Outsourcing Consciousness
This is an exclusive subscriber-only preview of the first six chapters of Rusty Guinn’s upcoming book Outsourcing Consciousness: How Social Networks are Making Us Lose Our Minds. The book explores how evolution, polarization, and technology are slowly transforming humanity into a hive mind - and what we can and can't do about it.
Introduction: David Bowie’s Alien
David Bowie was right.
Social networks aren’t a tool. They are an alien force that transforms human consciousness.
Chapter 1: Overhearing Ourselves
Shakespeare invented the human by inventing a device which spoke the language of consciousness:
Story.
Chapter 2: What is Story?
There are a lot of ways to define a “story.”
But to understand how story interacts with human consciousness requires us to be more specific.
Chapter 3: Caliban’s Garden
Man’s road to becoming a storyteller began with a single step.
That step kicked off millions of years of co-evolution of the human brain, society, language – and our relationship with story.
Chapter 4: Out of Eden
If we care about the influence of social networks on our minds, why are we talking about bipedalism and the 8 million year cycle of co-evolution it kicked off?
Because it defined how our young were parented, how we taught them, and what they were exposed to. Because it changed how our symbolic brains evolved.
Chapter 5: The Axe that Never Was
Our brains evolved to tell stories before they evolved to speak.
This has fundamental implications for our susceptibility to communication in the networked age.
Chapter 6: The Possibility Engine
Humans evolved to acquire symbols as quickly as possible.
Language and storytelling evolved to be acquirable as easily as possible.
That’s why our tales spin us.