Chapter 10:
The New Epoch - Life in a Future Built on Content Nation

When I was a young man I was, like many young people, not all that interested in history. I knew a fair amount about my own young nation's history, to be sure, and I had gained a decent appreciation of the world's history in high school and college, but I was very much a person focused on modern times. Today was the time that I cared about most.

When I got married, though, my wife and I decided to spend our honeymoon traveling through England and nearby Wales. Within a few hours of stepping off of a thoroughly modern jet plane we found ourselves in Westminster Cathedral in London, looking at the graves and memorials of famous people such as Sir Isaac Newton, Winston Churchill and William Shakespeare. All of a sudden these people existed for me in a way that I had never imagined before. They weren't just names in a book or people in photos or paintings: they were real. A couple of days later we were standing in the 12th-century Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford, then amidst the ruins of Tintern Abbey, then walking through the ancient fortifications of Tenby and then before a seventh-century Celtic cross south of Cardigan marked with the runes of an ancient language. We were spiraling back in history, seeing and touching time that had passed by and that was yet still real.

These were all very important experiences, but none of them were quite as important to me as a cool and cloudy afternoon that brought us to a quiet and remote field far up into the hills of Wales, past foggy fields dotted with Welsh ponies chewing away at their grass quietly. We got out of our car at a spot that we hoped was the right place to park and began walking down a narrow, grassy path towards a clearing in a field. There beneath the clearing skies stood Pentre Ifan, the stone remains of what is believed to be a burial chamber more than five thousand years old.

Very little is known about the origins of Pentre Ifan except that it was erected by people whose culture probably bore more resemblance to their ice-age ancestors from five thousand years before their time than to our own culture five thousand years later. In touching these stones I was touching the origins of humankind. All that remains of significance at Pentre Ifan are the massive stones that formed the outlines of the burial chamber: very little else has survived through the ages. The stones stand silent, as silent as our own culture might stand ten thousand years from now. We know that they were erected by humans, but we understand only dimly their humanness.

What will be the future for our own humanness? What will be the signs that we leave for others to consider about our own civilization ten or twenty thousand years from now? It is a question whose ultimate answer is probably as dimly understood to us as are the stones at Pentre Ifan. Like the people who erected this memorial in the hills of Wales our culture is not really based on permanence. As humans we erect memorials and other great structures that declare our desire for permanence, yet even when structures greated by great civilizations survive from the dawn of civilization the cultures that created them are long gone.

So it is with publishing, the code that created civilization. We assume that publishing will live on, modified by trends such as social media, yet enduring as the encoding of our culture indefinitely. History, though, would seem to disagree with this assumption, as would our encoding as living creatures. From an historical standpoint none of the large, centralized civilizations that arose only five to seven thousand years ago based on publishing have endured as they were in that era.

Large civilizations each claim to be made to last for thousands of years, but in spite of the power of publishing to unite people in civilizations they are in general passing phenomena. By contrast the coding in our own genes is designed for only two key concerns: how to survive our own time on earth and how to select a mate to create another generation. We extend these short-term goals to other entities such as civilizations through altruism, but we are ourselves incapable of living the thousands of years that our civilizations would like to last.

The Social Media Epoch: Publishing Rescaled for New Evolution

So you might say that using centralized publishing as a code for the organism of civilization has created a paradox: we create civilizations with a structure defined through publishing that can live for many centuries but the length of those civilizations fails to turn over new "genetic" code quickly enough to adapt to new circumstances. It turns out that humans, who live less than a century typically, are too involved in the goals of their own mortality to design immortal civilizations very well.

By contrast nature does an excellent job of designing species - natural civilizations, if you will - that can last for millions of years and more. In 1999 scientists at West Chester University in Pennsylvania isolated and stimulated the growth of a species of bacteria more than 250 million years old. The coelacanth , an order of fish more than 400 million years old, was thought to have been extinct for 80 million years but small pockets of recent species of the fish have been found to exist in isolated, stable climates. Many of today's modern shark species have been in existence for at least 150 million years.

So if nature can do such a great job of building species that can survive with just natural genes at their disposal, perhaps we should take a tip from nature and do what we have been reluctant to do with civilization: let new breeds of civilizations based on new models of publishing compete for survival. The ten thousand or so years since the rise of post ice-age civilizations is but a blink of an eye in terms of the long-term evolution of species, but few of living creatures in those species have a life cycle of more than several years. Perhaps the key to enabling civilizations to survive the ages is not to try to build great longer-lived civilizations that attempt to conform humans and nature into a large, long-lived organism but but rather to build shorter-lived civilizations that are more readily adapted to changes and more likely to produce diversity that will survive through radical changes in nature and society.

In other words if social media looks chaotic and random at times in its evolution as a publishing tool maybe that's a good thing. With a tool that can create unity out of diversity at a moment's notice and that can allow diverse people with a unified focus to sustain productive relationships over long distances and long periods of time perhaps social media's strength is that in many ways it doesn't resemble the "genes" of traditional publishing all that much. With social media patterns of successful collaboration will come and go, but in doing so humans will succeed intensely while those patterns last - without having the baggage of commitments to long-term civilizations that keep people invested in survival patterns that will no longer work well.

In adapting human civilization to social media as a default communications medium we may open up humans to new patterns of evolution. The coelacanth found success over millions of years in specialized, stable habitats where this particular kind of fish did very well, while sharks have succeeded in almost all parts of the world with a simple but flexible survival strategy. Perhaps the diversity found in social media will enable new kinds of cultural diversity to emerge that will allow for the success through many different kinds of survival techniques. Instead of looking at pyramids or the stones of Pentre Ifan in twenty thousand years for clues as to what humans were like, perhaps we will have to look no further than our own genes. Our ability to survive with a particualr form of publishing will tell the tale of what our civilizations were all about.

So how will humans and our societies evolve as social media competes to define the genes of civilization? What will our world look like through the lens of publishing tools in fifty years? A hundred years? A thousand years? Ten thousand years? We can only speculate, of course, but in doing so we may find patterns that will inform us as to what the full potential power of social media may be for us in the very near future. Let's take a look at what the future might look like as social media makes inroads into defining our work and our lives in a new epoch of human existence. The scenarios that I am about to lead you through are not meant to be a prophesy or the thoughts of a seasoned futurist but rather some of the logical conclusions that we can draw from the trends already evident in the explosive growth of social media. That said, I think that you will see that the impact of social media will be far more pervasive than many have considered so far.

Fifty Years from Now: Success, Turmoil and Transition

It is dawn at the home of Georges Cadoret, an architect living in the Provence region of southern France. Cadoret has a successful career with clients all over the world, many of whom he has maintained contact with since he was at his university through social media tools. On a daily basis, though, he works from home and keeps in touch with people in his village. Like many homes in this sunny region his roof is lined with highly efficient solar panels, which create most of his electricity by day and which also power a fuel cell that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen during the day and recombines them in the evening to generate electricity. France has been phasing out its nuclear power plants as locally sourced power and power from Africa's giant solar arrays in the Sahara has reduced their cost-effectiveness.

Inexpensive and abundant electricity has begun to transform the world of communications in many parts of the world in which Cadoret does business. Africa in particular has seen a great change as it has become the world's number one producer of electricity, followed by China, Australia and the United States. Villages throughout Africa are now powered and have access to Web-enabled mobile communications networks that have brought information and learning to them from around the world. The cost of computing power and communications networks has dropped radically, providing most everyone in the world the ability to communicate with anyone affordably - including people in small villages throughout Africa.

Mobile communications networks flourish everywhere in Africa, in many instances powered by local communities who maintain their own networks as a public service. Villages can communicate with other nearby villages instantly at virtually no cost, increasing local collaboration on key issues and closer social and political ties. Education is soaring and small farm productivity is on the rise in many countries once isolated from the world, thanks in part to access to global microcapital investors.

Cadoret shuffles out of bed on a sunny day and gets ready to shower. "Notre zique," he says out loud before turning on the water. His home's electronic communications system starts playing songs popular with his social networking groups, including selections from local musicians and his friends around the world. Whenever he listens to a song the artist is paid a small royalty fee by his music subscription service, whether or not they are a professional musician. This system has allowed millions of musicians to gain enough popularity from small groups of people around the world to make a decent living oftentimes. Music publishers as we have known them no longer exist: worldwide access to all music, and most content in general. is a given. THe publishers have turned into events producers, packaging the most popular acts rising up from social media for large-scale public appearances.

Cadoret likes one particuar song and says "sauvez"; his home communications system saves information about the song to Cadoret's personal online profile. Later that evening he and his wife will be entertaining friends: he wants them to experience a holographic concert by these musicians after dinner along with some of his friends in South Africa and Norway. It will be nice to see everyone together again, he muses - well worth the extra price of this service. Most public spaces are equipped with holographic services as well, enabling merchants to present information about their wares in person and instructors from Paris to tutor Cadoret's children sitting "next" to them.

Before having breakfast Cadoret opens the door to his home and picks up his personal newspaper for the morning. Yes, he is old-fashioned that way - he still likes to get his personalized Digg-compiled news from his local print-on-demand service once a day, just for the fun of it. He enjoys the familiarity of seeing articles that he likes from his favorite personal and professional news sources around the world and voting on them and noting them for later reference by touching the communications-enabled paper.

Advanced language translation has made news and comments in any language acessible to him, just as it helps him in his communications with clients around the world. Sometimes he touches on the comments section just to see and to hear what his friends are saying about a topic, along with politicians and other important people who feel obliged to chime in on these topics. There are still professionals who gather news for a living, but they are mostly independent journalists, syndicating their own content and maintaining their own networks of contacts and relationships which others value.

While Cadoret likes the experience of his Diggpaper, he's not too happy with what he sees and listens to in it. While his own global business is doing pretty well, the French economy is still suffering from a long decline. The remnants of traditional French industries not already migrated to China, India and Brazil are still struggling through intense confrontations with workers who are upset about the pegging of their wages to world labor market rates. Through social media there is beginning to evolve a global labor movement, which is fueling protests in many industrialized nations, including China and India. Although governments are trying to cut off the communications of these protests, the near-universal availability of wireless networking is making this very difficult. At the same time talented workers in knowledge-intensive industries are finding it easier to make their services available on a global basis through social networking services. 

In the meantime Cadoret notes in the world news pages that the global economy as a whole remains sluggish by traditional measures, as major currencies experience a deflation of their value. However, in traditionally poor nations their currencies are being bolstered by improving demand for their goods and services, fueled by social media linking investors, lenders, buyers and sellers internationally on a more personal basis. Small producers on a global basis are becoming more adept at meeting the needs of niche markets quickly and effectively by listening to the needs of people in social media-enabled communications. The production and marketing efficiencies of traditional large industries are still useful for a core of hard-to-replace products and services, most especially scientific, technical and medical equipment, but many other large-scale industries are rescaling their operations to deliver more "just-in-time" products and services in local markets and highly specialized global market sectors.

In the politics section of his Diggpaper Cadoret discovers in his personally tuned news that there is a new bill in the French parliament that is addressing building standards. He touches the article to make a note of the public markup site for the bill for his review later in the day. Use of technologies to enable the public to develop and to comment upon bills has enabled citizens to have more input into the legislative process of France, providing more expertise and a wider array of public opinions and insights to create and shape legislation. Politicians are still essential to shepherd these bills through the legislative process, but with the openness afforded by social media's monitoring of legislative processes oftentimes there is little opportunity to cut old-fashiohned deals in cloakrooms - especially since the moment-by-moment monitoring of social media enables politicians to see where the views of their constituents lie. Cadoret glances at news of political races for office, but he finds it a little boring. With laws now making it a felony to tell lies that would result in the physical or financial harm of others politicians and the constant openness of information about politicians through social media there are few secret and surprises exposed in national politics these days.

On the international front, though, Cadoret finds much that worries him. Changing climate conditions have devastated the lives of millions of people in the world. Continuing violent storms have devastated many cities along the shores of the world's oceans, forcing the abandonment of any large-scale settlements near the oceanfront. Much of the western part of North America has run dry of water, making the final salinization of the San Joaqin Valley almost moot. Western China, South Africa and Western Australia have also fallen victim to changing weather patterns, accelerating the desertification of these regions. Canada, Scandanavia and Northern Asia are experiencing both hotter summers and much longer and colder winters. Desalinization of ocean water is helping some rich nations to cope with these changes, but it remains an expensive option. Clean water is to Cadoret's time as oil has been to our time. Political turmoil accelerated via opinion-makers in social media from widespread deaths and loss of property are challenging national governments to come up with solutions, even as their national taxes are harder to collect from an economy driven increasingly by small international transactions and bartering.

Sobered by the headlines, Cadoret prepares for a walk into town to pick up some food and to meet with his friends at the local cafe. He confers with his home assistant, a robot that works with the home communication system to attend to basic household chores. The robot was a good investment, Cadoret muses to himself, so cheap to get good help these days, why not? The robot's computer processing power is equivalent to that of a human mind, yet is no more expensive than what a personal computer cost back in 2008. Cadoret instructs the robot to remind his wife Estelle of their party in the evening when she awakes and to tend to some household chores. The robot asks some questions and downloads further suggestions for the best way to prepare for the party from a social media site - for robots.

In the village Cadoret eases into a chair at a small table in front of a streetside cafe to await come close friends. As he waits for them he views some messages to him on the table's hologram display, replying to some and then publishing some thoughts in his personal social media space. He could have used his mobile media device to view and publish these messages, but since it communicates with the table's hologram display anyway he finds it to be easier to read and more convenient. He is intrigued by the new electronic brain implants available that enable people to communicate with people using images and sounds projected directly into the brain, but he finds it to be a little too advanced for his tastes. His daughter Manon, however, has asked for one as a birthday present. "Il n'y a rein d'importance," Cadoret argues with her sometimes, but Manon argues that it's very important to her, even if it's not to him. Cadoret does well at his job but like many professionals the the competition in the global labor market for his services enabled by social media has not left him with an over-lavish lifestyle.

As his friends still haven't shown up Cadoret brings up some of his social network friends on "le holo" to catch up a bit, noting from the icons on the hologram hovering around the table that a few people in his network are in privacy mode. The automatic translation capabilities of his communications service work pretty well to keep his friends in China communicating with his friends in the United States during their conversation, but sometimes the subtleties of languages leave something to be desired in the translation. As he chats with his holographic friends his village friends arrive, who he introduces to his "holo" friends. His remote friends who speak French are invited stay on for the conversation, including a friend in Mali, who have a keen interest in many French things.

As their conversation turns to local politics a new icon begins to glow on the hologram display, indicating that the village's mayor has something to say about this issue. Cadoret activates the recorded thoughts of the mayor from an earlier conversation, which prompts them to request a live holo meeting with him. The mayor obliges and their expanded conversation causes new icons to glow on the hologram display: politicians from other villages nearby whose intrests align with this topic are being made aware of the conversation through their social connection, though none of them join in this time. They conclude their brief chat with the mayor, go into a group privacy setting on the hologram display and discuss what they've heard with one another for a moment.

Cadoret realizes that he needs to get to his shopping so he says goodbye to his local and virtual friends and walks down the street. He passes a woman who smiles at him warmly but then looks at him a little more distantly: she's just seen on her GPS-sensitive communications implant that he's married. Cadoret makes it a point to keep that information public on his communication profile. As the woman passes by the stores her impant is alerting her with information about merchandise in the stores that may be of interest to her and to people who are in the store who are in her social network. She "waves" to one of her friends in one store who also has the implant and has her own implant communicate a note to her mobile communicator of some items to research later on.

The woman goes into a store selling local and foreign handmade clothing, chats via her implant with the person in Morocco who made a skirt that she likes, and then walks out the door with the skirt: her implant has completed the transaction for her, transferring funds both to the merchant and to the dressmaker automatically. Her friends with similar interests, made aware of the transaction through her social media service, receive information about the store and the dressmaker automatically. The people chosen for this matching are selected very carefully for matches based on a wide range of personal activities and interests: advertising is now mostly focused on matching people's real interests to the people who really meet them as precisely as possible and drawing them into personal conversations. There are still many brand-name goods, but for most people brands are the people, goods and services that their friends endorse.

Meanwhile Cadoret stops by the baker to pick up the bread to which he as subscribed and to pick up a few extra loaves for the evening's party. He pays for part of his subscription on a barter basis by heping the baker with a small redesign of his shop. Being less on the cutting edge of technology he still relies on the retina scanner at the baker's counter to complete his transaction for him as he enjoys a chat with the baker. He remarks into his mobile device how wonderful the bread is; his wife, who has turned off her privacy mode finally, looks at it through the hologram and agrees. At the greengrocer Cadoret picks up his subscription produce, and then peruses some of the special items that he needs to pick up for their dinner: his mobile device pulls up some suggestions on the produce automatically and helps him to pick the best ones.

He also notes on the mobile device that the prices at one of the few remaining super-stores down the road are lower, but not so low that it causes him concern. Social media has made it easier for local merchants to succeed by providing better service and more precise inventory for natural and hand-produced items that local people really want. Many mass-produced items are now delivered direct from the factories in which they are custom-built to order, with purchasers able to select between specific factories the way that they used to shop through mass retailers' Web pages. Some local merchants do well acting as consultants for manufacturers, providing floor samples from various manufacturers and taking a percentage of the direct sale.

Although technology is everywhere in Cadoret's life, in many ways it seems as if there is less technology in his life than there was in his youth. With always-present communications networks and most of the world's knowledge and entertainment stored in computing centers it is only the devices that he has locally that give a hint of technology - and most of those are designed to operate based on speech and touch. It's fairly rare that he uses a device such as a keyboard and when he does it's usually a holographic representation of a keyboard with a bio-feedback mechanism to simulate the feel of touching it.

While speech-based social media has reduced reading by many people - most things are shared by speech or videos - the written word remains important as a means to learn things quickly that speech and symbols alone cannot provide efficiently. But in many instances people just speak into their communications devices and have their words translated into text automatically. In a speech-driven environment social media has become all the more important a tool to facilitate work and everyday life, enabling people to communicate in groups more naturally and to facilitate collaborative learning and entertainment experiences.

How much longer reading will last is anyone's guess, Cadoret wonders on the way home. He's been hearing more people talking about protein computing, the merging of software and genetic engineering. The early experiments look promising, but ultimately he is glad that he will probably not live to think about the implications of computing based in cellular structures. As it is, the zoos filling up with re-engineered species from past eras are entertainment enough for him. Cadoret opens the door to his home, kisses his wife Danielle, hands his groceries to the robot and prepares to begin another day of design work with his global colleagues and clients before a pleasant evening.

One Hundred Years from Now: Content Nation Offers a Way Forward

Eloise Cadoret is busy with her robot and her children Edouard and Camille putting the finishing touches on their packing up boxes at their home in Provence. After the death of her Mother Manon she chose to stay in the house for a while, which seemed good like a good idea at first. The children were upset after the departure of their father for a new relationship so having a familiar place to live would be comforting for them, she thought. When she decided to take on her grandfather's profession several years earlier architecture still seemed like a fairly good profession to pursue, especially since she was able to call upon some of her grandfather's contacts from his social media network that he had willed to Manon upon his death and then given by Manon to her.

Unfortunately for Manon the shifting of the global economy left many of the descendents of those contacts in dire financial straits, leaving only a handful of people to provide any sort of valuable additions to her portfolio of clients. She has worked hard to build up her own clientele in nations in which the business and natural climate is more stable, but it takes time, even with the convenience and international power of social media, to get the accounts that will help her to make a living.

At the same time France is hardly recognizable in many ways as the country of her youth - and less encouraging than ever for her own business. Without the centralized industries of past years and with the decline of agriculture as weather patterns have grown more violent even people in formerly sunny Provence are challenged to lead what would have been a comfortable life a century ago. France is still a nation but barely so. It has no military of its own, it has little budget for public services such as education and roads and many of its formerly public facilities are now owned privately by companies on contract to the European Union.

Where local governments are still reasonably prosperous social media has enabled them to collaborate more effectively to develop public services autonomously. Though the uncertain economic conditions have made local autonomy difficult to manage at times the capital that flows into business owners into Provence internationally through microcapital has helped them to do better than some areas of Europe whose economies and weather patterns make them less desirable investments.

Much of the world has suffered greatly in the past fifty years from the changing economy and climate, leaving nearly half a billion dead or near starvation due to widespread crop failures and problems with transportation. With violent storms disrupting ocean and air shipping more frequently the assumption that goods could flow universally and uniformly throughout the world is no longer a given. And then there are the wars. With many parts of the world left with weakened central governments the warlords of central and eastern Asia are looking at opportunities further abroad. Social media enables people to collaborate more effectively against these threats at a local level, but with thinning economic resources it's not always possible to counter these roving armies which also make use of social media to coordinate their bands of warriors rapidly. There are still large high-tech armies to counter these warlords, but they are deployed mostly to secure the dwindling resources of major companies. Increasingly war and nationhood are becoming disconnected from one another.

For the time being, though, the wars are still quite far from Provence, as Cadoret knows already from her communications implant. She had felt squeamish about having the operation to have it inserted into her brain when she was young, but now she barely thinks about its presence. Since protein computing had progressed to the point where communications implants could be living tissue, her ability to communicate with the world through her implant seems as natural as opening her eyes. The world's computing storage is moving rapidly to protein computing as well, with large caves providing safe environments in which the world's collective memories can "grow" together.

The natural growth of computer storage was a necessity, as it became less expensive to create computing power from readily available organic materials rather than shipping inorganic materials all over the world for manufacturing. Modern networking has done away with much of the "wired" world of computer communications, enabling organic computer storage to be built wherever it is most convenient with great redundancy. As long as the planet as a whole exists, human knowledge is likely to remain intact indefinitely. But protein computing is still in its very early phases, mostly provding a safer and more easily upgraded versaion of earlier forms of computing equipment.

As Eliose tires from the packing she takes a moment to rest and to pay attention to her implant's messages. She wishes that she hadn't at first. As the images of her world news icons appear as if hovering before her eyes, whe decides to glance at the general news. Yes, she's aware that there's a comet fragment headed towards the earth. Yes, she knows that it's targeted to hit the middle of the Australian desert very soon. She's heard about it in detail for some time and tracks conversations of the experts that the world has trusted through social media ratings. She adjusts the personal importance of the story and it disappears from her display.

Eliose is more concerned with the messages from her friends in Vietnam, which are glowing brightest. Nguyen Van Anh, her best friend from her university days, has published a message that she's concerned about how the comet fragments might affect her family and is also on the move inland to Laos. Eloise can see in her communicator that Anh is already on the road, and confers with her friends in Laos briefly for ideas as to what might be a good gift for her when she arrives. Eliose had been thinking of moving to Vietnam, but she contracted into a new project through her social network that will be building a hospital in Africa. While many parts of Africa have seen great death and destruction, there is a core of fertile regions in which "superclans" are using social media to collaborate on many key public initiatives.

Social media has accelerated the ability of local clans in Africa to build bonds of trust across a wide area rapidly, enabling them to collaborate on many local and regional projects that used to take central governments or companies to initiate. The global networks available to them via social media have also allowed them to access technical knowledge and financial support from interested people around the world, who become more and more socially integrated with these distant people - making them in effect global members of one or more superclans. These superclans may be fluid and overlapping over time as the need for technical support, trading partners and social relationships shift, but their ability to sustain commerce, security and health on a collaborative basis in a rapidly changing environment are making them increasingly attractive altenatives to heirarchical governments and organizations to ensure the surviving and thriving of many people.

Over time many people like Eloise come to visit the homelands of the superclans, already familiar to most of them by name and face and touch through their embedded social media communications and eager to participate in their social fabric more fully - and to take advantage of the physical benefits of their collaboration. While there is not much money for the project, Eloise will be a part of an international group of engineers and designers who will benefit from working in a region where food is plentiful and cheap and there is a willingness to use bartering and other non-monetary forms of compensation to make everyday life comfortable and comforting. Eloise will also use her skills for making handicrafts and playing the guitar to provide entertainment to the superclan - and to others beyond the clan.

Leadership in local clans still tends to go to the elders of a particular family, but leadership in superclans is more flexible - especially as more people arrive from different nations. In general superclan leaders arise from the discussions and collaborations of social media, with leadership and the willingness of people to follow leaders becoming self-apparent on a fairly instantaneious basis. Leadership conflicts in superclans are not uncommon, but the complex interdependencies built up for common projects holds factions to a minimum. The ground rules for superclan participation are clear, as are the grounds for expulsion by the rapidly expressed consensus of the superclan, so long-term conflicts within a superclan are fairly rare. Most people come and go on a purely voluntary basis, learning the benefits of global collaboration rapidly.

The superclan culture is an amalgam of local traditions and languages with the traditions and languages of their far-flung partners. Automated translation services have made it easier for people from many cultures to participate in this common culture, but the need to communicate in a common tongue when communications services are not in use is beginning to create some interesting twists in languages around the world. Education using common knowledge resources available on the global communications network makes people aware of other cultures more easily, but still teachers relate these to the specific cultures of their students. Eloise's children are already very familiar with Vietnamese and African culture and share images and experiences with other children who are a part of Eloise's superclan.

While superclans are an interesting development, their success on a global basis is hardly universal. Social media still enables more traditional heirarchical organizations to succeed, but the ability of superclans to form and reform rapidly to adjust to changing resources is challenging many cultures to consider more bottom-up forms of government and management. Mass manufacturing is still strong for many basic goods and those that require advanced technologies, but shifing market requirements is accentuating mass-scale custom manufacturing more and more. This has enabled technology to advance very rapidly, though with a greater variety of products and solutions within widely agreed standards managed via social media.

The other challenge from superclans is on a more fundamental level: many of superclan leaders are women, who thrive in the collaborative culture of superclans and who find the increasingly oral culture facilitated by embedded communications of great benefit. Men still play a very important role in superclans, but with territorial issues of less importance to superclans than the ability to collaborate amongst many groups warlike skills are of more limited use for ensuring their success. Notably the warlords of central Asia are less interested in the types of embedded communications used by Africa's superclans: their communicators are designed for more heavy filtering of communications that facilitate heirarchical command.

Eloise ponders this as she looks at her children who play hologram games while she is resting and reviewing communications with her peers. They are so different from many of the other children in the village, she muses. Protein computing communications implants are still fairly controversial with many people: ethical, religious and legal issues have arisen that have put some people with the implants at odds with many of their neighbors. She gets many smiles when she ventures into the village to shop, but they do not last as long as before.

She still communicates with local and distant merchants as always in person and via holograms, but she finds that she is developing a style of speaking and interests that are not always similar to many of her old friends who have not opted for protein communications implants. She still enjoys French culture and the people of Provence as much as ever, but increasingly she is not sure what it means to be French. With almost every waking moment she is aware of the world and her place in a new kind of social grouping through her "always on" social media.

On the horizon of technology is a new development that has many people even more up in arms: the ability to onpass protein communications through one's own genes. Experimental versions of this technology are enabling people to develop protein computing for the human mind that is not only programmable but as well capable of merging its structure into the evolutionary code of humans. Not only will global communications capabilities be born into humans: they will have the ability to onpass their programming to future generations. So much better to have a simple injection than that horrid operation, Eloise thinks. But...what will it mean? A touch of her grandfather's conservative outlook is still in her.

Eloise Cadoret's moment of rest is interrupted by a deep rumbling in the distance. She looks outside and notices a bright, glowing ball of fire passing through the air miles above her village. The comet fragment is headed towards its impact zone on the other side of the earth. It looks larger than she had expected. She decides to pay attention to the news alerts that she had dimmed out earlier from her consciousness. Now she knows why the icons were glowing so intensely. The comet fragment entering the earth's atmosphere is larger than expected. Much larger.

One Thousand Years from Now: A World Transformed

It is late spring in Provence, France. Much of the landscape appears as it always does at this time of year, now: covered in snow atop ice more than twelve feet thick. The glaciers flowing down from the mountains of the Alps are still to the north, but advancing by several feet every year. Small pieces of the rubble from the home of Georges Cadoret appear briefly sometimes in the summer months, but his village disappeared long ago, no match for the changing climate conditions in the aftermath of the cataclymic collision of a comet fragment nine hundred years ago.

When the comet struck in western Australia the impact triggered massive earthquakes and tsunamis around the earth and deluged the atmosphere with debris. Millions of people died within days of the catastrophic event and billions more within the year as the debris blocked out sunlight needed for crops to grow and clogged engines on airplanes, ships and other key forms of transportation. In all more than a third of the world's population died from the aftermath of the comet collision itself and a third more from the loss of habitats, crops and farm animals within five years.

A near cessation of much of the world's industrial activity after the blast combined with the shaded sunlight to trigger a major shift in the earth's climate. While there had been signs of an approaching period of rapid global cooling for several years, the heat from industrial output had masked its arrival in many ways. Now the glaciation of the world is well under way, with mean global temperatures already lower than at any time in the past twelve thousand years. As usable territory is constantly shifting and people are on the move much of the time, ownership of key assets has become less important than being able to collaborate using the assets that are available at the moment.

Humanity has been transformed in an instant from a self-confident civilization to increasingly isolated pockets of human beings struggling to find the answers to surviving and thriving in the aftermath of this radical shift in global climate. Food, once plentiful, became a rare commodity almost overnight, triggering massive famines, wars and a return in many places to a hunting culture. Nine hundred years after the collision of the comet fragment the world's population is beginning to stablize at about 300 million people. Knowledge of agriculture, medicines, health care, energy generation and other advanced technologies preserved from earlier years through global social media have helped to mitigate much human suffering, but the radical changes in habitats have left many people to focus on natural solutions available locally to address many of their problems.

This number of people, though a fraction of the world's population a thousand years ago,  actually turns out to be rather a miracle: for a number of years there was concern that the human race would disappear altogether, a victim of both unforseen circumstances and its own negativity in the face of them. But many people using the most advanced forms of social media were able to keep in touch with one another through this period of radical transition and to sustain key relationships. Global economies are more fragmented, but goods and services are beginning to flow again, though much of the earlier industrial output has been replaced by natural produce and high technology services for social media. Increasingly mobile lifestyles make consumer goods less of an option for many: there are only so many things that are worth carrying from place to place.

The highly redundant global knowledge repositories based on protein computing had their own casualties during the climate shift, but in their highly stable underground environments many of these knowledge repositories were able to adapt far more effectively than earlier technologies and kept people around the world in touch with one another and their common communications and knowledge assets. The lower population of humankind has provided them very ample ability to grow new storage that keeps up with people's communication and research needs.

Nations as they had been known once have virtually disappeared from the earth. With large centralized governments largely ineffective at managing life in a climate that is still shifting rapidly the adaptive and highly scalable relationships formed through social media provided a more sustainable blueprint for global and local cooperation that enabled people to build consensus rapidly on trade relationships, renewed efforts at food cultivation and developing technologies for the changed environment. People in this new era are used to building up trusted networks globally the way that used to be the purview of politicians and captains of industry. Investment capital has begun to flow again internationally, accelerating the growth of global business relationships.

One of the key models for success in this era has proven to be the "super-clan" model that had begun to develop in Africa and other regions nine hundred years earlier. Many of the world's successful civilizations are now based on super-clans, enabling many people to collaborate both locally and on a global scale and to change leadership peacefully through the informed consensus of people in their common social media communications networks. Leadership passes fairly fluidly from one person to another and may be ceded to people with special talents rapidly in times of crisis. Key assets are owned by the superclans, but within the clans ownership is not as important as participating in the activities that lead to mutual success. Wars are not unknown in this era but the complex networks of relationships built up through social media have kept many conflicts at bay, making it easier to come up with new value propositions in existing relationships rather than risking economic and social isolation.

Most successful in this environment are those who had inheritable protein computer communications implants tuned to the world's networked protein-based knowledge resources literally growing in caves across the world. With no additional technology required to reach these knowledge repositories, people with protein communications in their genes - people now known as "naturals" - have been able to build up knowledge and the relationships at an early age that help them to survive most effectively. While add-on technologies can enhance the power of the naturals to solve problems, their ability to use social media almost from their first conscious moments has proven quite advantageous.

But the genetics of the naturals have also created a schism of sorts in human society. People with external or electronic forms of social media technology are mating with naturals more infrequently, even though the dominant trait of their technology means that most children are born as naturals in "mixed marriages." The naturals seem to be relying more and more on one another to solve many of the earth's most challenging issues for survival. The culture of naturals is also creating a divide of sorts, with naturals appreciating certain kinds of stories, humor and collaborative practices and other people just not quite seeing things the same way.

There is occasional violence and controversy concerning their role in society, but in general the ability of the naturals to adapt very rapidly to local and global opportunities seems to allow them to anticipate many of these points of social friction and to move on. Some have decided to forego the friction and set up their own communities which still interact with others but that allow them to develop their own cultures in peace. While there is still intense competition for many natural resources, game hunting is beginning to flourish in some regions, including as their prey some formerly rare species that escaped from world zoos in the wake of the global cataclysm - including some earlier species regenerated via genetic engineering. The world's ecology is still frail and shifting, but the diversity of the world's species is beginning to reassert itself again, if but slowly. Regenerated herds of mammoths are grazing in many places where they had grazed more than ten thousand years ago.

In one of these all-naturals commnunities in Africa a child is born on this particular late spring morning, a boy who looks rather peculiar to his parents when he is first placed in their hands by the midwife. His head is rather large, longer than most baby's heads and a little more elliptical, and a somewhat small mouth. Other than these somewhat odd traits he seems like a perfectly normal baby, though, so his parents are delighted as most any other parents would be. They are aware of loved ones on their social network looking in on the birth, ready to bestow their social links to the new child, and of the network's identity guardian inquiring about the new child's name. The mother smiles, and says to the guardian in a rough French accent: "Il s'appelle Adam - Adam Cadoret."

Ten Thousand Years from Now: Another New Epoch

It is late spring in what used to be called the Provence region in France.  At the edge of a grassland stand a small band of people, clad in remarkably familiar clothes and with genetically engineered robots carrying equipment for camping and cooking.  The glaciers of the recent ice age have retreated far to the north, leaving behind a new landscape of plants and animals. Our hardy band of descendents are on the hunt, but the abundance of large game such as mammoths which their own ancient ancestors had been chasing through the recent glacial period for many of their meals has given away to a mix of bison, elks and plants with grains that are becoming popular foods for these nomads.

This band of hunters is on the move in part because of the seasonality of some of their favorite food sources, but also because they like it. They are the offspring of hundreds of generations of people who have become expert at living off of natural resources and at creating an abundance of natural resources through advanced genetic engineering. Most materials used in creating manmade goods are grown from bacteria farms that are easily created and moved: an abundance of foods can be made at will from a wide variety of genetic engineering techniques. Hunger and want is rare in this world, helping world populations to stabilize.

While these people are able to sustain themselves using highly advanced technologies, they are part of a culture that has chosen to live in harmony with its surroundings whenever possible, living off the land when opportunities present themselves but having the ability to create nutritious foods, clothing and shelter in many ways. They have more permanent camps and buildings to take advantage of less portable food sources and technologies at times, but in general they prefer a mobile lifestyle that enables them to enjoy many parts of the world as they please with their favorite people. For today this group of hunters will return to a light, round portable structure that resembles a Mongolian yurt - equipped with the latest solar and fuel cell power technologies, of course. Their portable food preservation equipment will allow them to share their hunting and gathering with many other people who have subscribed to their efforts. Nothing will go to waste and they will all both enjoy their efforts and profit from them.

As the people start returning to their camp, they pause and start laughing with one another. Someone in what was once called India has told a funny joke on their social network. They utter some chuckling sounds, but otherwise are fairly silent people. They are neo-naturals - the distant descendents of Adam Cadoret, people who have succeeded in large part by communicating most of the time through the networks in their minds that connect with people around the world constantly. Like Adam a quirk of evolution has accelerated their ability to communicate through their genetically embedded social networks without uttering speech. Many of their "conversations" seem to happen automatically on a global basis, with universal concepts passing from one person to another in a universal language that can be translated into the very localized dialects that are preferred by many tightly knit clans for private communications.

Through the social networks of the neo-naturals they are rarely alone in the sense that you or I would understand it. They are always aware of the world of neo-naturals and the world of neo-naturals is always aware of them. Privacy can still be enforced as needed and desired and people are free to build or block relationships as they please, but in most instances it is considered a breach of etiquette to be off the network: there is a deeply embedded code of altruism in their society which views everyone as an integral part of a greater organism and everyone succeeding through this organism. Unlike past civilizations, though, their ability to succeed without any one person or group of people owning communications with others has enabled this sense of altruism to build much more flexible bonds of allegiance. Leaders come and go for specific tasks very fluidly, sometimes providing global unity for days or years and other times enabling small groups like the hunting party to succeed.

While the neo-naturals enjoy their own company and are succeeding in surviving and thriving without much stress, there is still quite a bit of tension with clans of other species of humans. As populations of neo-naturals grew and became more successful than others in developing natural resources and high technologies, there were wars for many years as jealousies as tensions grew, eventually calling racial differences into question. The ability of neo-naturals to organize and respond more rapidly to military threats allowed them to prevail, however, even though on a daily basis such tensions are rare amongst their own kind.  With populations of neo-naturals now in the majority and other populations of human species managing most of their affairs in collaboration with the neo-naturals through social media, tensions have been much lower in recent centuries.

The climate shifts in recent years back towards more stable climate conditions have accelerated permanent settlements amongst the neo-naturals, but they are reluctant to emphasize this as a lifestyle. Individuals own things and trade thrives through advanced transportation networks that make it almost trivial to move from one place on the globe to another and to human settlements on other planets. But the ease of transportation has also made it far easier for people to be with others in their global social network at will, making getting tied down to any particular location as much of a burden as an advantage. Neo-naturals are automatically aware of where people and resources are at almost any time, so the fear of letting go of any one location as a permanent advantage for survival rarely arises.

In many ways the neo-naturals are little different from ourselves. They enjoy music, a good laugh, they get angry and sometimes even jealous. Much of what has made people humans for tens of thousands is still very much a part of them. But their ability to live naturally inside a global social network that has universal knowledge as a given for people's progress has changed their perspective on life and its goals. Individual accomplishments are recognized quickly in neo-natural society and rewarded oftentimes on an instantaneous basis. But for the most part it's the consensus of many people that drives the value in their society.

The passing accomplishments of individuals are rewarded on a personal basis, but it's the recognition itself that serves as most of the reward. Through the seemingly endless organic storage and sharing of global knowledge nobody's published thoughts will go to waste. Everything that has been published by someone will find its correct contextual value in time. There is no need for pyramids in this culture, for people will not be forgotten: their publishing and their virtual images live on. In a sense, social media has enabled everyone to enjoy a particular kind of immortality - making concerns about lifespan and death in general somewhat less troubling to many.

But on this late spring day philosophical thoughts about life and death are very far from the hunting party in Provence. They are enjoying a moment in the sun, laughing amongst themselves and with distant friends, breathing in the spring air and remembering collectively something fun that they did as children. The neo-naturals stop for a moment, form a line, and begin dancing in a herky-jerky fashion, arms pumping up and down, legs moving up and down madly in place. In their collective consciousness they pull up an ancient video of people around the world doing the same being led by someone named Matt. Then they see their social network appearing all around them, joining in the dance, everyone joining arms, pumping legs and arms, laughing - all for the joy of it.

The world has become a nation of publishers. And everyone is indeed a citizen.

Is This Our Future?

The futuristic scenarios that I have laid out in this chapter are pure speculation, of course, though hopefully speculation that will provoke some thinking about just how radical an impact social media may have on our work, our lives and our future over time. Our survival as a species is hardly guaranteed: our technologies help us to overcome many daunting challenges to human survival, but ultimately we are living organisms that have inherited most of our characteristics from animal ancestors in our distant past. What do the innards of a primate have to do with many of the challenges and opportunities facing our society today? Oftentimes it's hard to make that connection. Our technologies have so far outstripped our capabilities as living beings that we can lose sight of our humanness altogether.

But social media is a tool that asks us to reconsider how our technologies have evolved from beings who used social relationships based on language as our primary advantage for surviving and thriving in a complex and challenging world. The tools of publishing that were developed to form more complex societies have taken many thousands of years to evolve to the point where they are beginning to catch up with our natural abilities to communicate and to form valuable human relationships. In a sense we are only beginning to learn how to be truly human publishers. Our ability to influence, to endorse, to lead and to extend our bonds of altruism to others through publishing in ways that enrich our lives has just begun.

The good news that I get from considering the future of a world that is being transformed through social media publishing is that perhaps there is far more hope for humankind than we may be led to believe sometimes. Science fiction writers can create rather bleak visions of the future, with wars, sinister machines and other imagined evils plaguing humanity as much as over even more than they do today. As we can see from the scenarios in this chapter, though, a better future will not be a perfect future: even with our future evolution as living beings it's highly probable that we will remain as human as ever.

Yet what if our humanness grows in ways that call on our long-suppressed traits that have been in our genes for thousands of years? What if, using our own publishing, people decide on a different kind of future for themselves? It may take some humility on our part to get to that kind of future, but if social media can lead us to a world in which everyone's ability to publish to the world and to learn from the world takes on its full power perhaps there is good reason to hope for such a future.

Content Nation Future Rule #1: The future belongs to Content Nation.