Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

by Richard L. Currier

When the human social group, which for millions of years had consisted of no more than a few dozen individuals, freed itself from its primate inheritance and expanded into tribes of thousands, a process of fusion began that has culminated in the formation of vast nation-states consisting of millions of individuals and claiming dominion over the earth’s entire land surface. Whether our species is capable of a final act of fusion—in which all living people achieve a shared identity as members of a single global culture and civilization—is a question that will determine the future not only of our own species but also of most forms of life on Earth. This is, in fact, the question that lies at the heart of this book.