Chapter 8:
The New Survival - Content Nation Redefines
the Future of Humanity

As we have seen so far in this book social media has had a wide-ranging impact already on many of our most essential institutions and ways of living. Clearly the scale and the scope of this impact is shaping the way that people survive and thrive in the world in ever more profound ways. But just how profound is social media's impact on human civilization? It it just another way to communicate with people that will have little change on society as a whole or is there some more basic change occuring due to social media that will have far-ranging implications? The significance of any new technology on the long-term prospects of humankind is difficult to predict with any real accuracy, but let's consider the impact of social media in the light of how other significant innovations in technology have impacted human civilizations in the past and in the present. In looking at these examples of humanity's struggle to adapt to changing conditions we may find some very important lessons about the role of publishing in these struggles for human survival that will shed light on what role social media may have in helping us to ensure the future survival of humanity.

Two Fables: When the Present Repeats the Past

Twenty-seven hundred years ago the plains surrounding the Tigris River in what is today southern Iraq were awash in grains and prosperity, thanks to an innovation that enabled the rulers of Babylon to support a booming population: irrigation. The wealthy and powerful Bablylonian empire nearing its height at that time was controlled by the rulers of a city-state in the midst of this lush scene of fertility. With a civilization that had lasted already for a thousand years Babylonia had every reason to be optimistic about its future.

Through the years, though, the very innovation that helped to fuel the rise of Babylon led to its ultimate downfall. For while irrigation was a wonderful way to grow more crops on the land in the Tigris River flood plains it was also a technology that had a problem associated with it: salinization. Inevitably the forced flooding of farmlands that made the soil of the irrigated land moist and more fertile also made it salty, making it harder and harder for crops to grow. A thousand years after its final peak of glory Babylon was in ruins, the once-fertile plains surrounding it glistening with salt. The most fertile lands in early civilization had become a desert.

While this may seem to be a fable that points out the weakness of earlier civilzations it is a fable about the survival of today's civilizations as well.

Not far from San Francisco and the so-called Silicon Valley, the birthplace of the Internet and many other advanced technologies, lies the San Joaquin Valley, one of California's most productive farming regions and the source of a quarter of all U.S. agricultural products. While the San Joaqin Valley enjoys the benefits of today's modern agriculture technologies like the kingdoms of Babylon this fertile region also relies on irrigation and fertilizers for its productivity. With a geology very similar to that of the Tigris River valley upon which Babylon relied for its food, the San Joaqin valley suffers mightily from the salinization of its farmlands. Most scientific estimates calculate that at least 25 percent of the San Joaquin Valley's farmland is already affected severely by salinization.

While the parallels to Babylon's difficulties with farming and those found in California today are troubling, what's more troubling is that the problems with salinity in the Jan Joaqin Valley have built up in little more than sixty years: the infertility of Babylon's irrigated farmlands took thousands of years to unfold. A seen in the chart to the right, dissolved salts in the San Joaqin Valley soil, which indicate problems with sailinity that degrade farming,  have grown steadily since World War II. At this rate some scientists believe that the San Joaqin Valley will be unfarmable as early as 2080. If left unchecked we are racing towards Bablyon's destiny at an alarming rate.

When I say "we" I am referring to the world, of course, since the world's use of agriculture methods largely similar to those used in the U.S. puts us all on the same accelerated path towards a reckoning with our ability to survive using the farming techniques of the past sixty years. Global statistics on the impact of farmland salinization parallel those compiled for the U.S. very closely. But while I am pointing out a global problem with agriculture, I am using the San Joaqin Valley as a key example of this problem to underscore a broader point: why is it that in the shadow of the world's most technologically advanced region of the 21st century we have problems that are a clear near-term threat to the survival of humankind - problems that are very similar in their essential nature to those encountered in Bablylonia thousands of years ago? Why has the vast store of knowledge available on the impact of salinization on farming failed to change the course of this phenomenon?

The answer to this question lies in many places, of course, but there is one key technology that contributes both to our inability to face the major crises of modern humankind and to the opportunities that we may have to meet those challenges: publishing.

The Race for Human Survival: Is Publishing's Past Threatening the Future of Humankind?

To some it may seem to be a little dramatic to consider social media as having the potential to change how humankind responds to situations that challenge the survival of humankind. But if you look at the history of how publishing helped civilizations to rise in the first place and how publishing is positioned in modern civilizations then it may become more clear just how new and important social media may be to our survival as a species.

Innovation and the Quest for Survival: The Persistence of Short-Term Ideas That Keep on Working

As much as I love social media, one of the things that I don't like about it sometimes is that many new social media products and services seem to favor short-term solutions over long-term goals. Thinking back to The Museum of Modern Betas' rapidly building list of new social media publishing tools it reminds me a bit of what happened in the 19th century just beyond the San Joaqin Valley in the Sierra Nevada mountains. When in 1848 John Sutter discovered an abundance of gold in the Sierra Nevadas' American River his discovery didn't remain a secret for very long. By 1849 there were hundreds of thousands of people heading to the mountains of California to become gold miners. In some ways the "get rich quick" schemes of that era never left, with the culture of Silicon Valley sometimes feeding the ambitions of entrepreneurs as intent on striking it rich through publishing technologies as surely as the '49ers of California's "Gold Rush" sought to turn some quick and hard sweat and a bit of luck into their own fortunes.

But while the entrepreneurial spirit of California's gold miners no doubt inspired an aggressive "can-do" attitude amongst Silicon Valley technologists there is one key difference between them and the Gold Rush miners. Where the gold miners of the 19th century in California sought riches from natural resources, the 21st century entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley were seeking riches from the publishing tools that they build through their intellect and insight. The gold of the California mountains never lived up to the huge expectations of entrepreneurial miners, but there is no real limit to the potential economic benefits from the human mind applied to tool-making. While the tools that are generated for social media may seem to be short-sighted at times, their astounding variety and their sheer numbers ensures that there will be an enormous number of options for developing models for publishing social media that will be tried, tuned, rejected or adapted to new circumstances rapidly.

By contrast most print-based publishing for the past five hundred years has been based on one single invention that revolutionized publishing: the movable type printing press. When the German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg introduced the first practical version of his invention in 1450 it had metal-based movable type that could be created in large quantities easily. The crisply printed letters, durable inks and relatively affordable design of Gutenberg's invention enabled printing to become a trade that could flourish in the growing economy of 15th century Europe. This invention enabled many significant changes to human society, but the invention itself was largely unchanged for centuries. Even today the only truly significant difference between most major printing operations and Gutenberg's invention is the efficiency with which they produce a printed page.

The stability of the technology used for print publishing is not terribly different than the stability of irrigation technologies used by the Babylonians to flood their farmlands. There were no doubt improvements through the years in the efficiency of the equipment and techniques used for irrigation, to be sure, but in essence the fundamental concept and the underlying farming methods remained unchanged. A tool found a stable place in society, little needed to be invested in the improvements of farming methods and Babylonian civilization flourished - until the limitations of their farming technologies became evident. What seemed like a long-term solution turned out in fact to be relatively short-sighted in terms of the long-term need for human survival.

The ability to grow populations and farming away in unexploited regions kept people reinvesting in the same basic Babylonian irrigation concepts again and again. If it worked for thousands of years for them, after all, why shouldn't that be good enough? But when modern fertilizers and water-pumping technologies enabled the Babylonian concepts of irrigation to be accelerated to a new scale of productivity irrigation-based farming was able to sustain soaring world populations as never before. Human technology has been able to out-run the growth of human populations with ever-increasing commitments to modern farming techniques, but inevitably this continual amplification begged a greater question: what would happen should all of the world's farmable land turn into salty deserts? We carried a single, highly scalable technology through thousands of years to the point where its limitations for all of humankind are apparent both for the short term and the long term.

In a similar way publishing was a short-term human invention that kept on getting used again and again as human society grew, becoming part of the fabric of human life and developed into new forms through more efficient technologies. Even the electronic publishing technologies of the 20th century, which enabled mass communications with illiterate people, accelerated the impact and reach of publishing but still carried over key traits from the publishing of Gutenberg. Most importantly, like print publishing 20th century electronic publishing was based largely on centralized mass production: a single item was created and reproduced by a central source for a mass audience. Like the modern technologies used to accelerate farming, the implications of accelerating earlier strategies for deploying technology on the survival of human culture were poorly understood by many people. Like human tools from the dawn of time they were tried and what seemed to work in the short run kept on being repeated as long as it seemed to drive the success of human civilization.

But now we appear to be reaching an impasse as to how the combination of human society and human technologies transforming both nature and society will enable the survival of humanity as we know it today. In many ways, though, we are not changing our underlying assumtions about how a civilization should go about responding to this impasse. Like the farmers who irrigate the San Joaqin Valley most responses to the global challenges to human survival are pulled off of a relatively short menu of options that have worked for thousands of years. Although technology has changed in some dramatic ways since the days of the Babylonian empires, civilization as a whole is still running the same game plan for survival as the Babylonians: transform nature uniformly through technology and use centrally controlled publishing to compel people to act uniformly in a society transformed by technology.

This is a formula for developing civilizations that has worked pretty well for more than seven thousand years. But as humans begin to stretch the limits of how the world can sustain human life at an astounding speed, we need to consider what may need to change in the basic formula for successful human civilizations. Inevitably considering the role of publishing in this formula is an essential component to unraveling its role in the survival of humankind - and to considering the value of social media as tool that can help civilizations to respond more effectively to today's challenges affecting the future of civilization.

The Code of Hammurabi: Publishing as a Tool for Natural Selection

Thirty-seven hundred years ago Hammurabi, the ruler of Babylon, decided to create a standard set of laws that would be known well by everyone in his growing empire. Since stone and clay were popular publishing media in that era he chose to erect in public places large stone tablets, or steles, to publish his code of law. Many of the laws proscribed punishments for not following the Code of Hammurabi. Oftentimes the punishment for breaking a law was dismemberment or death. This was the price that people would have to pay if they could not help society to be organized and managed in a predictable way.

Why was predictability so important? Because it seemed to ensure survival. If the Babylonians followed Hammurabi's laws people would be able to live in safety, they would be able to organize effectively to defend their land against potential invaders and they would have an efficient economy based on well-understood rules for supporting the state government through taxes and obedience to regulations. The assumption in providing a death penalty for not following Hammurabi's laws was that based on past experience rule-breakers would threaten the survival of society as a whole. It would be better to destroy people who threatened the ability of Babylonia's gene pool to flourish than to enable them to challenge what had been "written in stone" as the keys to survival. The publishing of Hammurabi's code was in effect an extension of human DNA, the genetic coding inside every human cell that determines the form of a human life that is likely to survive into another generation. People who could conform to these laws were promised a high chance of survival in a society that was influenced as much by human technology and relationships as much as it was by natural circumstances impacting humans.

Most people adhered to Hammurabi's laws, out of fear in part, perhaps, but also because of a basic human trait related to human genes that had allowed the growth of human civilization beyond small groupings of people: altruism.

Altruism and Scalability: How Publishing Fueled the Growth of Civilization

Altruism is depicted oftentimes as selflessness, the willingness to put one's personal interests aside to enable others or society as a whole to gain. Author Nicholas Wade observes in his book "Before the Dawn" that altruism is a trait that existed in the ancestors of human beings as well, but on a more limited scale. Chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest genetic relatives in today's world, also exhibit the ability to demonstrate altruism. Both of these species of animals will collaborate to ensure the survival of those of their kind who are not certain genetic relatives. In other words, they see benefits to the survival of their own bloodline through ensuring the survival of others in their social groups who may benefit their own genetic survival indirectly. Some scientists believe that this may be due in part to the indiscriminate mating patterns of these animals, which make it hard for an individual chimp or gorilla to determine whether another particular individual is a blood relative or not. In a sense animal altruism is a deep-seated survival response to threats to others in their social groups that tells these animals, "Well, who's to say if these others who are threatened are my relatives or not? I had better help them just to be on the safe side."

It turns out, then, that while there may be a noble aspect of sorts that drives altruism its roots are grounded in an individual's desire for their bloodline to survive another generation. Animal altruism is, in a sense, healthy self-interest that gives others the genertic benefit of the doubt. But the altruism of animals can only go so far, apparently, and similarly so in primitive human societies. In his study of the isolated tribes of the Amazon rain forest, anthopologist Napoleon Chagnon noted that it was rare that these tribes ever exceeded 50 to 100 people. It appears based on numerous studies that until the rise of civilizations large groups of people were rarely if ever organized towards a common cause. Something more than the possibility of a genetic relationship was required to create a broader kind of altruism.

A possible explanation for what drove human civilization forward from clan-based altruism to society-based altruism may be found in the clan depicted in the preamble to this book. As the ice ages waned thousands of years go and new tools and methods enabled more efficient hunting and gathering in a more stable climate, surpluses of food and crafted materials accrued more regularly. This made the prospect of trade with neighboring clans and, eventually, far-away clans, more attractive. To make this system of trade work, Nicholas Wade argues, trust was a necessary ingredient. Trusting someone outside of one's clan for the purpose of trade was like a temporary granting of clan-like reliance on someone else to ensure one's survival. Even today in some cultures oaths or contracts are confirmed sometimes with a cutting of fingers and the mixing of blood between people to signify a family-like connection between people trusted for business dealings. Trust is like a virtual extension of one's DNA-based circle of altruism.

There was no guarantee that reciprocity with a trading partner from another clan could be relied upon in early human commerce, but gradually trading partners built up that trust, extending the reach of altruism's power.  Organized human behaviors began to expand significantly beyond small clans and hunting groups. However, as trade relationships became more complex and memories of what had been entrusted to whom became more difficult to maintain it became clear that something more than trusting in one's memory of a commitment would be required to ensure that trade transactions could be carried out correctly. Having records of transactions and contracts became essential to enable altruism to scale more effectively beyond clan-like reliance on others. Publishing became the bond that held these altruistic relationships together, using tablets of clay and stone to record the underpinnings of commercial altruism. The signature that indicated the extension of genetic-like bonds of trust through altruism had passed from blood to writing implements.

Publishing enabled humans to organize on a scale far beyond small groups of people, creating an extension to how people could survive through altruism that was startling in its impact on both people and the natural world. A person's bloodline might have genes that changed in very small ways with every generation: a person was a person, the reach of their arms was pretty much the same, their legs were pretty much the same and so on. But through publishing the organism of society built through ever-broadening altruistic collaboration could change radically the size and scope of human endeavor. Erect a stone stele of laws or display engineering diagrams for a great building or an irrigation project and all of a sudden any number of people could be made to behave uniformly and to manipulate the natural environment uniformly.

Through publishing civilization itself became a genetic code, the DNA of a civilization encapsulated in laws, contracts and diagrams, able to transform landscapes through technology guided by publishing as if it were an animal of immense proportions. Even those who could not read what was being published could see, touch and hear the consistent societal coding to which they offered their altruistic cooperation. The stone steles of Hammurabi and other rulers became the blood of kinship for the organism known as civilization.

Publishing, Modern Enterprises and Brands: Altruism Becomes Detached from Society

The basic formula from Hammurabi's era of using state-controlled publishing and record-keeping to transform nature and society through technology remained unchanged for thousands of years. After the fall of the Roman Empire in Europe the churches in that region played a more prominent role in publishing for many centuries, playing a bridging role until the secular economy of Europe revived. Publishing that compelled society as a unified organism through altruism was primarily a function of the government and government-recognized religions. With the development of the printing press in the 15th century there was at first little change to this formula, as there were relatively few people who were literate enough and wealthy enough to take advantage of its capabilities directly.

By the 18th and early 19th centuries widely distributed publications authored by independent individuals in Europe, the Americas and elsewhere thrived. Independent publishing enabled people to share with an increasingly literate public thoughts about science, politics, religion and other key tools for the development of civilization with little reliance on government or religious patrons. While these were highly influential movements in essence the concept of forging altruistic bonds with a government through publishing was largely unchanged at first. In fact, in many ways the democratic movements of that era enhanced the bond between a people and its government through publishing. Laws and regulations continued to build a highly scalable social relationship that managed technology and nature for the good of society.

But as the 19th century progressed the genetic-like bonds of trust through altruism that binded people to their governments through publishing began to mutate. Private enterprises arose as the new champions of technology innovation and began to become powerful sources of society-wide publishing in their own right. The altruistic bonds holding people together in civilizations began to have a more complex map of allegiances, spreading their social genes in more complex patterns. On the one hand nationalism demanded strong altruistic ties to governments, but industry encouraged strong altruistic ties to private employers and the products of their industrial output as the basis for the bonds of civilization. After thousands of years of stability the assumption that publishing would map out the ultimate bonds of a large society as an altruistic organism that could ensure the survival of one's gene pool was being challenged as never before.

Paper and electronic publications began to issue advertisements to society to build altruistic allegiances with a new organizing force in society: brands. Brand name products could be sold and transferred from one company to another through several generations of customers, outlasting oftentimes the companies that created them, becoming like natural resources in the lives of everyday people. The map of altruistic relationships required for survival was getting more and more complex. Instead of using our genes to survive using technology in a natural landscape with a clan, modern society required people to navigate their genes through altruistic relationships with enormous entities that promised benefits of increasingly tenuous and questionable value to their gene pool's survival. 

Publishing became less and less a tool to tie a person's bloodline to trustworthy relationships that would help it to survive in the natural world. Instead publishing became a tool that would shift people as natural resources to ensure the survival of brands. A toothpaste brand could promise "sex appeal" to generations but neither nature nor society would seem to benefit as much from altruism extended to a toothpaste brand as much as the brand product's producer. Both the civilization and the natural resources producing the toothpaste could die away, but the toothpaste brand would live on.

Losing Evolutionary Options: The Impact of Publishing on Human Survival

Humankind had taken a risk with publishing, a short-term tool that enabled a better environment for survival but ultimately a tool that seemed to focus less and less on the fundamentals of human survival. Publishing largely benefitted and was controlled by powerful centralized entities that did not have a genetic or personal relationship with the person offering them their altruism. As long as there were benefits for survival that outweighed the risk, civilization flourished, enabling human genes to remain undisturbed globally. But in the process of doing so the underlying animal motivation of people - using altruism to extend one's perceived gene pool - may have betrayed our ability to secure our bloodlines' future through these extended relationships.

Over the past 7,000 years human genetics have continued to evolve but analysis of the history of human DNA seems to indicate that there have been no significant additions or modifications to human genes. In fact modern human beings have remarkably little genetic variation, far less than our closest modern genetic relatives such as chimpanzees or gorillas. Instead of people adapting to changes in their natural surroundings, society's use of technology and control mechanisms such as laws that were spread through publishing appears to have substituted for the genetic adaptations to natural surroundings usually required for survival.

In place of humans modifying their genes through evolution in a complex natural environment, the centrally controlled and standardized societies and technologies that evolved over time forced out human genes that could not adapt to these environments standardized through publishing. The surviving genes were adapting less to variations in nature and more to survival in highly standardized civilizations, dependent more and more on altruism extended to the institutions of civilization for their survival than on nature. The result appears to be a human gene pool that has eliminated many of the genetic options not well suited for conforming to centralized civilizations with highly centralized control through publishing. Publishing provided the map, the genes, if you will, for the widespread standardization of survival guidelines and practices. Just as humans engineer crops and animal species to produce more genetically uniform organisms, so have we made our own species more genetically uniform through our engineering of an enormous standardized civilization that is itself, in essence, the world's largest organism.

The Risks of Standardized Civilization: The Potato Famine and The 1918 Infleunza Pandemic

A standardized global civilization offers enormous potential benefits to humankind, but since it appears to suppress genetic diversity in both ourselves and in the natural systems supporting our lives it also exposes us to global survival problems as well. The decline of the Babylonian empire was a very slowly evolving failire of civilization as an organism exploiting nature but such failures can occur very rapidly in today's highly standardized and technology-driven modern civilization. Two tragic examples demonstrate the impact that a lack of genetic diversity can have on human life in a standardized global civilization.

The potato as most people know it is a whitish brown tuber, grown around the world as a food staple. Imported to Europe in the 16th century by Spanish explorers visting the Andes mountains of South America, the globally grown potato is in fact just one of many different kinds of colorful potatoes native to the Andes mountains. Potatoes are a genetically diverse species in their native habitat. When potatoes arrived in Europe one particular potato plant brought back by the Spanish explorers was reproduced widely for farming. It was a very successful crop, but the potaties grown from this one set of genes were not adapted to a fungus native to Ireland called late blight. In the 1840s late blight swept through the farmlands of Ireland and destroyed most of the potato crops which were the primary source of food for many poor people. It is estimated that a million or more people died in Ireland over several years from what became known as the Great Famine - because of the lack of genetic diversity and adaptation in a key crop that was planted in a standardized agricultural environment.

Human civilization as an organism lacking diversity creates problems similar to the Great Famine. In 1918 an unusual strain of the influenza virus began to be spread from inland U.S. states to the world, accelerated by the movement of U.S. troops participating in World War I, the first truly global conflict. Eventually known as the Spanish Flu, the spread of this infleunza virus aound the world was accelerated by the standardization of warfare, health care and transportation in a modern era. Half of the U.S. casualties in World War II were attributed to the virus, which is believed to have killed from 20 to 100 million people worldwide in about two years, possibly taking more lives than World War I itself. The Great War was a violent and sudden event, but the violence caused by a simple virus taking advantage of the standardized organism of civilization was greater and more sudden yet.

Climate Change: Civilization Faces New Natural and Social Challenges

The Great Famine and the Spanish Flu are enormous tragic events on the scale of everyday modern life. Still, as with the salinization of farmlands, it's possible to rationalize the effects of these catastrophes and to think that our civilization will adapt to changes as needed with its existing structure largely intact. But what if nature challenges civilization on a scale far broader than even these catastrophes? What would happen if some of the basic assumptions underlying the development of all civilizations as we have known them were to change?

For most of the past 400,000 years the earth has been an icy planet, with large portions of its land and oceans encased in glaciers of ice kilometers thick. Rarely did the earth approach its current relatively warm state in this era. Every 100,000 years or so mean temperatures on earth would approach today's typical averages briefly and then plummet back into more frigid conditions, returning much of the earth's surface to a largely frozen state. Brief periods of somewhat warmer climate would come in between these major warming peaks, then the climate would return to "ice age" conditions.

In the era of climate history in which we now live, called the Holocene Epoch by climate scientists, humankind has been blessed with a long period of stable climate that is warm by historical standards. Unlike typical periods of warmth after an ice age, which would last a few hundred years before a new ice age began, the Holocene Epoch has lasted about 10,000 years - about as long as modern human civilization itself. By modern standards temperatures have fluctuated in this period quite a bit, but by the standards of more than 450,000 years of climate history the Holocene Epoch has been the longest and most stable period of relatively warm recorded temperatures.

How the earth's climate will change from today's conditions is a point of heated debate these days, a debate that I don't intend to engage in this book. We don't know conclusively today whether the effects of global climate change over the next several hundred years will cause earth's climate to heat up indefinitely or to cool indefinitely or whether we'll see both far hotter and far cooler climate conditions indefinitely. The most significant problem for civilization, though, is that the relatively stable climate conditions of the Holocene Epoch appear to be ending. Perhaps within our lifetime but more likely within the next few centuries, according to climate scientists, mean global temperatures will be nothing like today's steady, moderate climate. Mean temperatures will again fluctuate wildly and rapidly, as they have for hundreds of thousands of years and more. When this occurs, large portions of the earth that are home to billions of people are likely to be rendered uninhabitable by the standards of modern civilization.

Since the Holcene Epoch has been a unique period of sustained mild climate conditions it's difficult to project exactly what might happen next. This unpredictability in and of itself is a major problem for humanity. We've been used to a relatively predictable climate since the dawn of modern civilization and we have relied upon that climate's predictability for the survival and growth of our civilizations. Regardless of what the future of our climate may turn out to be in its specific details there is one clear problem facing humanity: our modern civilization was not developed to thrive in periods of highly unstable climates. Looking at the experiences of the Babylonians with farming and our own fast-forwarded farming failures in the San Joaqin Valley it's clear that civilizations as organisms repeatedly using the same short-term survival solutions with highly centralized controls aren't even terribly good at ensuring their long-term survival in relatively stable climate conditions.

Human genes however, were designed mostly in an era of great climate change. Humans are designed by nature to survive highly variable climate conditions. We even survived an apparent near-extinction event about 50,000 years ago, according to research focused on the evolution of human genes, which may have reduced the surviving gene pool of modern humans to an estimated 5,000 people. The question isn't whether humans will survive climate change but whether our civilization that was predicated on the availability of an unusually stable climate will survive climate change through the use of the right tools.

Through the altruistic bonds of publishing we became part of the global organism of civilization, an organism that was foreign to early humans and not one that is encoded into our bodies' genes. Humans as a species are likely to survive radical climate changes, but civilization itself is not likely to survive as an organism in its current form using its current tools for survival. The bonds of altruism that hold civilization together, already frayed and stretched by conflicting and wavering commitments to governments, employers and a consumer-driven economy, are challenging already the basic assumptions formed around the altruism that has bonded human civilization together for more than 7,000 years.

At the heart of this fraying system based on altruism lies the tool of publishing, a tool that began its role in society by helping people to build trusted relationships with one another in what was then a newly stable climate. Publishing enabled the radical centralization of decision making and the widespread enforcement of those decisions in a stable climate. But with the climate of the world becoming unstable and highly variable this may not be the best way to use publishing as a tool for the rapid adaptation of our civilization to these new conditions.

Surviving and Thriving in an Unstable World: Does Social Media Point the Way Forward?

Acknowledging the Impasse: The Need for More Flexible Survival Strategies

Every species of life on our planet faces the same evolutionary challenges as humans. Some will survive the natural selection of species: some will not. Unlike any other species on earth, though, humans have the ability to create a wide array of tools and adaptive behaviors that can be used to predict and to adjust to expected changes before they occur. Our ability to survive through toolmaking allows humans to adapt to environmental changes more rapidly than our genes can adapt. When humans were in the rapidly shifting climate of the ice ages, their tool-making ability enabled our ancestors to develop new responses to emerging survival conditions rapidly. Human language, a tool itself, enabled other tools to develop even more rapidly once the Holocene Epoch unfolded.

But the push towards the standardization of tools and techniques used for survival through the publishing efforts of central authorities in the era of large civilizations cut us off from our original human roots. Altruism, intended originally to ensure the survival of small, genetically diverse groups, instead wiped out that diversity at many local levels in favor of broader bonds that ensured survival. Tools that allowed humans to adapt and to survive more effectively flourished in modern civilization, but the need to gain consensus at very high levels of authority before the standardizing of tools could occur slowed down their evolution in many instances. Civilization as an organism, like any other organism, became interested in conserving itself and adopted the widespread use of new tools to control nature and people very selectively. In the process of doing so humanity began to lose track of its need to survive as one of many diverse organisms in an evolving natural world.

Reclaiming Our Past for the Future: Social Media as a Path to Diverse Survival Models

From the standpoint of ensuring the survival of humankind the development of today's diverse array of social media publishing tools already in wide use is probably the most significant event in human history since the dawn of large-scale human civilizations. Social media publishing is important to this significant degree not just because it is revolutionary in light of our current civilization but because it enables humans to reclaim our ability to survive and to thrive in an overwhelmed global civilization that must adapt to diverse and increasingly unstable conditions in nature and in civilization itself. Other advances in technology have allowed us to survive and thrive in relatively predictable conditions: social media prepares us to evolve survival and success responses rapidly and flexibly in a highly unpredictable world.

The Web technology that powers social media is designed to survive local catastrophes and to enable its global communications network to seek out automatically ways to keep people in touch with one another in unstable conditions. Social media leverages the Web's networking capability to emphasize the autonomous power of individuals publishing to the world as peers. With social media globally scaled altruism no longer needs to be based solely on content approved by a central publishing authority for distribution through fixed channels. Through social media people can build trust directly and rapidly with any group of people anywhere at almost any scale of human activity, trust that can be reinforced through peer-to-peer communications that can pass through a wide variety of channels in highly unstable conditions.

This highly scalable self-organizing behavior enabled by social media publishing is the key to its enabling the development of a better system for managing human civilization. Altruism can re-assert itself as a tool for highly specialized communities united in purpose but scattered in their locations. Altruism expressed through social media can also enable very large communities to form built more on direct person-to-person trust than on the implied person-to-person trust found through a central publishing authority. The highly diverse and overlapping bonds of trust built up on a wide variety of social media platforms used for a wide variety of purposes in a broad array of social and business contexts dramatically increases the diversity of ways in which altruism can be established and maintained.

The great and sudden flourishing of short-term solutions emerging for social media publishing has generated a wide diversity of ways in which independent people or units of people can cooperate with one another. This "Gold Rush" of social media publishing tools is more than just lucrative: it is the key to creating extraordinary diversity in the "genes" of the organism of civilization. Like our own genes the tools of publishing that define the genetic coding of civilization are short-sighted, looking at how to survive immediate conditions. But also like our genes having many options for short-term survival that are well-adapted to surviving radical changes can lead to extraordinary long-term evolutionary options. As a result our options for building successful models for new kinds of civilizations have increased dramatically, as if the global genome of human society was having new genetic material spliced into it almost daily.

In a few short years social media has utterly transformed the publishing gene pool available to civilization's organism from that of a small set of aging techniques for survival threatened with extinction to one that offers through the proliferation of social media publishing models a wide variety of new options for the survival of civilizations that can survive and thrive quite comfortably on a local and global level no matter what humankind's circumstances may become. Social media offers both the ability to build highly specialized social networks of people who can be united rapidly towards specific goals and the ability to assemble rapidly very large groups of people united towards very broadly purposed goals. With social media the bonds of altruism, the bonds that make us feel that we are united in a common purpose, can coalesce in new patterns with remarkable efficiency, enabling us to adjust rapidly the ways in which we govern ourselves, the ways in which we make our livings and the ways in which we live our lives together.

How Social Media Can Reinvent Civilization's Genome: A Hint from a Game Based on Genetics

A hint as to how efficient the human species can be at reinventing the organisms of civilization through social media came recently from the coming introduction of a new computer game based on mastering the evolution of species. Spore is a game that enables people to create their own worlds of virtual creatures that they can design themselves and share with others via the Web. Spore was under development in 2008 when its creators decided to get people involved in the product ahead of the release of the actual gaming software by releasing a software tool that would allow people to develop and share the creatures that they could use in their game once that it was released.

When the Spore development team first decided to release the Creature Creator software in June 2008, their thought was that they might be able to encourage people to develop about 100,000 new kinds of evolving creatures by the time that the software was scheduled to launch in September 2008. Much to their surprise, the number of people downloading Creature Creator had surpassed the 100,000 mark of created Spore creatures within a few hours. Within about a week Spore users had created and shared more than 1,000,000 different types of Spore creatures with one another and within a month they had created more than 1.8 million Spore creatures - more than the estimated 1.5 million known species alive today on our planet. At this point the Spore development team is expecting that by September 2008 Spore users would have created for sharing about 20 million different kinds of software-based species - more than 13 times the number of species living on the earth today.

The Spore phenomenon is certainly an indication of the number of creative computer game players in the world, but it's all an indication of how quickly humans can conceive of and share different ways to adapt to and survive in an environment through social media. The impetus to be creative is a universal human trait, not limited to a few fortunate people whose works of art have been played in concert halls or hung in art galleries. Combine that essential human creativity in response to survival challenges with the ability to create altruistic bonds via social media publishing and there are more patterns that could emerge for human survival than exist in nature for every kind of living being on earth.

Social media will release an explosion of ways in which human genes can be extended to create bonds of trust and collaboration that will lead to rapidly evolving strategies for surviving and thriving in a rapidly changing world. We have developed a relative handful of successful civilizations through traditional publishing in 7,000 years compared to what may emerge from the experiments of people who can define any number of altruistic relationships through social media.

Reconciling the Past with the Future: The Evolving Role of Traditional Publishing

While social media offers humankind powerful options to survive and to thrive during radical changes to our world it is a young development in the long history of publishing. But its impact on traditional media has been significant and challenges the position of authority that traditioanl media claims in leading civilization forward. Already the attention given to social media outlets online significantly overshadows the attention given to traditional media outlets for younger audiences and it has a signifant amount of attention and participation from older audiences also.

The potential for social media's civilization-changing potential is global in nature, as well: according to recent data compiled by the Universal McCann International ad agency there are more boggers in China than in any other nation in the world and some 92 percent of people in South Korea using the Web have read a weblog. Content Nation is already here and has the world's attention: Content Nation is already well on its way to becoming the world. It's only a question of what the world will become in the hands of a nation of publishers when those publishers control the most powerful links of altruism for most of civilization.

Even as social media continues to grow, traditional sources of publishing continue to survive and in some cases they are learning how to thrive amidst the competition offered by social media. In the U.S. total hours of television viewing are up, according to recent resarch, though how much people actually watch the television versus listen to it in the background or over the top of their laptop PCs is unknown. It's likely that social media will never replace traditional publishing fully in the competition to provide powerful bonds of altruism that bind civilizations together through publishing. Instead, governments, industries and other global and local institutions will continue to use and to evolve centralized media production but they will occupy a smaller role in an emerging system of publishing that will favor in many instances social media as the most efficient way for people to organize themselves successfully.

Thinking of our exploration of human history and evolution and how it relates to the evolution of publishing, there are parallels from the animal kingdom's evolution that may offer a model as to how traditional publishing will fit in with social media moving forward.

When mammals were evolving in the age of dinosaurs they were fairly insignificant creatures at first, coexisting with dinosaurs and then thriving as radically new climate conditions overtook life forms that could not adapt to their new surroundings. But recent discoveries by paleontologists studying the fossil records of dinosaurs and mammals in China reveal that even in the age of dinosaurs there were mammal carnivores who were actually preying on smaller dinosaurs. So even before the exinction-triggering event that eliminated most dinosaurs 65 million years ago mammals were asserting themselves as competitors of dinosaurs, not just scurrying between their toes. At the same time dinosaurs never quite left us, of course: survivors of the extinction event in the Jurassic Period of earth's history included dinosaurs that evolved into today's birds, which compete with mammals for survival resources to this day.

I think that it's important to look at this model of evolution in light of many people calling today's traditional media outlets "dinosaurs." In one sense it's probably a true statement in terms of where traditional media is going in the long run: it's not likely that the economics that have supported many large-scale traditional media outlets for centuries are going to survive on the scale that they do today indefintely. Already in many instances through cable television channels, television recording and playback devices such as TiVo and highly segmented print publishing mass audiences are fragmenting into many highly focused market segments anyway. Social media only accelerates this trend, enabling content from all sources to come to global attention spontaneously.

With only so much time and energy available from people to pay attention to any number of things in their lives, traditional media is becoming only one of many possible sources for content that can engage audiences. People are listening to authorities in publishing that matter to them on a more personal level, even as publishing authorities are trying to figure out how to engage their audiences on a more personal level. The stone tablets of Hammurabi are being challenged by the collaborative civilization-building of social media, enabling the consensus of millions of people with creative approaches to building altruistic bonds of trust to organize themselves more flexibly with whomever serves their needs as leaders of civilizations.

Over time today's civilizations will fall, not because one was conquered by another to create a new central authority, but because humans will be able to survive and to thrive more efficiently by choosing the authorities that help them to survive on a dynamic basis that renders the need for today's central publishing authorities moot. We will no longer need them to create effective bonds of altruism not because they have been overthrown but becase we will have known and agreed to already what they would tell us before they even say it.

Scale in a Diverse World of Social Media Outlets: More Options for Scalable Civilizations

So it's quite possible that social media may become a force affecting the formation and growth of civilizations that will be more responsive than traditional publishing to changes in both our civilizations and in nature. There is likely to be an "extinction" of some forms of publishing that do not help humans to adapt well to new threats and opportunities arising from those changes. While used for ceremonial and religious purposes, for example, scrolls and stone tablets are no longer used as publishing tools that hold civilizations together.

How are the traits of social media well adapted to helping human civilizations to survive and to thrive? One of the key factors that makes social media a powerful force in publishing is its ability to scale rapidly for global audiences using the same publishing tools that service small, focused communities. Today's video that appeals to just a few people who know its producer can become a worldwide sensation overnight. This ability to scale rapidly for global audiences based on peer acceptance and endorsement of social media content enables almost anyone to become an influential publisher overnight - not just those chosen by central authority figures. Civilizations that have benefitted from the scale of centralized publishing are not going to be denied many of the benefits of highly influential and scalable publishing with social media publishing tools.

In one sense social media scales in ways that are very similar to traditional media sources. Social bookmarking services such as Digg can create a user-generated "front page" of newsworthy content automatically based on user selections which, while very different oftentimes from that selected by a traditional media outlet, services a similarly broad array of tastes and outlooks. At this level Digg is definitely mass media and mass media that has become dominant very quickly, with an audience already double that of the leading U.S. newspapers.

But unlike a major newspaper Web site having millions of people selecting the most popular content of the moment means that Digg's scale is powerful but its potential impact more unpredictable. There is no specific editorial policy at Digg for content: it represents the insights of many people, but never the same people each and every time. By comparison a government, a newspaper or another major publisher relies on a fairly small group of people who determines what gets published.

At the same time highly scalable social media services can focus on the interests of very specific groups very quickly. Looking again at Digg a visitor to their site can focus on one of the pre-defined topics such as business or politics or use Digg's search engine to focus on far more specific topics. Facebook and other social networking services face similar strengths in scalability. Each person may have only a hundred or fewer people in their personal social networks but by joining topical interest groups they can be part of any number of groups of hundreds of thousands.At the same time new or specialized social media publishers may devise solutions for social media

This scalability of social media poses some interesting challenges when thinking of how it may help to shape the future of human civilizations. Recently researchers at the Santa Fe Institute the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. developed a computer model that evaluated how the size of mammal species affected their evolution and their ability to survive.

The researchers looked at thousands of different sizes of mammals over the past 60 million years and how their size related to species that evolved from earlier species. They discovered that in relatively stable conditions mammals will tend to evolve into larger species over time, making more efficient use of resources as a competitive adaptation. However, when having to respond to events in the environment that caused mammal species to become extinct, mammals that were smaller were much more likely to survive. So being a larger organism appears to be beneficial to mammals in a stable environment but disadvantageous in an unstable environment.

Thinking of how publishing acts as an extension of human genes to form the altruistic bonds of a civilization social media may offer humans some distinct advantages for the survival of civilizations. Since the content of social media is not controlled centrally it may help civilizations to develop rules and resources to help people to survive and to thrive more rapidly than traditional centrally controlled publishing. Large-scale civilizations using social media may be able to identify better survival options in more challenging times more rapidly and efficiently by enabling options to be identified, weighted and refined through a wider array of opinions and insights than found through centrally controlled publishing systems.

Social media may enable civilizations to develop rapid responses to major threats that would be the equivalent of creating new "genes" for survival that can be tuned more rapidly than by central publishing authorities more invested in existing ways to respond to threats. Instead of having to have wars, corporate takeovers or other types of activities to create new standardized bonds of altruism the people of these societies or organizations may find through social media ways in which groups can build insight and consensus among themselves to use available natural and human resources more flexibly and efficiently.

Large or Small? Social Media Can Help Civilizations to Be Both More Effectively

So large civilizations and organizations may be able to use social media to respond to opportunities and threats more efficiently, enabling them to stay large longer than usual by using social media to find solutions to survival threats more efficiently and effectively. By the same token, social media may enable smaller organizations and civilizations to survive and to thrive in times that would normally see them overwhelmed by larger competitors by giving them the ability to scale more rapidly with allies in response to common threats. Altruistic bonds can be formed more rapidly oftentimes through social media than through centrally controlled publishing services, enabling people to cut through local orthodoxies that would otherwise divide people who could be united to solve problems.

The flexibility found in social media may become critical to the survival of human civilization as climate and natural resource issues begin to create more fragmented areas in which human civilization can be maintained. Large armies or global institutions will not be needed as much to encode remote groups in fragmented environments into a common altruistic framework. Instead, social media will enable these people to move far more rapidly to develop their own altruistic bonds independently and autonomously. In the world of social media any and every person in the world could become an extension of your tribal clan instantly. Social media may be able to help humankind to adopt the best attributes found in the cultures of early nomadic human tribes with the cultures of sophisticated global civilizations. We will have the ability the civilizations that help us to survive to be either large or small or both as we need them to be in response to the threats and opportunities of the moment.

Social media will enable people around the world to respond to rapid changes in our natural and social environment as small groups of wandering nomads, as highly integrated civilizations, or both. Altruism expressed through social media will allow us to extend bonds of trust, commerce and common social values to whomever can help us to survive, wherever they may be found, with minimal support from central authorities. Through social media the gap between our origins as successful clans of hunters and gatherers and our current world of highly integrated societies can begin to be closed, with the wisdom gained from both models of human survival informing the strengths of each model. Social media will enable us to explore new ways of being human in ways more independent and more united than ever before.

The Big Sombrero Economy in a World of Highly Scalable Civilizations

In this emerging world of highly scalable civilizations assembled more rapidly than ever through social media large economies will continue to thrive, but it's likely that the overall shape of economic acivity will begin to take on different overall forms. Earlier in the book we discussed the "Big Sombrero" model of marketing that is emerging through social media, a model in which economic activity generated through social media enabled value to be created in many small markets effectively without having to pass into a phase of entering a mass market model. We have seen already in this book how social media makes smaller, more direct transactions that provide economic benefit to parties more feasible on a global scale. In a world in which social media becomes the driving force for most economic activity this means that much of the value in global economies will pass from large quantities of highly similar mass-produced goods to large quantities of highly dissimilar goods, some of which will become massively popular at a particular moment in time but none of which may need such popularity to provide economic success to their creators. In a sense the Big Sombrero economy will become the reverse of The Long Tail economy, enabling more and more value in small focused transations that no longer rely on "hits" at all for long-term economic benefit.

An interesting example of this concept can be seen already in the Lulu self-publishing book service. Lulu enables anyone to create their own books for publishing in both electronic format and in print format. When someone wants a book created by Lulu in print format, they can queue and order to Lulu that will then be generated via technology that can print small numbers of individual items in large quantities efficiently. This print-on-demand capability enables Lulu titles to be created and to provide benefit to audiences indefinitely before needing the services of mass printing. In the meantime the highly scalable capabilities of Lulu's print-on-demand services enable the technology of mass production to benefit very focused markets.

It is this combination of highly scalable technology tailored to service very focused needs that is going to be at the heart of the emerging global economy powered by social media. Rather than building centralized production capacity developed primarily to meet demand a handful of centrally defined products and services, we will see a flourishing of highly centralized and standardized production capability designed to meet the highly scalable demand for unique products and services defined and demanded through social media, with highly scalable decentralized production playing an equally important role in meeting these needs. Many of these products may never become "hits" - and they will not have to in order to keep production capacity at all levels working efficiently. In time, people will become less and less concerned with "hits" in general and more concerned with the things that give them lasting satisfaction in life - the things that are closer to the true value of altruism that binds together successful societies.

The New Society: Unity and Diversity Aligned for Surviving and Thriving

Social media, then, is impacting the future of human society by reworking the basic concept of what holds civilizations together. It reworks the basic formula for civilization into a paradigm that reflects both our origins as humans and our future: transform and co-exist with nature diversely through technology using highly scalable publishing that builds influence, leadership and consensus amongst peers who can act collaboratively in a society transformed by technology.

Through social media human society is discovering a new route to surviving and thriving in a world being transformed both by human technology and dramatic changes in our natural environment. Social media is more than a new way to conquer known worlds: it is the path to creating a new kind of world for humanity, a world in which humans will continue to be a remarkably successful species - but with a new definition for what constitutes human success.