Christopher Burns - Networks Rising: Thinking Together in a Connected World

For the second time in human history, we are on the verge of a great leap forward in health, personal freedom, and productivity, and networks are the reason. Not because the technology is amazing which it is but because the networks are changing organizations based on layers of power, replacing them with flatter communities based on collective intelligence and an open exchange of real-time experience. We are talking directly to each other in a connected world.

Twenty-five thousand years ago cavemen suddenly began living longer, healthier, and more productive lives. With the help of a new generation of elders, families learned to see themselves as part of a larger community. They began to raise food together, hunt in packs, and trust each other in good times and bad. After two million years of failed variations, Homo sapiens became the new model of modern man. Today, networks are similarly connecting us in larger, flatter information collectives, and research now suggests that those are smarter, more competitive, and more articulate than the old hierarchical models.

Networks are shifting power from a bureaucracy of the few to a noisy community of the many. Mandates and executive decisions are out; committees, marches, swarms, strikes, and insurrections are in, and authority is the weakest form of authority. Groups are bringing more diverse resources to the task, keeping in mind more aspects of the problem, and better engaging the imagination, loyalty, and enthusiasm of the participants. And they are making better decisions than individuals. Everyone knows what anyone knows, flash mobs storm the town square, and new ways to live and work together are rising all around us.

Networks are also changing the nature of the information we share. On social media, forums, blogs, and guerrilla television, we are sending and receiving faster, more accurate, and more emotional messages. We are no longer preserving scientific and religious truth on illuminated pages, treasured for a thousand years. We are no longer exchanging chunks of established, authoritative knowledge, footnoted to the printed text. We are much more likely to be sharing experiences in real time. We are starting to think together. But without moderators to fact check and authenticate the dialogue, these new channels get polluted with false information and propaganda. Participants are manipulated and private information is exploited. In a freer, more caring, more interesting world, it is harder to tell who we are and where we belong. For some this is a feeling of freedom, for others it is a feeling of being lost.

We are at the beginning of a great transformation.

This idea that a worldwide network might one day lead to a new global consciousness was first suggested a hundred years ago by a young priest serving as a stretcher-bearer on the Western Front, and the language of his notebook entry was indistinguishable from madness:

From day to day the human mass is... building itself up; it is weaving around the globe a network of organizations, of communication, and of thought... Through us, the earth is engaged in adding to its lithosphere, its atmosphere, its biosphere, and its other layers one more envelope the last and most remarkable of all. This is the thinking zone, the Nosphere. Is the world not in the process of becoming more vast, more close, more dazzling than Jehovah? Will it not burst our religion asunder, and eclipse our God? Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (written in 1915 and published after his death in 1955)

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin [1881-1955]

August 1915: The Bosche artillery had started booming again as it did every night , sending shells whistling toward Allied positions that zigzagged from Dunkirk on the English Channel south into the Belgian countryside. Night after night, the men of the 8th Moroccan Regiment climbed out of the muddy trenches and threw their bodies against the wire, dying in the crossfire of the new German machine guns massed against them in the fog. Then, with the enemy on three sides, firing down on them from an elevated position, they saw a green cloud of chlorine gas rolling slowly toward them across the killing field.

Later, in the pre-dawn silence, a young man stepped around the blackened bodies of the dead waiting to be trucked back to the rear, names pinned to their crusty tunics, the watery, rose-red mix of heaved-up blood and spittle still drying around the mouth and nose. He was a French Jesuit priest serving as a stretcher-bearer, a scientist by training, and a mystic at heart, known to the Muslim soldiers of his regiment as Sidi Marabout , the holy man, the magician who held them in their agony and whispered them down into death. And he was strange. After a battle, it was his habit to sit alone in the low wind and the stink of blood and gunpowder, writing in his journal thoughts so heretical that the Church forbade their publication during his lifetime.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was not thinking about a worldwide network. He was thinking about a worldwide consciousness. He imagined that if we could share our thoughts and prayers with each other we might understand each other better, dream together, and together be capable of ideas that could change the future of our species.

Teilhard was the son of a scientist father and a deeply religious mother, and he spent his life trying to resolve the conflict between those two worlds. A Jesuit trained in paleontology, he was moved by the experience of war to think about mans relationship with the eternal and, as all soldiers do, about the deep communion that forms among men at the edge of death.

He had grown up collecting insects and rock samples with his father, and everywhere he looked he saw the beauty of the natural world. He came to believe that evolution must be a testament to some Divine plan, a consciousness gradually waking by way of countless fumblings. Mans miraculous rise from the primordial swamp, he thought, would continue. Evolution was not just the past, it was also the future, and he set out to see where that might lead.

In the years that followed the war, he rose to become a world expert on the primitive origins of man and, as a religious thinker continuing to write in his journal, he became one of the important philosophical voices of the century. But the Church opposed his ideas on evolution and he was in trouble all his life. In 1923, after repeatedly offending the ultraconservatives in Rome, he was censored, relieved of his teaching post, and sent to China for the next twenty years to study bones.