{"id":34776,"date":"2018-06-05T07:26:59","date_gmt":"2018-06-05T12:26:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=34776"},"modified":"2018-06-05T07:26:59","modified_gmt":"2018-06-05T12:26:59","slug":"the-emergence-of-the-superorganism-susan-kuceras-movie-living-in-the-futures-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=34776","title":{"rendered":"The Emergence of the Superorganism: Susan Kucera\u2019s Movie \u201cLiving in The Future\u2019s Past\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n

The Emergence of the Superorganism: Susan Kucera\u2019s Movie \u201cLiving in The Future\u2019s Past\u201d<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n
Imagine you are an ant. All you have seen in your life are only other ants, touching their antennas and moving on. Then, one day, the Ant God, who is benevolent and merciful, lifts you up in the air and shows you the world from there. And, miracle, you see the anthill for the first time. You see the teeming, organized, complex, superorganism which you never suspected to exist but of which have been a single cell for all your life.<\/p>\n

That would be quite an experience for an ant and we, humans, might be subjected to something similar: the sudden, unexpected, and amazing perception of the human superorganism \u2013 a planetary-scale creature, not unlike a giant anthill, engaged in changing the world.<\/p>\n

Physicists enjoy talking about \u201cemergent phenomena,\u201d that is about entities appearing as the result of the interaction of smaller and simpler elements. An anthill is a good example: a single ant is not an anthill and knows nothing about anthills, but the behavior of many ants creates the anthill.<\/p>\n

Humans can do something similar, it is an emergent characteristic which appeared only in recent times in the human evolutionary history. Collecting first into bands, then villages, then cities, then states, now humans form a single, giant creature \u2013 the superorganism \u2013 which is literally devouring the planet to keep itself growing. In a sense, it is like a science fiction novel, but it is real: you can see it at work \u2013 one good place to get a feeling of its presence is in Susan Kucera\u2019s movie \u201cLiving in the Future\u2019s Past.\u201d<\/p>\n

The concept of a human superorganism is not new \u2013 its origins may go back to the work of Gustave Le Bon, \u201cThe Psychology of the Crowds<\/i>\u201d (1895). The idea of a single, worldwide human anthill is relatively recent, but it is clearly appearing in the human memesphere.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Emergence of the Superorganism: Susan Kucera\u2019s Movie \u201cLiving in The Future\u2019s Past\u201d Imagine you are an ant. All you have seen in your life are only other ants, touching their antennas and moving on. Then, one day, the Ant God, who is benevolent and merciful, lifts you up in the air and shows you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7],"tags":[10777,20362,17734,20361,2692],"class_list":["post-34776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-survival-2","tag-cassandras-legacy","tag-living-in-the-futures-past","tag-superorganism","tag-susan-kucera","tag-ugo-bardi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34776"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34776\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34777,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34776\/revisions\/34777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}