shared in play.  Words seem to be the necessary anchor to ground our memories.  Before we have grasped language, we hold onto nothing.  Those memories might be there, deep within us, but we have no way to find them, no hook that would allow us to trawl our preverbal history.  “Where there are no words, thereof we can not speak.”

We come into knowing as we come into language, judged both by adults and other children through our facility with words.  Using language as an informal intelligence assessment, we assume a well-spoken child to be more mature than one who stumbles through words and makes a mess of grammar.  An adult with a poor command of the language often finds themselves treated like an idiot – a perennial complaint of immigrants.  We have tied language to intelligence for so long the two feel almost inseparable, perfectly expressed in the dual meaning of the word ‘dumb’.

Humans have been ‘anatomically modern’ – that is, recognizably identical to ourselves – for almost two hundred thousand years.  Caves in South Africa bear the evidence of habitation by our earliest ancestors.  We have their bones and their tools, but no sense of who they were.  We can hypothesize what they felt and thought, but a gulf separates us from them — the gulf of language.

It isn’t until about eighty thousand years ago that we start to see the hallmarks of what we think of as human intelligence – patterns carved in clay, fragments of textiles.  These first elements of decoration – accenting the purely functional – speak to an internal depth which the earliest humans seem to have lacked.  That depth came with the emergence of language.

Few topics in science ignite more heated and less illuminating debate than the origin of human language.  For three hundred years, the question has tantalized and frustrated the best minds.  Hypotheses abound, but answers are thin on the ground.  We study the growls of chimpanzees, our nearest cousins, and analyze the clicks of dolphins – who seem to have a language of their own – in an attempt to understand how we navigated the passage from silence into speech.

Although we don’t know much about what happened, we have recently learned where: southwest Africa.  Quentin Atkinson, a biologist from the University of Auckland, analyzed the phonemes – individual sounds – which compose a broad sampling of human languages.  He found that the language family of southwest Africa – Xhosan, home to the !Kung people, with their famous clicking dialect – had the greatest number of phonemes, over 100.  Hawai’ian, on the other hand, has only 13.  

Southwest Africa is close to the birthplace of our species; Hawai’i, the most recently colonized land on Earth.  Atkinson saw that as our race migrated ‘out of Africa’, languages tended to lose phonemes, and each subsequent migration dropped some of these basic sounds.  (The number of phonemes a language possesses doesn’t affect the ability of that speakers of that to express rich thoughts; it simply means that the phonemes in a phoneme-poor language get more of a workout.)  Atkinson gave us a map, which points back in time, to the first people we would recognize as people, the first people with language, memory, and culture.

Even if we never know why, we know where we began to speak, and know that we carried that capability with us as we moved out across the planet.  Once language had arrived, it never left us.  It became too vital to be forgotten, so important that we consider language one of the defining characteristics of our species: to be human is to have command of language.   Our myths remind us of this: God blessed Adam with an ability to name the animals.

Yet there was a humanity before, a Homo sapiens before sapience.  We can reach back through prehistory, but our reach extends only as far as language.  Before language, our species was like a small child, remembering nothing.  After language we have continuous memory – indigenous Australians claim a cultural continuity going back some 60,000 years.  Language empowers us to express ourselves and know one another’s minds, but also imprisons us within an unbreakable cage that limits our ability to know anything about our pre-linguistic ancestors.  We are so different from them they are incomprehensible to us.  Language has so changed us that we understand nothing of those who do not share language.

“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”  Language was among the first human tools – along with stone axes and fire – and definitively the first tool that lived entirely within us, a bit of innovation as much cultural as technological.  In the moment language arrived on the scene, it became indispensable, and once indispensable, we adopted it as innate, favoring those with the greatest linguistic capability, and thereby subtly affecting the evolution of our species.  People who ‘talk pretty’ have broader prospects for success in the world.  They and their children will thrive.

Every claim made for the power of language – as an amplifier of human capability – can also be made for the sudden arrival of hyperconnectivity.  Connected people are more successful, and those most successful at mastering the techniques of connectivity have the greatest successes.  Connection is becoming indispensable, and we have already begun to think of it as an innate capability.  The billion seconds from 1995 – 2026 is witness to a transition from a world in which no one is connected, to a world where being connected and being human is seen as synonymous.

Just as we now see being verbal and being human as synonymous, hyperconnectivity is adding another layer of richness and depth to our experience.  Where we can observe the sudden explosion of depth in the human record, eighty thousand years ago, so our children’s children’s children’s children will look upon this billion seconds as a second explosion, another sudden quickening, before which the ‘dumb’ and disconnected generations of humanity will seem incomprehensible and inhuman.

We are at a threshold.  In fact, we are already more than half-way across it.  We can look in either direction; behind us we can see the familiar shape of a species as we’ve known ourselves for eighty millennia; before us we see something quite different, a form not wholly realized, yet quite real.  We still don’t have all of the language of hyperconnectivity.  The chaos of the present moment is very much like the hollering of seven billion toddlers learning to stretch their voices across an entire planet.  It’s growing quite loud, as everyone clamors to be heard.  There’s a lot of sound, but not much sense.

That sense will come over the next billion seconds.  When it does, the door to our recent past will be closed.  We will have been these disconnected people, but we will not understand them, any more than we can understand our earliest ancestors.  We will have lived two lives, before and after we all connected.

]]> http://thenextbillionseconds.com/2012/01/17/3-articulation/feed/ 0 http://thenextbillionseconds.com/2012/01/12/2-introduction/ http://thenextbillionseconds.com/2012/01/12/2-introduction/#comments Thu, 12 Jan 2012 01:00:08 +0000 mpesce http://thenextbillionseconds.com/?p=92 Continue reading →]]>

2 #INTRODUCTION

We live in a connected world.  

Not limited to the wealthy nations and peoples of the world, nearly six billion of the planet’s seven-billion-and-counting individuals own a mobile.  Rich and poor, everyone sees the value in being continuously in-touch.  Connectivity creates opportunity.

A story related in THE ECONOMIST perfectly illustrates the relationship between connectivity and opportunity.  For thousands of years, fishermen in the Indian state of Kerala, on the nation’s southwestern coast, sailing their sturdy dhows into the Indian ocean, have dropped their nets, said their prayers, and harvested the sea’s bounty.  Once they’d filled their hold, the fishermen would head back to the mainland.  At this point, they’d be faced with a choice: where should they sell their fish?  The Kerala coastline, dotted with ports and fish markets, offers fishermen lots of choices, and the markets need fish every day.  Working from instinct, the fishermen would pick a port, and sail into it.

Inevitably, other fishermen would have had the same idea, pulling into the same port at the same time, their holds also filled.  Suddenly there’s a problem of oversupply: Too many fish for sale means low prices at the market.  A fisherman might just barely cover their costs, no matter how hard they worked, or how many fish they caught.  Meanwhile, just a few kilometers away, another fishing port had been forgotten by all the fishermen that day.  No fish for sale in that market, at any price.  The Kerala fishermen had grown used to their subsistence lifestyle, and Kerala fishmongers to their inconstant supply.  It’s just the way things were, the way they’d always been.

In 1997, mobiles came to Kerala.  Cell towers began to spring up all over Kerala, including its extensive beaches.  Radio signals travel in straight lines, so mobile coverage carried out to sea for nearly 15 miles.  Anyone could make a call from the middle of the Indian ocean, almost out of sight of land - if they had a reason to make a call.

As is the case everywhere, the first mobiles were expensive to own and use, so only the wealthy could afford them.  A month of a fisherman’s income barely covered the price of the cheapest mobile.  (In relative terms, mobile cost as much to a Kerala fisherman as a good used car would cost us.)

At least one fisherman had enough spare cash to purchase a mobile.  That mobile went out to sea and at some point - no one knows precisely who, or where, or when - someone rang that mobile.  Over the course of a conversation, the fisherman learned about a fish market which going without fish that day.  He immediately set his sails for that port, and made a tidy profit on his eagerly awaited fish.

The next day, the fisherman phoned around, calling each of the fish markets in succession, learning which of these markets most needed fish - and would pay the most for it.  That day the fisherman made another excellent return on his catch.  The same thing happened the day after that, and the day after that.  With his mobile to check the markets, every day brought a very nice profit.

News of the mobile-facilitated fish market spread very quickly throughout Kerala.  Within a few months, every fisherman, from the poorest to the most well-off, owned a mobile, checking prices at several fish markets before selecting a port of call.  Three things happened as a result: every fish market now had a supply of fish; the price of fish at one market matched the price of fish in another market; and the fishermen now got the best possible price for their fish, every day.  That mobile, which had cost a month’s income, could be paid off in just two months.  

Kerala’s fisherman have a new tool, helping them earn more money.  They’re not alone.  Farmers in Kenya use DrumNet, a text messaging service allowing them to check the current market prices for their produce at a range of locations.  When a farmer readies his vegetables for sale, he sends a text message to DrumNet, using the response to select the market offering him the best price.  Forever at the mercy of the weather, insects and crop blights, farmers have also suffered from ‘informational asymmetry’ in the marketplace, never knowing quite enough to make the most of their opportunities.  Connectivity wipes away these asymmetries: using DrumNet, Kenyan farmers have been earning as much as 40% more for their vegetables.

In Karachi, the largest city of Pakistan, barbers have always had to rent an expensive stall in the public markets to ply their trade.  As Pakistanis bought mobiles, a different kind of commerce became possible.  A barber can just print up signs reading “FOR A HAIRCUT CALL 03XX-YYYYYYYYY”, posting them on any available space.  Everyone is better served by this relationship: the client gets on-call service in his home, while the barber saves a fortune in rent.  

The market, which had always been attached to a place in space and a point in time, has migrated into our mobiles, following us everywhere, all the time.  Unexpected and unpredicted, most businesses have little understanding of how this transition to a universal market fundamentally transforms commerce.  Yet billions of individuals have already grasped the truth: the mobile is the most potent tool for wealth-creation since the invention of the metal axe-head, thousands of years ago.

The business case for the mobile is irresistible: a small investment yielding enormous returns.  Owning a mobile in Bangladesh or Peru or Nigeria dramatically improves your capability to care for your family.  As people saw their employers and friends and family using the mobile to earn more money, the mobile became the must-have device, the universal item in the 21st-century toolkit.

Marshall McLuhan wrote “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”  Seeing it as an essential element for our success in the world, we have taken up the mobile.  We grow richer, but this gift comes at a cost: the more we use the mobile, the more we are transformed by it.

]]> http://thenextbillionseconds.com/2012/01/12/2-introduction/feed/ 3 http://thenextbillionseconds.com/2012/01/10/initiation/ http://thenextbillionseconds.com/2012/01/10/initiation/#comments Mon, 09 Jan 2012 22:33:05 +0000 mpesce http://www.mypod.me/nextbillion/?p=1 Continue reading →]]>

Blessed with good health, we spend most of our days blissfully ignorant of a vital question: what do we do when we get sick?  In America, Australia or any other developed nation the answer is easy: we go to the doctor.   High-quality medical care might be expensive (or free, depending on where you live), but access to it can be taken for granted.  Thankfully.

This is not the case everywhere.

In Kenya, quacks posing as medical professionals treat gullible patients, depriving them both of their money and a chance for a cure.  With only 7000 qualified doctors to treat 40,000,000 Kenyans, the huge demand for medical services means anyone with enough medical knowledge to sound convincing can set up shop.  As a result, many Kenyans receive sub-standard medical care.  Some die because their doctor isn’t.

Fortunately, that has started to change.

A smartphone app, MedAfrica, provides any Kenyan with a smartphone a list of registered and certified medical providers.  When a Kenyan gets sick, they can learn - more or less instantly - if a particular practitioner is the real McCoy.

While most Kenyans do not yet own smartphones - the cheapest of these amazing devices still costs around $75, which is a lot of money in East Africa - the nation as a whole has 25,000,000 mobile subscriptions.  Half of Kenya owns a mobile, which means that even if they do not own a mobile themselves, Kenyans undoubtedly know someone who does.  And although smartphones are not in the majority, they aren’t entirely rare.  A Kenyan likely knows someone who owns a smartphone, so they could simply call or text that smartphone-enabled friend, and ask them to use MedAfrica check out their prospective doctor.

When people are sufficiently well-connected - hyperconnected - something known by any one of them can be shared with all of them, very quickly.  MedAfrica includes another feature, a decision-tree of questions which helps the sick self-diagnose their illnesses, making the same inquiries a doctor or nurse might.  From these responses MedAfrica offers up a provisional diagnosis that can point the the sick person toward the most effective treatment.  MedAfrica may not be as good as a doctor, but it’s free, and freely available to anyone with a smartphone, helping both patients and doctors.  When patients can off-load the burden from doctors, by doing some of the work themselves, doctors can spread themselves around, seeing the patients who will most benefit from their expertise.  MedAfrica helps make the creaky, overstretched Kenyan health system more effective.  This app will save lives.

That a little piece of software could have such a profound effect tells us a lot about how quickly and comprehensively our culture has transformed.  In 1999, half the planet had never made a phone call.  By 2009, half of us owned mobiles.  The world has grown connected, and that connectivity acts as an amplifier of human capabilities.  Individual efforts have wildly disproportionate effects.

Much of what transpired in 2011 - a year of turmoil, catastrophe and revolution - seemed chaotic and irrational.  In reality, 2011 saw the first fruits of hyperconnectivity: a rising tide of chaos goes hand-in-hand with our ability to reach out to one another.  Much that was difficult or rare has become easy and common.

We are unprepared for this sudden advancement in our capacity, and we have an urgent need to understand the origin and nature of our new-found capabilities. Like children in the bodies of giants, we kick over everything in our path, unaware of our own strength.   Some few among us have chosen to become agents of chaos, exploiting hyperempowerment for ends that serve only themselves.  Others have used hyperempowerment as a fulcrum - like the authors of MedAfrica, propelling Kenya forward with just the lightest touch.

From inside the fishbowl of this transformation - a civilizational acceleration hurtling us toward a future that feels very different and very potent - it’s difficult to understand how much we have changed.  In our behaviors and expectations, we are already very different than we were just half a billion seconds (15 years) ago.  In another half a billion seconds we will be almost unrecognizable.   What we are becoming will be incomprehensible to the people we once were.  The language of sharing and connectivity we employ today simply did not exist half a generation ago; the way we both depend upon and conform to a world of continuous connection tells us that there is no going back.  Even if all the devices vanished tomorrow, they have left a permanent mark on our collective psyche.  Once connected, we are not easily broken apart.  

Drawn from a decade of research into the social and technological factors fusing in this explosion of cultural change, our book, The Next Billion Seconds, has been broken into 100 chapters.  Every Tuesday and Thursday until December 20, 2012, we will dig a little deeper into the processes and products of hyperconnectivity.  For the next hundred posts, this blog will work to articulate a complete vision of a what happens, now that we’re all connected.  

]]> http://thenextbillionseconds.com/2012/01/10/initiation/feed/ 3