Team Human

by Douglas Rushkoff

Autonomous technologies, runaway markets, and weaponized media seem to have overturned civil society, paralyzing our ability to think constructively, connect meaningfully, or act purposefully. It feels as if civilization itself were on the brink, and that we lack the collective willpower and coordination necessary to address issues of vital importance to the very survival of our species.

collective incoherence and disempowerment.

our current predicament: an antihuman agenda embedded in our technology, our markets, and our major cultural institutions, from education and religion to civics and media.

human connection and expression into ones of isolatio...

remaking society toward human ends rather than the end of humans.

first step toward reversing our predicament is to recognize that being human is a team sport.

Anything that brings us together fosters our humanity. Likewise, anything that separates us makes us less human, and less able to exercise our individual or collective will.

ensure mutual survival, and to derive meani...

On TV we watched together, simultaneously, events from the moon landing to the felling of the Berlin Wall, and experienced our collective humanity as never before.

internet connects us more deliberately and, in some ways, more reassuringly than any medium before it. With its development, the tyranny of top-down broadcast media seemed to be broken by the peer-to-peer connections and free expressions of every human node on the network.

Instead of forging new relationships between people, our digital technologies came to replace them with something else.

Our culture is composed more of mediated experiences than of directly lived ones. Yet we are also more alone and atomized than ever before. Our most advanced technologies are not enhancing our connectivity, but thwarting it. They are replacing and devaluing our humanity, and—in many different ways—undermining our respect for one another and ourselves.

When they are not developing interfaces to control us, they are building intelligences to replace us.

Social control is based on thwarting social contact and exploiting the resulting disorientation and despair.

socially fulfilled people need less money, experience less shame, behave less predictably, and act more autonomously.

Language that could inform is instead used to lie. Money that could promote trade is instead hoarded by the wealthy. Education that could expand workers’ minds is instead used to make them more efficient human resources.

We are increasingly depending on technologies built with the presumption of human inferiority and expendability.

We humans—in a single generation—are experiencing a turn of the cycle in real time. This is our chance. We can choose not to adapt to it any longer, but to oppose it.

Nature is a collaborative act. If humans are the most evolved species, it is only because we have developed the most advanced ways of working and playing together.

We’ve been conditioned to believe in the myth that evolution is about competition: the survival of the fittest. In this view, each creature struggles against all the others for scarce resources. Only the strongest ones survive to pass on their superior genes, while the weak deserve to lose and die out. But evolution is every bit as much about cooperation as competition. Our very cells are the result of an alliance billions of years ago between mitochondria and their hosts. Individuals and species flourish by evolving ways of supporting mutual survival.

A bird develops a beak which lets it feed on some part of a plant that other birds can’t reach. This introduces diversity into the population’s diet, reducing the strain on a particular food supply and leading to more for all. What of the poor plant, you ask? The birds, much like ...

By viewing evolution though a strictly competitive lens, we miss the bigger story of our own social development and have trouble understanding humanity as one big, interconnected team.

We also tend to miss nature’s interconnections because they happen subtly, beneath the surface. We can’t readily see or hear the way trees communicate. For instance, there’s an invisible landscape of mushrooms and other fungi connecting the root systems of trees in a healthy forest. The underground network allows the trees to interact with one another and even exchange resources.

Trees protect one another as well. When the leaves of acacia trees come in contact with the saliva of a giraffe, they release a warning chemical into the air, triggering nearby acacias to release repellents specific to giraffes. Evolution has raised them to behave as if they were part of the same, self-preserving being.

“Individualists” who challenged the leader’s authority or wandered away from the group were picked off by hungry lions.

teamwork was a better strategy for everyone’s survival than competition.

Like break-dancers challenging one another in a ritualized battle, the combatants assume threatening poses or inflate their chests. They calculate their relative probability of winning an all-out conflict and then choose a winner without actually fighting.

The virtual combat benefits not just the one who would be killed, but also the victor, who could still be injured. The loser is free to go look for something else to eat, rather than wasting time or losing limbs in a futile fight.

We used to believe that human beings developed larger brains than chimpanzees in order to do better spatial mapping of our environment or to make more advanced tools and weapons.

Primates with better tools and mental maps would hunt and fight better, too.

The most direct benefit of more neurons and connections in our brains is an increase in the size of the social networks we can form. Complicated brains make for more complex societies.

a quarterback, point guard, or midfielder, no matter their skills, is only as valuable as their ability to coordinate with the other players; a great athlete is one who can predict the movements of the most players at the same time.

Developing bigger brains allowed human beings to maintain a whopping 150 stable relationships at a time.

The more advanced the primate, the bigger its social groups. That’s the easiest and most accurate way to understand evolution’s trajectory, and the relationship of humans to it.

Human social cohesion is supported by subtle biological processes and feedback mechanisms.

Our nervous systems learned to treat our social connections as existentially important—life or death. Threats to our relationships are processed by the same part of the brain that processes physical pain. Social losses, such as the death of a loved one, divorce, or expulsion from a social group, are experienced as acutely as a broken leg.

the ability to understand and identify with the thinking and motivations of other people.

Enduring social bonds increase a group’s ability to work together, as well as its chances for procreation.

In one experiment, people who were subtly imitated by a group produced less stress hormone than those who were not imitated. Our bodies are adapted to seek and enjoy being mimicked. When human beings are engaged in mimesis, they learn from one another and advance their community’s skill set.

We flash our eyebrows when we want someone to pay attention to us. We pace someone else’s breathing when we want them to know we empathize. The pupils of our eyes dilate when we feel open to what another person is offering. In turn, when we see someone breathing with us, their eyes opening to accept us, their head subtly nodding, we feel we are being understood and accepted.

Our mirror neurons activate, releasing oxytocin—the bonding hormone—into our bloodstream.

Limbic consonance, as it’s called, is our ability to attune to one another’s emotional states.

It’s why our kids want to sleep with us—their nervous systems learn how to sleep and wake by mirroring ours.

We naturally try to resonate with the brain state of the crowd.

Our survivability increased as we learned how to orchestrate simple divisions of labor, and trusted one another enough to carry them out.

Humans are defined not by our superior hunting ability so much as by our capacity to communicate, trust, and share.

You take a risk to rescue someone else’s child from a dangerous predator because you trust the other parent to do the same for your kid.

That multigenerational exercise alone would change the fabric of society and its faith in a cooperative enterprise.

The difference between plants, animals, and humans comes down to what each life form can store, leverage, or—as this concept has been named—“bind.”

Plants can bind energy. They transform sunlight into biological energy. By spreading their leaves, they harvest ultraviolet rays and turn them into energy that they (and the animals that eat them) can metabolize.