CHAPTER NINE

DIGITAL CULTURE

Toward a Global Brain

 

IMAGINE A child with a severed leg in a remote village in Tanzania who will die if it is not properly amputated. He is rushed to a local NGO-run clinic, one equipped with robotic surgical equipment made by a low-cost 3D printer. After putting a tourniquet on the child’s leg, the clinic orders rush delivery of anesthetic drugs by high-speed drone from Dar es Salaam. The boy’s medical past is quickly checked by taking a heart monitor scan that compares the result to a cloud-based database of people’s unique cardiac rhythms, finding the identifying record that had been uploaded by a smartphone-wielding aid worker during a visit to his village years earlier. The clinic then dials up a New York surgeon, who puts on her virtual-reality goggles, slips her hands into the remotely located controller, and starts manipulating the robotic limbs. High-tech viewing cameras create a hologram of the boy’s anesthetized body, presenting him before her as if he were there in her lab. She completes the delicate work clearing torn tendons, bone, and muscle and finally sealing the wound. After it has healed, the child is given a flexible but firm new prosthetic leg, cost-effective and custom-made by the same 3D printer. A one-legged boy who would otherwise have been doomed to panhandling in a polluted city has a chance at a more fulfilling future.

If we—that is all 7 billion of us—don’t screw up the planet, advances like this imagined scenario portend a world of boundless opportunity. For that we can thank a dizzying spate of technological change and ever-intensified human interconnectivity that’s part of a positive feedback loop of decentralization and disruption. Essentially, the old monopolies of knowledge are breaking down, freeing up human ingenuity. Social media is vital to this process. Technologies such as mobile telecommunication, gene therapy and other biotech advances, 3D printing, drones, smartphones, digital currency, distributed networks, and open ledgers are all feeding off and back into the Social Organism. They, too, are part of this living, evolving life form that’s challenging incumbent industries and traditional models of social organization, dislodging some from outdated jobs while creating innumerable, unforeseen opportunities for others.

In this world, social media is becoming our global brain. It is a powerful mediating system through which human beings’ ideas can, in the colorful words of British intellectual Matt Ridley, “meet and have sex.” It represents, to reuse an analogy, a rich agar for cultivating creativity and new concepts. With automated translation services embedded into social media platforms, people with different native tongues can communicate seamlessly—and when linked via VR goggles they can feel like they are in the same room together. This environment of collaborative innovation is getting more fertile by the day.

I first realized this when my buddy Lane Merrifield showed me what he was doing at Club Penguin, the children’s online game/social network. Well before Facebook and others deployed an auto-translate feature, Club Penguin let kids from all over the world communicate seamlessly in pre-determined phrases that translated across all languages. (It was a form of digital Esperanto, or a real-life version of the “babel fish” from Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.) That was a big aha moment for me. These are the ways in which social media has dramatically flattened the lines of communication and given billions the opportunity to contribute their thoughts to a giant pool of information unconstrained by time or distance. It has contributed more to the process of creative procreation—and so to our capacity for exponential learning and innovation—than arguably any other Internet-based technology.

That might sound like a bold claim to anyone who still thinks of social media as merely a corporate marketing tool, a Millennial joke-sharing toy, or a place for anonymous trolls to say libelous things. But by now we hope you recognize that it is so much more than that. This horizontal, biologically determined communication system offers a completely new way of rapidly unleashing, sharing, and deploying information. It is especially powerful when combined with other decentralizing technologies such as cloud-based data storage, Big Data analysis, cryptography, machine-learning tools, open data protocols, and blockchain ledgers, technologies whose interoperable qualities mean they are linked directly into the social media publishing platforms.

What’s emerging is a giant, living, and ever-evolving, intertwined uber-organism with tentacles spreading far beyond the platforms of Twitter and Facebook. It’s a beast that currently encompasses 1.5 billion Internet users, more than a billion websites, and, according to internetstats.org, consumes more than 2 terawatt hours of electricity to process more than 2 billion gigabytes of data every day. And global connectivity is only getting more comprehensive as experimental ventures such as Facebook’s Aquila project, which will offer drone-delivered WiFi to remote areas, and Google’s Project Loon, which aims to do the same via high-altitude balloons, gain traction. Mesh networks, which provide intra-community connections that periodically sync with the global Internet, as well as the rollout of cheap smartphones such as Mozilla’s offering at $25, will also bring many more of the world’s digitally disconnected into this giant ecosystem of human exchange.

The complexity of the environment in which this organism operates goes far beyond the most commonly recognized social media systems. Online repositories of scientific data; open-source software developers; crowd-editing sites such as Wikipedia; decentralized marketplaces such as Airbnb, Lending Club, and eBay; bitcoin and other digital currency communities—these all go into the richly interdependent, decentralized ecosystem in which the Social Organism lives and thrives.

One way social media helps spur innovation within this global network of idea-generators is by drawing attention to new investment opportunities and, in that way, steering money toward where it’s needed for research and development. That’s especially valuable for places that don’t have the kind of deep, venture capital markets that U.S. and European start-ups can tap. This shows up in the donations to projects launched on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter, which as of early 2016 had raised more than $2 billion for over 100,000 projects. Using social media to alert people to their ideas, a pair of inventors in the Philippines got $77,000 to develop their 3D printer–based DIY home solar panel maker, and the Clean Africa Energy project in Lesotho expanded production of its clean and safe biomass cook stove—just two of myriad Kickstarter success stories.

This is just the beginning. As digital-currency applications for transferring money combine with blockchain-based systems for securely issuing and trading so-called crypto-stocks and crypto-bonds, people will gain a newfound confidence that they are not being defrauded. When combined with the less restrictive regulations for soliciting investment contained in the U.S. JOBS Act, this could open up a deluge of investment flows. The result: the organic and exponential expansion of a global marketplace of ideas. Social media will be integrated into this process, replacing newswires and other traditional sources of information for capital markets. Already, some adventurous publicly listed companies are using Twitter to release information about their earnings and other announcements. That kind of global, straight-to-the-public broadcasting strategy—whether delivered over Twitter or via some current or future successor—is going to become commonplace. For our increasingly interconnected global economy, the free flow of ideas and information is its lifeblood. And social media networks, the infrastructure over which those ideas travel, are its cardiovascular system—the heart, arteries, and veins of this vast, networked uber-organism.

Yet as we ponder how we might shape social media’s future role in this, we must also douse ourselves with a bucket of cold water. The dreams we have of our future are not only filled with stories of saving Tanzanian children, or of super-smart homes that can manage our complicated lives with exquisite, automated efficiency. They can also be rather nightmarish. Many of us worry, for good reason, that the age of ubiquitous, all-powerful computing capacity might reduce the essence of life to some kind of mathematical, algorithmically determined equation where we are told, without room for debate, what we should or shouldn’t value. Computers are becoming artificially intelligent, whether we like it or not. How can we ensure we’re not building a world in which we are trapped by the very machines we created? As we’ve said, we can’t blindly assume that evolution makes for a “better” world.

In March 2016, when a computer programmed by Google beat a human competitor at the 2,500-year-old game of Go—a contest that’s phenomenally more complex than chess—many saw it as a major milestone in the self-reinforcing evolution of artificial intelligence. I tend to believe Ray Kurzweil, the legendary futurist, when he says that “the singularity”—that moment in which computers are able to recursively learn and self-improve to the point where artificial intelligence starts to surpass human intelligence and never turns back—is near. The combined exponential effects from Moore’s law, Metcalfe’s law, and all the related computing, biotech, and financial technologies that are unleashing an ever-growing flood of networked processing power are taking us inexorably to that point.

It’s exciting but, naturally, it’s also unsettling.

That we have a strong interest in how A.I. evolves is an understatement of profound proportions. Every day another expert adds his or her voice to the cacophony of warnings that humanity faces grave risks once computers reach a point where they control us more than we do them. It’s a justified concern; we cannot assume that if machines are programmed to think for themselves that they won’t embark on some malevolent mission that we’re unable to stop. Isaac Asimov and other science fiction writers’ fears of a sentient machine—Kubrick’s HAL, if you will—are as relevant now as ever. But, in this final chapter, I want to explore what I see as a huge opportunity for social media to provide a powerful counterbalance to a future of soulless mechanistic authority by layering on top of it a rich tapestry of humanity.

If we follow the warnings of Yale computer scientist David Gelernter, the biggest danger is that we view computer intelligence, founded as it is on rational, mathematical processing, as somehow a sufficient proxy for human intelligence, which covers a much wider spectrum. Human consciousness starts with the logical, left-brain way of thinking that we’ve exported into computers, but further along it also encompasses dream states and nuances of thought, emotions, and random sparks of inexplicable creativity. We do not want the machines to simply deliver some cold, rational, mathematical assessment of what’s “best for us” if we can’t at the same time give value to, respect, and protect all that other stuff that makes us human. What matters are the elements of our being that appreciate beauty and love, that can imagine Harry Potter performing magic, or ponder why the universe exists, or marvel, without feeling compelled to understand, at the majesty of an eagle in flight, a brilliant blue glacier, or the Great Barrier Reef.

Citing the poet Rilke, who compared “the flight of a small bird across the evening sky to a crack in a smooth porcelain cup,” Gelernter asks, “How did he come up with that? Possibly by using the fact that these very different things made him feel the same way...Emotion is a hugely powerful and personal encoding-and-summarizing function. It can comprehend a whole complex scene in one subtle feeling. Using that feeling as an index value, we can search out—among huge collections of candidates—the odd memory with a deep resemblance to the thing we have in mind.” He’s talking about something that a computer will never get. (Apologies, faithful MacBook.)

I always had this feeling of sadness when I thought about the “new consciousness of the collective,” this idea that we were entering a “beige” era, one devoid of the possibilities of the David Bowies and other such mutating forces of creativity. I was inspired by Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and by Neil Postman, who described the sad fate of conformity and the lost information that computers introduce. (Postman chained himself to the card catalog at Berkeley when it was being computerized because he didn’t want to lose the value of the human notes that were left on those cards, an earlier version of “social media” for future generations to use.) The complexity of mutation and of biological evolution inspires me much more than the conformity of the computer networks envisioned by the Googles of this world. Yet here I am building my life around the potential unleashed by that technology. It’s one reason I feel duty bound to keep the element of random creative genius alive and well within this computerized system.

But, given that we are on this path, I also believe that social media is our biggest hope. If life is to be worth living in a future dominated by extremely powerful computers, we must carve out a space within it where the essence of what it means to be human has primacy within the same digital context in which those computers operate. We need a computer-readable forum in which expressions of artistic endeavor are celebrated, where we can make emotional connections with each other and play out our hopes, fears, loves, and dislikes, all with the full understanding that this is an essential, nonexpendable part of our digitally interconnected future. Social media is that forum. Preserving the autonomy of the billion-plus human cells within the Social Organism and encouraging the multitude of ongoing interactions between them will be absolutely vital if we are to avoid a reign of malevolent robot overlords.

How might we build this space of humanistic freedom? Well, let’s first not forget that these machines will be programmed by us, or at least by the software engineers among us. We, the general public, must demand some input into that process. We need accountability, transparency, and translatable evidence that the coding used to set the machines’ governance protocols is something we can reach consensus on. To achieve this requires the rollout of cryptographic proofs and of decentralized, trustless architectures such as the blockchain to immutably document the engineers’ work. That will sound complicated for anyone without a background in cryptography, and I don’t expect every Average Joe to have the skills to audit what the techies are doing. But as long as we keep the system open and support the educational development of more civic-minded software engineers, a worldwide volunteer army of sufficiently skilled, trustworthy coders and hackers can and will use these tools to keep their peers honest. (If you don’t believe me, take a scroll through the immeasurable amount of unpaid work that goes into open-source projects listed on GitHub.)

What these guardian angels must insist upon, on our behalf, is that A.I. designers apply code that interoperates with social media but which also gives the latter the autonomy to foster the continued blossoming of human imagination. It all suggests a bigger role for the armies of self-appointed “white hackers” that currently live on the fringes of mainstream society. We may develop a greater appreciation of the contribution to our security that controversial transparency advocates like Anonymous and Julian Assange’s Wikileaks provide.

Second, we must remember that artificially intelligent machines are nothing without the data that’s fed into them. If they are to serve us, their information inputs must detail who we really are, what we truly value, what makes us come together, and what drives us apart. Nodes in the always-connected, ever-calibrating network of computing power will function just like T-cell receptors tasked with recognizing threats: They will seek out patterns in human behavior that prompt their steering algorithm to dictate an appropriate response. We must give them valuable, meaningful, and constructive data about the human existence. As far as I’m concerned, social media is the right place to gather and process this information.

To be sure, as we mine social media to discover who we are, it’s probably unwise to just set some A.I. machine loose on the network to figure things out. Microsoft’s experiment with a machine-learning Twitter bot offers a cautionary tale. The A.I. account, opened to the world on March 23, 2016, in the form of a model teenage girl named Tay, soon evolved into the embodiment of a horrible human being. Hordes of Twitter users showed how easy it was to teach the bot to become a racist bigot. In little time, she was declaring that feminism was “a cancer,” “Hitler was right,” “9/11 was an inside job,” and that the Holocaust was “made up.” Within twenty-four hours, Microsoft was forced to lobotomize Tay, as one commentator put it, and then issued a statement saying it was “deeply sorry” for what they’d let loose on the world. Sadly, Tay became a reflection of the content she was fed.

Nonetheless, we should be able to use social media to assess our culture without inviting spoilers to create destructive feedback loops. And despite our obsession with all this ugly behavior, it’s the best shot we have. Not only does social media represent the highest evolved distribution system for human communication, but, as we’ve discussed, it lives and breathes off the emotional exchanges that define the human condition. It might depend on a base of hard-wired computers as its infrastructure, but what makes social media tick is the hard-to-define gooey stuff of humanity, the magic sauce that makes us chase our loves, attack our hates, and forge the tenuous but vital bonds of community that give life its meaning.

The old, top-down model of information management is incompatible with the flat, holarchic structure of this emerging ecosystem of ubiquitous computing power. For one, change happens too fast for the old system to keep up. The time it takes for a corporate lawyer to sign off on alterations to software code can’t match the timescale of computers that react in milliseconds to ever-changing conditions. Also, in a global, borderless community, how are we going to decide which of those “suits” should be speaking for us?

This new world is already being constructed through open-source computing models, a crowdsourcing approach to design and engineering that the techie community has shown to be a far more effective than centralized projects. Now, as software design becomes the basis for every manufactured good (3D-printed products and parts) and for every service we use (financial, professional advice, health, communication, etc.), nearly all of it will eventually be founded on open-source coding infrastructure. People will make proprietary, profit-making applications on top of that infrastructure, but the open platform will allow innovative competitors to try to dislodge them. The superiority of this model is demonstrated by the open-source Linux operating system, which now runs 90 percent of the world’s servers and datacenters, and has spawned loads of vital offshoots, including Google’s Android OS for smartphones. The input of hundreds of independent engineers into that collective creative effort has made Linux’s software stronger, faster, and better for all of us. Now compare that to the government-run healthcare.gov website, whose launch was delayed by horrendous malfunctions, scaling, and interoperability problems. The market will demand that software designs follow the former model, not the latter.

We must apply this same open-source approach to human creativity of all kinds. Institutions like the Creative Commons, which encourage derivative works, are vital if the Social Organism is to thrive alongside a booming industry of functional software design. We must embrace and allow the constant remixing of culture. Especially as we barrel toward the Internet of Things era, when sensors on billions of machines will have them talking to each other, we must continue to feed and nurture the Social Organism.

In this open-source world, virtually any institution that remains trapped in a centralized, top-down architecture will be forced to adapt to this new system for sharing information and knowledge. Many may need to be completely overhauled. Education is a good place to start. We should promote open-minded approaches to learning that encourage experimentation and recognize failure as an integral, even welcome, part of that process. We must also promote the idea of collaboration. In a traditional classroom, students are punished for sharing; striving for success is a lonely enterprise, with raw competition emphasized at every stage of school life. But in social media, where knowledge grows through the constant, iterative development of memes and artistic contributions, where ad hoc collaborative teams spread ideas around the world and share their work under open-source agreements, this closed-book mind-set is anathema. If we want our graduating seniors to behave civilly on social media—which, whether we like it or not, is now the forum in which society works out its ideas and differences—we have to prepare them for it. We can’t cultivate selfish, protective, overly competitive individuals for a system that’s inherently dependent on cooperation and sharing. To the economist and social theorist Jeremy Rifkin, failure to make that pedagogical transition could very well doom the planet. “We need to teach our young people to share as part of human society,” Rifkin says. “Then we can prepare them to live in an interconnected planetary society and to understand the biosphere in which we live.”

Government is another institutional arena that needs a top-to-bottom shake up. Our bureaucracies need to learn the same lesson that General Stanley McChrystal discovered when he arrived in Iraq to lead the Joint Special Operations Command’s fight against Al Qaeda. McChrystal realized that to fight an enemy that had no real leader or classic, top-down military hierarchy, he had to similarly shake up the U.S. command structure. He had to make communications lines across the army, navy, air force, marines and the various intelligence agencies more fluid, horizontal and interactive. In effect, he had to create more of a holocracy. McChrystal left his post in controversy, after officers under his command were quoted bad-mouthing President Obama, but his reforms are credited with helping to quell the insurgencies in Iraq. He is now parlaying that experience into consulting work, advising companies how to restructure their organizations in keeping with the new information-flow paradigm of our age.

Something similar needs to happen in federal, state, and local government bureaucracies. Otherwise, our super-fast, evolving computing systems will bypass our democratic institutions and insert their own will. For now, government remains an indispensable institution for holding people accountable, and that’s going to matter deeply as we monitor the coders who are building our A.I.-managed future. Maybe we’ll evolve new, software-driven models of governance, using distributed blockchain ledgers to keep work records traceable and instill natural, unbreakable laws of decentralization into our human exchange systems. But it’s still hard to see how we dispense with democratic governance altogether. We will need to bring government’s authority structure more in line with that of the Social Organism and embrace holarchic models of organization. Given the dysfunction of the U.S. Congress, this is a daunting undertaking. And yet such change is essential.

As we try to reimagine and restructure institutions, nature once again is our guide. Our digital lives are hurtling toward a more complex state of human commune, where the permutations of possible connections are exponentially more varied and unpredictable than those that existed during the era of linear, top-down control. The fields of physics and molecular biology have had to make sense of the universe’s wondrous natural inclination toward entropy and disorder. Now, after millennia of imposing our own rigid order in the face of all that chaos, we are, to an extent, yielding to it. And if we are going to let go in this way and design companies, government systems, and software programs that can contend with this new model, we need to understand where our theory of the Organism fits within the greater context.

Whatever path we take to achieving this social reconfiguration, it is going to entail a reorganization of knowledge itself. Thankfully, this is already happening. The crossover of disciplines traditionally associated with the natural sciences of biology and physics with those in the social science realm, especially around the study of human networks, is opening vast new realms of understanding about how the universe functions. This cross-pollination of ideas from different schools has become so fertile that the very idea of separate scientific or academic disciplines is starting to look a bit archaic. In fact, we think this book can be viewed in that same light: Is it a work about business, society, computer science, biology, all of the above, or none of the above?

At the MIT Media Lab, where Michael works, the favored word is “antidisciplinary,” the idea being that researchers should pursue projects that defy the traditional classifications of faculty. As Media Lab executive director Joichi Ito puts it, an antidisciplinary project is “a field of study with its own particular words, frameworks, and methods.” Note, he’s not talking about an “interdisciplinary” approach, but rather one whose focus lies outside of the traditional boundaries that academia has carved out for itself. In this spirit, the Media Lab’s designer/architect/biologist extraordinaire Neri Oxman combines computer technologies such as 3D printing with the “design” patterns found in nature to create beautiful, bacteria-managed clothes that literally live on you. She also designs buildings made of robust yet biodegradable natural materials. Her unclassifiable work reflects her view that we live in an “Age of Entanglement” in which “knowledge can no longer be ascribed to, or produced within, disciplinary boundaries, but is entirely entangled.”

Others are not so much abandoning disciplines but creating new ones. Hybrid fields drawn from biology, computer science, and social science now focus on how complex systems operate in nature and what they can tell us about how human beings interact with each other. Some are reviving the cross-disciplinary ideas of people like computer scientist Jay Forrester, who in the fifties pioneered the study of system dynamics. His work led to interest in cybernetics, the study of how feedback loops and self-adaptive systems explain the behavior of networks of autonomous molecules, organisms, and computing nodes and their application to the environment.

Using similar models, many systems designers are embracing biomimicry, which seeks to model human networks and organizational systems on the structure and functioning of those found in nature. The idea is that biomimicking will lead to a more efficient use of resources—be they social resources such as brainpower, natural resources such as water and fossil fuels, or computing resources. Of course, biomimicry has always been a part of business product design—think of how birds inspire the development of airplanes—but the key now is that leaders in this field are tapping nature for lessons on how to organize communities of people.

Much of the focus is on how to structure distinct business organizations and government agencies—and, as we discussed in chapter 2, some of that work is building on the concept of holarchies and holonic structures. But the lessons from nature also apply to really big systems of ad-hoc, informal relationships. Physicist Geoffrey West, for example, has identified a preferred population growth trajectory for big cities by drawing inferences from precise mathematical equations that measure how large animals’ metabolisms reach optimal efficiencies as they grow in size. French physicist-economist Didier Sornette, along with others, is creating models that predict the boom-bust cycles of markets based on how particles and molecules behave in the natural world. Scottish engineer David Irvine used nature’s coordinating mechanisms as his model for Maidsafe, a sophisticated, cryptocurrency-based network that lets thousands of computers share memory and computing power in a collective arrangement that obviates the need for a central server. To find the right optimizing balance for incentivizing owners to share or withdraw resources without disrupting the network, Irvine studied how ant colonies and other natural social systems work together. Nature, he says, “is the ultimate decentralized system.”

In understanding how all these systems function, the key element is communication, the signaling mechanism for the cause-and-effect responses that shape a group’s behavior. And while we tend to think of communicating as a uniquely human activity, key units of nature, both within and between organisms, are constantly communicating with each other. In fact, some living organisms play roles as messengers between other organisms. One striking example comes from mycelium, the prodigiously expansive mass of underground filaments on which fungi are formed. (One mycelium conglomeration in Oregon’s Blue Mountains occupies 2,384 acres of soil to stake a claim as the biggest living organism on earth.) Scientists have long known that mycelium forms symbiotic relationships with plants over what’s known as mycorrhizal networks: The plants provide the fungi with food while their root-like mycelia suck up water and nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen and transfer them to the plant. More recently, however, researchers discovered that the mycelia connections allow plants to share information with each other about the state of their metabolism. Using the same fungal interconnections, they will then make transfers of phosphorus and nitrogen from those that are rich in nutrients to those that are in need.

“I believe that mycelium is the neurological network of nature,” says mycologist Paul Stamets. “Interlacing mosaics of mycelium infuse habitats with information-sharing membranes. These membranes are aware, react to change, and collectively have the long-term health of the host environment in mind.” Stamets calls mycelium “Nature’s Internet,” and even goes so far to describe it as “a consciousness with which we might be able to communicate.”

I recently took an amazing trip with Paul around Iceland in the spring of 2016, where we discussed how mycelium is nature’s “immune system.” A remarkably passionate human being, Paul argues that once we figure out “cross-species interfacing,” we might be able to tap these “sentient cellular networks” to improve our own lives. How, and indeed why, would we do that? Because these “externalized neurological nets sense any impression upon them, from footsteps to falling tree branches,” which means they could “relay enormous amounts of data regarding the movements of all organisms through the landscape.” He’s even made a case for tapping the communicative power of mycelium, which has a powerful capacity to teach organisms’ immune systems to defend themselves, to bolster bees’ resilience to the diseases that are dangerously threatening colonies worldwide.

Mycelium’s role as nature’s communicator stems from the unique cellular structure of its fibrous networks. At the tips, where the extended filaments connect with the outside world, the strands are intensely polynucleated in what’s known as a coenocyte—which means their cells contain not one but many nuclei. This is like a concentration of brain power, which, Paul says, turns the tips into powerful sensors that are constantly reading data from the outside world. That data is then conveyed, through biochemical reactions, back to cells deeper within the underlying fungi so that they can adapt and evolve to their changing surrounding. I think it conjures up a fascinating analogy with the hyper-sensors that are now deployed in places that interface with our social media networks: the personal cameras and recording devices that convey information, such as the shooting of a black man, to the Social Organism. It’s not for nothing that images of both mycelium and neural networks look similar to graphic representations of social media networks.

Whether Stamets is right about mycelium’s special properties, the notion of a biological communication network isn’t unique to fungi. All multi-species ecosystems must share information if they are to regulate their complex, interdependent relationships. That goes for the trillions of microbes that coexist inside the human body, a giant ecosystem of tiny microorganisms whose interactions with each other—both competitive and cooperative—are only now becoming apparent to scientists armed with powerful new Big Data and DNA-sequencing techniques. Known as the human microbiome, this congregation of microscopic creatures is the biological equivalent of our networked Social Organism; it’s constantly sending and receiving signals from a countless array of nodes. The balance of communication within the microbiome—which will in turn influence and be influenced by its particular mix of symbiotic and pathogenic microorganisms—will decide whether we are healthy or not. As Michael’s teenage daughter Zoe points out, this giant leaderless community of tiny organisms “does a much better job of looking after its environment than we humans have done for ours.”

Mycelium

Neural

Social

Societies can adopt the same “self-healing” and positive growth mechanisms, especially if their communication systems are open and interconnected. Think of the “we shall overcome” message that was implied in the widely replicated #JeSuisParis and #JeSuisBruxelles hashtags following the terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels.

I recently relocated to Iceland, where I’ve been struck by how peaceful, productive, innovative, and communitarian its society is. And I think that says something about its networking instincts. The survival of the “Icelandic species” relied upon collective behaviors to combat the harsh environment, dark winters, and isolation. It gave rise to Iceland’s sagas during one of the most prolific eras in medieval literature. These unvarnished and realistic tales emphasized, on the one hand, respect for rugged individuals who’d overcome nature’s challenges and, on the other, their absolute dependence and connection to a wider social setting. It’s a holonic ideal: independence and autonomy yet simultaneous, unavoidable dependence on the wider whole. These stories forge a conflict in which was bred both a socializing instinct and a respect for each person’s unique qualities. It probably explains why Iceland has a 60 percent penetration on Snapchat, 93 percent penetration on Facebook, and geothermal-heated natural-spring swimming pools that teem with social interactions. A society interwoven with the shared values of humanism, egalitarianism, accountability, sustainability, and a deep connection to nature has created a unique petri dish of culture from which I am learning every day. I hope that the Social Organism can also become infused with the same inherent trust.

It seems that societies whose communication behaviors most mimic those of nature fare the best. So it’s presumably a good sign that, everywhere, we are developing habits like those of birds. To Giles Hutchins, cofounder of the consultancy Biomimicry for Creative Innovation, our new tendency to share smaller packages of content such as tweets on Twitter matches nature’s preferred communication format of “short instant messages.” Traditionally, he says, human communication has been “presented or created in long form and can also be very documentary,” but now we are seeing “a reawakening of our very own ‘waggle dance’ or pheromone-style short messaging instinct.” Tweets, he notes, “mimic the biological bird call metaphor,” as do SMS messages. Perhaps this is why it can feel like the Social Organism is functioning as one big cacophonous birdhouse.

This merging of human and natural systems cuts both ways. We are discovering how our new communications architecture also helps us understand natural phenomena such as the spread of disease. After Haiti was hit with a devastating earthquake in 2010, epidemiologists used social media patterns to study and predict the development of a cholera outbreak. Their work helped medical teams get ahead of the epidemic, preventing a bad situation from turning catastrophic. The technology may also be useful in monitoring the very real problem of suicide contagion, a phenomenon first highlighted in 1962 when Marilyn Monroe’s death by barbiturate poisoning led to a 12 percent increase in the rate of U.S. suicides. Reading an article about Guyana’s shockingly high suicide rate, I was struck by how researchers had found that when people killed themselves, mini “outbreaks” of follow-up suicides would cluster in the place where the first happened. The article discussed the prevalence of “contagion beliefs” associated with mental illnesses, pointing to a troublesome network effect where one person’s actions can trigger a domino effect across a population of mentally ill people. It’s precisely the kind of pattern that, once identified, could show up in social media data, where it could be used as an early-warning tool.

Different types of computing technology are working in parallel to fulfill two distinct purposes. In one direction, social media platforms and related social networking technology are dramatically changing how we distribute and consume information. In another, high-powered microscopes, gene-sequencing, Big Data, and sophisticated mathematical modeling tools are giving us a deeper understanding of complex systems of all kinds, be they biological, sociological, or physical. Together, these twin trends are delivering a kind of reflexive duality where biology and sociology are becoming one.

We probably shouldn’t be that surprised—we should have known all along what the eco-physicist Fritjof Capra has argued: that human social systems are not just like living systems, they are living systems.

Yet this reflexivity goes deeper still. Experiential information, which we were taught to view as data points that only we humans, with our supposedly superior brains, were uniquely capable of interpreting, isn’t just something that is sustained outside of our bodies as an independent variable; it can actually change us at our core. Thanks to studies of mice that have been conditioned to fear a certain smell, which found that their offspring were born with the same fear, we now know that trauma is something that can be coded into our DNA. Presumably, that means that learned positive responses can equally be incorporated and passed down from generation to generation. This demands even more that we respect our collective consciousness. Let it remind us of our past but also bring us forward, help us to grow.

As both our communication system and our social media–infused culture undergo the accelerating evolution detailed in this book, it appears that the biological makeup of the human species is itself undergoing faster changes. Research by University of Wisconsin anthropologist John Hawks has found that human evolution has sped up over the age of civilization, making the genetic differences between our bodies and those of people from 5,000 years ago much greater than the differences between those people and the Neanderthals, who vanished 35,000 years previously. Hawks’s thesis is that by changing our environment, our diet and moving around so much, we were forced to adapt more frequently. Wouldn’t it then follow that the Social Organism’s ever-wider exposure to new, emotive information sources must also change our bodies—or at least our brains?

And that’s not all. Biotech is now bringing the power of computing to the redesign of our very body. The Media Lab’s Hugh Herr, who lost his legs in a mountaineering accident, has created sophisticated prosthetic limbs that many believe are better than the human version—certainly they will last longer and they are more readily upgraded. Then, at the molecular level, there’s the somewhat polarizing field of synthetic biology. Recently, scientists led by genetics pioneer Craig Venter announced that they’d created a microbe with a simple DNA structure composed of just 437 genes, simpler than any known organism found in nature. The scientists are not quite sure what it is yet, but they say that it could provide a useful platform—a code base, if you will—with which to develop bold new medical treatments. Others will understandably worry that a real-life Dr. Frankenstein has been given a dangerous opportunity. Venter’s team didn’t clone a living thing; they created one from scratch.

My friend, the futurist Andrew Hessel, certainly thinks this radical new field can be a force for good, to in essence rewrite our biology. Recognizing that an organism’s cells function as information processors that use their own special programming language, DNA, Andrew and other “bio-hackers” are using tools like 3D printing to synthesize biological agents such as the Phi-X174 bacteriophage, a virus that infects the E. coli bacteria but is benign for humans. While some worry that this technology might one day create bio-warfare weapons, Andrew’s approach is to shine the sunlight of transparency and open-source coding on a humanitarian mission. His Pink Army Cooperative is an open-source community of like-minded bio-engineers who are contributing their coding and knowledge to a collaborative effort to create a synthetic oncolytic virus that would target and kill breast cancer cells. An open-source community of brainy people can bring to bear so much more collective processing power than can a patent-driven pharmaceutical company. This, he believes, will ensure that his community will beat such companies in the race to make such a virus, both in terms of cost and speed. They are making the Linux of cancer treatments: a robust, heavily tested, patent-free design that anyone is free to copy and apply. Big Pharma should be worried.

What this survey of pioneering interdisciplinary work reveals is a convergence of three rapidly evolving forces: biology, computing networks, and, most important, a globally shared wellspring of human knowledge and cultural output. It suggests that if the world is approaching Ray Kurzweil’s wonderful/horrifying (take your pick) singularity moment, its structure could be far more nuanced and complex than that which Hollywood likes to portray. Movies like 2015’s Ex Machina, where the focus is on android machines that take control of our minds, suggest we are at risk of losing our human essence. But I think they are missing a key part of the story. Beyond the machines, there is a simultaneous and powerful evolution of the global human brain under way. I’m not talking about changes in our individual brains. (There’s a viable argument to make that having an always-available search function at our fingertips is making at least part of our brains dumber.) I’m talking about the evolution of the amorphous “brain” of interconnected minds that has been plugged in and set to work by social networking technology. Life itself is already unfathomably complex as a system—far more so than any computer could hope to be. Now, with our highly evolved living brains contributing to a giant pool of procreating memes and ideas, a Cambrian explosion of creativity is under way.

So, while we are undoubtedly headed to a new, decentralized concept of collective mindshare—whether that’s to be labeled the singularity or something else—I think it’s too simplistic to describe that as a world run solely by computers. This new paradigm also includes that richly diverse, wonderfully unpredictable interconnected human layer, which of course is another way to describe the Social Organism. Along with the biological/physical layer of the complex natural ecosystem in which it resides, the Organism’s global human brain will engage with the computer layer to set us on a path of random changes that are simply impossible to forecast.

I see it as the ultimate act of unlocking human capital, a commonly used term in economics but one that’s all the more relevant here if we think about it as NYU economist Paul Romer does. He says human capital is “stored as neural connections in a brain.” We are now able, like never before, to open the locks on all that rich, stored capital. Companies such as Twitter founder Biz Stone’s new start-up Jelly, which allows people to ask a question of potentially millions of social media-interconnected minds, deliberately seek to accelerate this kind of exponential expansion in information-sharing. As Stone puts it, “Everyone is working on Artificial Intelligence, what about just, Intelligence?” This great unlocking of ideas almost guarantees life will be very different in just five to ten years’ time, though there’s no way to predict what it will look like. What is clear to me is that if we recognize that humanity derives power from sharing information, together we can set the world on a more sustainable path.

To put this all in context, I’ll return to my bio-hacker friend Andrew Hessel. Instead of making A.I. computers human-like, he is honing the already incredibly high-tech computers that have long resided inside humans. “We are seeing the formation of a new cellular organism,” Andrew says, “one that is comprised of billions of intelligent minds. Just think of them as molecules interacting together for the first time. We’ve never done this before. Who knows what we’ll make from this process?” To undertake this collective, unguided mission of idea formation, these billion intelligent minds are following the instructions of the Internet protocol, which Andrew describes as “the first truly global communications standard” we’ve created. He adds, “The only other global standard that I’m aware of is the genetic code. Whether we are talking about plants or humans, the structure of the genetic code has been the only one in use.”

The core genetic code—our first common programming language—has been in place for 3.5 billion years, long before Alan Turing conceived, in the 1930s, of an era of man-made computers that could augment the limited computational capacity of a single human brain. Over that time this standard DNA code has coordinated the activities of an infinitely more complex network of information processing “machines.” Together they have progressively built the richly diverse and constantly evolving reality of life on earth.

It’s a humbling thought. And when we see the hubris of politicians and other would-be leaders play out daily across our media streams, such humility can be a valuable refuge, a place from which to reflect with wonder on this incredible world. The most important tools being built right now, the most important buildings, vehicles, and software applications, are those that work within and recognize the highly complex, adaptive systems that shape society.

Such efforts do not lend themselves to a giant ego. Kevin Slavin, another genius Media Lab software designer, has suggested that the people currently at the cutting edge of design tend to show more humility than their predecessors. People who are “deliberately working with complex adaptive systems cannot help but be humbled by them,” Slavin hypothesized in a recent article. “Maybe those who really design systems-interacting-with-systems approach their relationships to said systems with the daunting complexity of influence, rather than the hubris of definition or control.”

The world is complex—more so than we can comprehend. No individual can hope to try to control it. We can jointly figure out how to work with it, how to teach parts of it to respond in certain ways to certain stimuli. But the overarching systemic processes, where billions of interacting molecules create feedback loops, counter-responses, and self-fulfilling perpetuations, are impossible to manage against their will. That’s the dilemma that gripped me when I found myself a few years ago in the Mojave Desert, reaching for the right metaphor to describe the social media landscape. I knew it was far too complex to synthesize into a traditional flow chart. The only thing that seemed to sufficiently capture its complicated intricacy was life itself.

There’s a critical lesson here as we figure out how to manage this unpredictable new model for communicating our ideas, hopes, dreams, and fears. Humility in the face of complexity is a trait that can help us, as a group, to collectively gain the most from that system. Humility implies respect for everyone else; it implies empathy, compassion and, most of all, tolerance for difference. For although specific individuals have no singular power to take autocratic charge of this complex system, the paradox is that the system itself derives its power from individualism, from the diversity of its billion-node makeup.

Here, diversity and community are two sides of the same coin. Together, they capture the holonic essence of the Social Organism, where units belong indelibly to a common, wider whole but are also intrinsically autonomous. If people are not allowed the freedom to express themselves, to be who they are without demands that they conform to the wishes of someone else, we introduce stress into the Social Organism. But if we let it draw upon the shared but diverse humanity of its billion-odd nodes, the Social Organism gets stronger. It turns out strength does not come from unity, at least not when that idea is defined as conformity or predictability. It comes from variety, change, dynamism, and a capacity for surprise. With rich, heterogeneous gene pools, variance creates a greater chance of mutation, which allows the population to evolve into something stronger. Similarly, a wide array of ideas means we have a better chance of finding the best answers to whatever problems we face.

There’s no guarantee we won’t screw this up. A poorly designed legal and political framework that fails to safeguard diversity and free expression could see us overwhelmed by some of the more destructive elements imbedded into our millennia-old cultural code—the diseases of greed, selfishness, hate, and intolerance that have reared their ugly heads in recent years. Just as an entire species can be wiped out when its immune system isn’t strong enough to withstand a threat from some extremely harmful pathogen, so, too, can a culture be destroyed. Just ask anyone who lived through Nazi Germany or, more recently, North Korea.

This systemic convergence of understanding and interaction between our biological, technological, and social worlds comes at a most urgent moment. Thanks largely to the top-down, centralized model of communication that persisted until the rise of the Internet, the planet itself is on the verge of ecological disaster. A fragmented and woefully unsophisticated understanding of the functioning of the Social Organism has led to social governance structures that encourage terribly destructive decisions—climate change; war in pursuit of oil that foments conditions for terrorism; curbs on human mobility, freedom of speech, and lifestyle choices that breed resentment and antisocial backlash. One could argue, in fact, that the very idea of the nation-state, the dominant power structure for the past half-millennium, is at loggerheads with sustainability. (And yet Britons felt compelled to do their “Brexit.”) The simplicity and rigidity of that geographically defined political unit runs counter to the borderless, interconnected, and supreme complexity of social media, which in just a single decade has become the dominant, transnational system for human communication. It is vital that we come to terms with how that Organism functions. The survival of our home is at stake.

The Social Organism will always be in flux. There will always be tension. So, there’s no way to definitively map it. What we have instead are guideposts. These are the Seven Rules of Life that dictate how the Organism functions. In essence, they tell us that we need to nourish our ideas, that we must reach out to people’s emotional receptors to have an impact, and that we should encourage others to share or replicate our memetic content. These biology-provided markers, outlined throughout this book, provide a framework—not just to improve your understanding of how best to engage with social media in your life or business but a framework for how we can deliberately build a better society. We should no longer dismiss social media as trivial, nor fear it as an agent for disorderly chaos. Instead, in understanding and treating it as a Social Organism, we have a unique opportunity to nourish a new, healthier society and to build a more inclusive, prosperous, and sustainable world.