technology has had an unusual and
profound impact on humans and humanity
from the very start in fact it’s
actually very difficult to have any
conversation about the intersection of
tech and community without rolling the
tape back to the very beginning of it
all we have to go back to a time before
there were computers or cell phones
before there was Facebook and Netflix
which is kind of hard for some of us we
actually have to go back to a time when
modern humans didn’t even walk this
earth for this story to sink in so I’m
gonna start us off by turning the clock
back some 300,000 years now
that’s the blink of an eye as far as
universe is concerned it goes by just
like that but it’s an almost
unfathomably distant time in our past
when viewed from a human perspective and
I mean unfathomable actually think about
it for a second what does it mean to say
that something happened 300,000 years
ago the chances are you can’t quite hold
it in your mind maybe your mind goes
blank and that’s actually a really big
problem for the story that I want to
tell because it hinges on having a
visceral feeling for just how long this
dance between tech and community has
been going on it’s been going on for our
purposes forever now what’s going on
here is that being human comes with a
whole set of constraints some of our
physical some of them are cognitive this
is a cognitive constraint being able to
conceive of very long periods of time or
very large numbers is not something
we’re particularly good at we can see
everything from about a quarter of a
second up to about a lifetime or so and
outside of that it gets pretty blurry
pretty quickly 300,000 years is way
outside of that window but I have a
solution we’re actually going to borrow
from something that we’ve been doing for
about 300,000 years we’re going to use a
tool to help us overcome this constraint
and by the way that’s what tools and
technology have been all about over the
years it’s been about how do we overcome
the constraints of being human to be
able to lift things that we couldn’t
lift to be able to see things that we
couldn’t see or to understand things
that we can’t understand let’s see how
that might work here I want you to
envision
just for a second holding a pushpin in
your hand feel its weight think about
how long it is don’t poke yourself but
think about its length and now I want
you to think about taking that pushpin
and putting it on a football field near
the goal line and then taking as many
push pins as you need to stretch that
line all the way to the opposite goal
line a hundred yards distant now if a
pushpin is about the length of a human
life of modern humans life that football
field a hundred yards is about three
hundred thousand years that starts to
give you a picture of the time frames
that we’re talking about okay so back to
our story what happened three hundred
thousand years ago well from our
perspective everything happened because
that’s when Homo sapiens started at that
point three hundred thousand years back
Homo sapiens appear on the scene for the
very first time and that’s a big deal
for those of us sitting here today now
there were several physical
characteristics that define early
humankind but what I’m more interested
in is a couple of other characteristics
that stick with us to this day that
completely changed the world the first
was that even back then we loved our
gadgets we were tool makers we like
technology we like to make stuff that
helped us overcome the constraints of
being human the second is we were very
unlike other creatures in that we were
social animals from the beginning we got
together in groups and we cooperated so
tool-making cooperation were hallmarks
of early humans and actually survived
with us today in fact you might
recognize him by different terms
technology and community now this would
be an interesting enough story if
technology and community both evolved
separately at the same time and turned
into the world we have today but that’s
only half of it the thing that I’m most
interested in is the interplay between
these two in fact looking back on the
history of Technology and community it’s
really hard to say whether it was humans
in groups that form technology or
whether it was technology that formed
community let’s look at some of those
early tools in the early story we’re
starting all the way at the end of the
football field here and take a look at
what might this might look like so the
first technology that pre humans
explored were stone tools it was a great
starter tech and it was a great way to
extend the power of the arm added an
additional fulcrum here so you could get
more force at the point where you hit an
object um this actually dates back into
the pre human era 2.6 million years ago
that’s 9 football fields back now those
of you who are technophiles will be
horrified to know that there were not
many updates to the product back in the
royalty so it actually took many
hundreds of thousands of years before we
saw some other technologies that were
just as profoundly as important the one
I want to spend a couple of minutes on
is this so I think of this as technology
one this emerged about the same time
that humanity did 300 thousand years ago
and that’s probably not a mistake this
was a profoundly important technology
now you remember that humans early
humans actually did get together in
groups and spend quite a lot of time
together out of the gate they actually
were pack hunters so the hunt was about
community well using controlled fire
back about three hundred thousand years
ago also give him the ability to cook
the food that they hunted so the hunt
was a community activity around the fire
that gathered in community to cook their
food and of course they ate it around
that fire as well so fire was actually
the first technology of community would
give you a couple of examples of why
this was so important okay so first of
all first example I talked a little bit
about the fact that that cooking food
made it possible for humans to get
together in community around the
campfire that ended up being critical to
the early bonds that were created and
some of what we see today in community
can be seen around that early campfire
the second example and this is maybe
most important it’s actually why the
believe now that the ability to get a
lot of calories by hunting and cooking
contributed to early humans brain sizes
increasing very rapidly over relatively
few generations and it was a bigger
brain
that made it possible for us to be
social animals it actually turns out
it’s really hard
cognitively to be social we have to keep
track of all kinds of relationships does
she like him or do I still my still
angry at that guy it’s really hard from
a brain perspective to actually keep
track of all that one more example the
other thing that fire did was help us
overcome a built-in constraint that is
bad night vision we’re actually quite
bad at seeing in the dark
well what fire did was allowed early
humans to extend the day well into the
night time and you can actually envision
this anybody who spent any time around
the campfire sitting in community
telling stories and it’s very very
likely that that actually is the
beginning of culture that’s probably
where early language started that’s
probably where storytelling started and
that’s pretty fascinating so fire was an
amazing first technology and what
happened next is we marched down the
field it was basically the same model
repeated over and over and over and over
again so every technology that we
created from that point on was first
about solving for some basic human need
like cooking food it was about
optimizing that making making it better
getting better at it over time and then
doing it again and again and again and
again and that was the pattern that
unfolded what I’m most interested in is
that it also turns out that just about
every technology you can imagine
influences community in some important
way so we talked a little bit about fire
let’s go through a couple of other quick
examples so we’re actually needing to
march quite far down the football field
to get to this next technology that’s
really not the technology number I just
added axe I thought it was fun
but but it turns out that most of
technology that’s been created actually
is creating the last yard of that
football field and that’s true here of
Agriculture this was about in the last
three or four yards about 9500 BC is
when it first appeared on the scene on
its face it’s a technology about food
and that’s true but it also enabled a
small group of farmers to supply food to
a large group of specialists
specializations came out of that and
through that we had towns that got
bigger and bigger and eventually turned
into cities which were hot beds for
communities so agriculture in many ways
is actually a technology of community
about the wheel actually came after
agriculture really enough 3,500 BC
that’s about the 2-yard line so yes it’s
a technology of transportation helping
get things and people from here to there
but it also allowed humans to spread out
over a greater geographic area and come
back together in community a facilitated
community the wheel is a technology of
community as well and then there’s the
light bulb now we’re in the last hundred
and fifty or so years the last few
inches on the field and this is one of
my favorites because really what this
does is the same thing that fire did for
us so many years ago yes it helps you to
not stub your toe when you get home late
at night it also makes it possible for
you to read a book if you want to do
that after the Sun sets but really what
the lightbulb enabled was groups of
people to get together at night in
community
it’s another technology of community so
hopefully you can kind of see these
interactions and now we’re literally in
the last four inches or so of the field
and this is where we get a little bit of
a plot twist the last four inches of the
field the last hundred years or so has
seen more development of more
technologies than the previous three
hundred thousand years combined included
in that has been a new understanding of
the way that we work and the way that
technologies have been built over the
years and one of the most important
discoveries that’s informed that new
understanding was this simple molecule
its dopamine it’s a neurotransmitter
that was discovered about 50 years ago
and this discovery fundamentally changes
every
we know here’s why so if you think about
the previous model of building
technology it was about achieving some
basic human need or helping to overcome
a deficit in being human
well now what we know is that it works
something like this I invented
technology like light it enables me to
get together with my friends at night
which feels good that feel good is
dopamine or some other feel-good
chemical neurotransmitter in our brain
and that causes me to say you know what
I should do that again that was good and
it causes me to go back and think about
maybe I should change this light maybe I
could make it brighter and have more
people over to iterate on technology and
improve it so this is all well and good
and actually quite interesting what’s
problematic about it is that we learned
a few other things for instance it’s
possible to skip the middleman and it’s
possible to interact with brain
chemicals directly we see this in their
purest forms in injecting and ingesting
various drugs and compounds here’s a
list of just a few of them that more or
less interact with brain chemistry
directly and we know this is pretty
dangerous but in many ways this is
actually the devil we know what I’m more
concerned about is this when you’re
interacting with technology today
clicking likes on websites watching
videos spending time on sites shopping
you’re probably not thinking a whole lot
about the neurotransmitters that are
happening in your brain but you know
what the people who run those companies
are thinking about it they’re actually
building their products to optimize for
a certain neurotransmitter release
because that makes it so that you’ll
come back and buy more or click more or
like more and we’ve gotten to a point
where it might just be that those needs
being served by those companies actually
don’t match what’s good for us as
individuals or communities so it might
be good for that company that when you
gather in community online you like and
comment a lot but it might actually not
be so good for community in the real
world and that is a really big problem
so we started this story around the
campfire
and I want to end it by talking about
fire in another way because today we’re
kind of playing with fire it’s actually
a dangerous and pretty uncertain time
I’m not entirely sure what happens next
that gets us out of this mess but it’s
pretty extreme however I have a lot of
room for optimism and there’s two main
reasons for that the first one is that
there are a lot of good technologists
out there companies and projects that
are being run that are thinking about
this in an ethical way they’re thinking
about how can we actually optimize for
good community outcomes instead of this
neurotransmitter event more clicks and
likes and pageviews those projects are
worth following they’re worth backing
they’re worth paying attention to and
the second thing and I’m going to leave
you with this is that we actually have a
lot more control as consumers than we
think that we do and a lot of the old
technologies that we’ve maybe shoved
aside are actually still pretty good
technologies now this is crazy coming
from a technologist and somebody who
loves gadgets but I think we should
probably use these new technologies a
little sparingly and I would actually
suggest that you consider this every
once in a while close the laptop put the
phone down
turn off notifications turn off Facebook
for a little while and maybe just go
back to some of the original
technologies maybe go back around the
fire in community and tell some stories
thank you you
profound impact on humans and humanity
from the very start in fact it’s
actually very difficult to have any
conversation about the intersection of
tech and community without rolling the
tape back to the very beginning of it
all we have to go back to a time before
there were computers or cell phones
before there was Facebook and Netflix
which is kind of hard for some of us we
actually have to go back to a time when
modern humans didn’t even walk this
earth for this story to sink in so I’m
gonna start us off by turning the clock
back some 300,000 years now
that’s the blink of an eye as far as
universe is concerned it goes by just
like that but it’s an almost
unfathomably distant time in our past
when viewed from a human perspective and
I mean unfathomable actually think about
it for a second what does it mean to say
that something happened 300,000 years
ago the chances are you can’t quite hold
it in your mind maybe your mind goes
blank and that’s actually a really big
problem for the story that I want to
tell because it hinges on having a
visceral feeling for just how long this
dance between tech and community has
been going on it’s been going on for our
purposes forever now what’s going on
here is that being human comes with a
whole set of constraints some of our
physical some of them are cognitive this
is a cognitive constraint being able to
conceive of very long periods of time or
very large numbers is not something
we’re particularly good at we can see
everything from about a quarter of a
second up to about a lifetime or so and
outside of that it gets pretty blurry
pretty quickly 300,000 years is way
outside of that window but I have a
solution we’re actually going to borrow
from something that we’ve been doing for
about 300,000 years we’re going to use a
tool to help us overcome this constraint
and by the way that’s what tools and
technology have been all about over the
years it’s been about how do we overcome
the constraints of being human to be
able to lift things that we couldn’t
lift to be able to see things that we
couldn’t see or to understand things
that we can’t understand let’s see how
that might work here I want you to
envision
just for a second holding a pushpin in
your hand feel its weight think about
how long it is don’t poke yourself but
think about its length and now I want
you to think about taking that pushpin
and putting it on a football field near
the goal line and then taking as many
push pins as you need to stretch that
line all the way to the opposite goal
line a hundred yards distant now if a
pushpin is about the length of a human
life of modern humans life that football
field a hundred yards is about three
hundred thousand years that starts to
give you a picture of the time frames
that we’re talking about okay so back to
our story what happened three hundred
thousand years ago well from our
perspective everything happened because
that’s when Homo sapiens started at that
point three hundred thousand years back
Homo sapiens appear on the scene for the
very first time and that’s a big deal
for those of us sitting here today now
there were several physical
characteristics that define early
humankind but what I’m more interested
in is a couple of other characteristics
that stick with us to this day that
completely changed the world the first
was that even back then we loved our
gadgets we were tool makers we like
technology we like to make stuff that
helped us overcome the constraints of
being human the second is we were very
unlike other creatures in that we were
social animals from the beginning we got
together in groups and we cooperated so
tool-making cooperation were hallmarks
of early humans and actually survived
with us today in fact you might
recognize him by different terms
technology and community now this would
be an interesting enough story if
technology and community both evolved
separately at the same time and turned
into the world we have today but that’s
only half of it the thing that I’m most
interested in is the interplay between
these two in fact looking back on the
history of Technology and community it’s
really hard to say whether it was humans
in groups that form technology or
whether it was technology that formed
community let’s look at some of those
early tools in the early story we’re
starting all the way at the end of the
football field here and take a look at
what might this might look like so the
first technology that pre humans
explored were stone tools it was a great
starter tech and it was a great way to
extend the power of the arm added an
additional fulcrum here so you could get
more force at the point where you hit an
object um this actually dates back into
the pre human era 2.6 million years ago
that’s 9 football fields back now those
of you who are technophiles will be
horrified to know that there were not
many updates to the product back in the
royalty so it actually took many
hundreds of thousands of years before we
saw some other technologies that were
just as profoundly as important the one
I want to spend a couple of minutes on
is this so I think of this as technology
one this emerged about the same time
that humanity did 300 thousand years ago
and that’s probably not a mistake this
was a profoundly important technology
now you remember that humans early
humans actually did get together in
groups and spend quite a lot of time
together out of the gate they actually
were pack hunters so the hunt was about
community well using controlled fire
back about three hundred thousand years
ago also give him the ability to cook
the food that they hunted so the hunt
was a community activity around the fire
that gathered in community to cook their
food and of course they ate it around
that fire as well so fire was actually
the first technology of community would
give you a couple of examples of why
this was so important okay so first of
all first example I talked a little bit
about the fact that that cooking food
made it possible for humans to get
together in community around the
campfire that ended up being critical to
the early bonds that were created and
some of what we see today in community
can be seen around that early campfire
the second example and this is maybe
most important it’s actually why the
believe now that the ability to get a
lot of calories by hunting and cooking
contributed to early humans brain sizes
increasing very rapidly over relatively
few generations and it was a bigger
brain
that made it possible for us to be
social animals it actually turns out
it’s really hard
cognitively to be social we have to keep
track of all kinds of relationships does
she like him or do I still my still
angry at that guy it’s really hard from
a brain perspective to actually keep
track of all that one more example the
other thing that fire did was help us
overcome a built-in constraint that is
bad night vision we’re actually quite
bad at seeing in the dark
well what fire did was allowed early
humans to extend the day well into the
night time and you can actually envision
this anybody who spent any time around
the campfire sitting in community
telling stories and it’s very very
likely that that actually is the
beginning of culture that’s probably
where early language started that’s
probably where storytelling started and
that’s pretty fascinating so fire was an
amazing first technology and what
happened next is we marched down the
field it was basically the same model
repeated over and over and over and over
again so every technology that we
created from that point on was first
about solving for some basic human need
like cooking food it was about
optimizing that making making it better
getting better at it over time and then
doing it again and again and again and
again and that was the pattern that
unfolded what I’m most interested in is
that it also turns out that just about
every technology you can imagine
influences community in some important
way so we talked a little bit about fire
let’s go through a couple of other quick
examples so we’re actually needing to
march quite far down the football field
to get to this next technology that’s
really not the technology number I just
added axe I thought it was fun
but but it turns out that most of
technology that’s been created actually
is creating the last yard of that
football field and that’s true here of
Agriculture this was about in the last
three or four yards about 9500 BC is
when it first appeared on the scene on
its face it’s a technology about food
and that’s true but it also enabled a
small group of farmers to supply food to
a large group of specialists
specializations came out of that and
through that we had towns that got
bigger and bigger and eventually turned
into cities which were hot beds for
communities so agriculture in many ways
is actually a technology of community
about the wheel actually came after
agriculture really enough 3,500 BC
that’s about the 2-yard line so yes it’s
a technology of transportation helping
get things and people from here to there
but it also allowed humans to spread out
over a greater geographic area and come
back together in community a facilitated
community the wheel is a technology of
community as well and then there’s the
light bulb now we’re in the last hundred
and fifty or so years the last few
inches on the field and this is one of
my favorites because really what this
does is the same thing that fire did for
us so many years ago yes it helps you to
not stub your toe when you get home late
at night it also makes it possible for
you to read a book if you want to do
that after the Sun sets but really what
the lightbulb enabled was groups of
people to get together at night in
community
it’s another technology of community so
hopefully you can kind of see these
interactions and now we’re literally in
the last four inches or so of the field
and this is where we get a little bit of
a plot twist the last four inches of the
field the last hundred years or so has
seen more development of more
technologies than the previous three
hundred thousand years combined included
in that has been a new understanding of
the way that we work and the way that
technologies have been built over the
years and one of the most important
discoveries that’s informed that new
understanding was this simple molecule
its dopamine it’s a neurotransmitter
that was discovered about 50 years ago
and this discovery fundamentally changes
every
we know here’s why so if you think about
the previous model of building
technology it was about achieving some
basic human need or helping to overcome
a deficit in being human
well now what we know is that it works
something like this I invented
technology like light it enables me to
get together with my friends at night
which feels good that feel good is
dopamine or some other feel-good
chemical neurotransmitter in our brain
and that causes me to say you know what
I should do that again that was good and
it causes me to go back and think about
maybe I should change this light maybe I
could make it brighter and have more
people over to iterate on technology and
improve it so this is all well and good
and actually quite interesting what’s
problematic about it is that we learned
a few other things for instance it’s
possible to skip the middleman and it’s
possible to interact with brain
chemicals directly we see this in their
purest forms in injecting and ingesting
various drugs and compounds here’s a
list of just a few of them that more or
less interact with brain chemistry
directly and we know this is pretty
dangerous but in many ways this is
actually the devil we know what I’m more
concerned about is this when you’re
interacting with technology today
clicking likes on websites watching
videos spending time on sites shopping
you’re probably not thinking a whole lot
about the neurotransmitters that are
happening in your brain but you know
what the people who run those companies
are thinking about it they’re actually
building their products to optimize for
a certain neurotransmitter release
because that makes it so that you’ll
come back and buy more or click more or
like more and we’ve gotten to a point
where it might just be that those needs
being served by those companies actually
don’t match what’s good for us as
individuals or communities so it might
be good for that company that when you
gather in community online you like and
comment a lot but it might actually not
be so good for community in the real
world and that is a really big problem
so we started this story around the
campfire
and I want to end it by talking about
fire in another way because today we’re
kind of playing with fire it’s actually
a dangerous and pretty uncertain time
I’m not entirely sure what happens next
that gets us out of this mess but it’s
pretty extreme however I have a lot of
room for optimism and there’s two main
reasons for that the first one is that
there are a lot of good technologists
out there companies and projects that
are being run that are thinking about
this in an ethical way they’re thinking
about how can we actually optimize for
good community outcomes instead of this
neurotransmitter event more clicks and
likes and pageviews those projects are
worth following they’re worth backing
they’re worth paying attention to and
the second thing and I’m going to leave
you with this is that we actually have a
lot more control as consumers than we
think that we do and a lot of the old
technologies that we’ve maybe shoved
aside are actually still pretty good
technologies now this is crazy coming
from a technologist and somebody who
loves gadgets but I think we should
probably use these new technologies a
little sparingly and I would actually
suggest that you consider this every
once in a while close the laptop put the
phone down
turn off notifications turn off Facebook
for a little while and maybe just go
back to some of the original
technologies maybe go back around the
fire in community and tell some stories
thank you you
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