Alex Asseily | Founder, Zulu Group
Introducing the series
My first technology company, Jawbone (née Aliph), was founded in 2000 in Silicon Valley. Its mission was to develop noise-suppression so damn good people could take mobile calls even in very noisy environments. Our tech was ultimately so much better (-20dB for the nerds) than existing solutions that DARPA (US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) sought us out to build something similar for its military helicopters. Noise suppression boosts coherent information (the caller’s voice) by removing noise that would block it—or at least force a “can you say that again.” So, in our modest way, we made communication between nodes in the human information network more efficient and, when we deployed millions of Jawbone headsets, we were making the human network as a whole significantly more coherent.
The realisation that our societies may adapt and evolve faster when their communication tools improve stuck with me. In 25 years swirling around technology, I’ve sought to understand what makes human information networks work. If we could really understand those dynamics, perhaps we could deliberately tune our networks to make our societies much more conscious and capable.
From my findings, a few quasi-theories emerged: we survive because we communicate; as bands of early humans became complex societies, our cultures became human information networks; the fidelity and speed of these networks sparked extraordinary survival benefits; and our tools extended these networks through time and space, creating meta-capabilities that drove several non-linear bursts of human progress over the past 5000 years.
What I find most interesting about these key moments in history is that they almost always were preceded by a plateau of stagnation and followed by periods of extraordinary cultural transformation. Likewise, these bursts tended to follow mass adoption of a communication tool or capability once limited to a small portion of humanity.
In other words, the most significant emergent properties of our human information networks have inevitably occurred when we invented new communication systems (to capture, store, process and transmit knowledge) that could become adopted by a critical mass of humans. Each major leap—from oral traditions to writing, from the printing press to the internet—has dramatically changed how quickly and widely ideas can be shared and, critically, how quickly ideas can be challenged and subsequently refined.
We will often hear Silicon Valley technologists talk about product ease-of-use, of open-source technologies, of mass-production and mass adoption. But these are not Silicon Age instincts; they are core instincts honed since the dawn of humanity itself. The human family has always sought ways to improve the speed and sophistication of its information networks and by extension to expand its emergent collective consciousness. I venture, as a premise of this piece, that such a tendency is instinctive rather than learned.
As with all evolution, new developments also came with new risks. For example, wireless radio transformed mass-media but it also meant that de-humanising propaganda could be delivered en-masse to susceptible populations and what followed was (on occasion) genocide. Likewise, while the Information Age (circa 1980 onwards) democratized access to knowledge - transforming communication for > 50% of the world’s 8 billion inhabitants - it has also been marked by new dangers. These dangers feel like they could outrun our ability to adapt: conspiracies, mental health crises tied to social media, deliberate distortions, viral disinformation, and propaganda.
These issues don't just affect us collectively, but form a central threat to life and liberty in the 21st century. Yet, in the challenge lies the opportunity. My own time as a technologist and human have left me confident about the future and our ability to advance our civilization once again beyond the current ‘plateau’.
Joseph Henrich says, “The key to understanding how humans evolved… is to recognize that we are a cultural species.” Our ability to pass knowledge forward—to accumulate it, refine it, and build upon it—has always defined our progress. This can be conceptualized as a collective ‘Puzzle of Reality’ that we’ve been solving together for millennia - not as individuals but as networks of humans forming a “collective brain”.
Today, that puzzle is evolving fast. Short-form media and networked platforms create denser content and faster feedback loops, allowing good ideas to spread—and bad ones to be challenged—at unprecedented speed. But information alone isn’t enough. What matters now is our capacity for discernment: like Jawbone’s headset, to filter the signal from the noise, to seek greater coherence within our explanations of the world, and to integrate this knowledge meaningfully into life.
In this series of four essays, I will argue that we may be entering a new epoch: The Age of Wisdom—a Cambrian explosion of coherent insight emerging from the chaos of modern information and outdated cultural models. I explore how we got here, what’s changing now, and where we might go next if we apply our capabilities intelligently.
To do so, I trace the arc of that transformation through three forces that have acted as drivers of wisdom:
Tools that shifted how we transmit and preserve ideas (e.g. writing)
Cognitive meta-capabilities that shape our understanding (e.g. science)
Network tipping points where these capabilities scaled to the many (e.g. mass literacy)
Think of this as a guide for how human information networks have evolved over time and how collective cognition might evolve in the coming decade - and what it takes for human civilization to grow wiser, not just bigger or richer.
Cultural Learning and The Development of Language
So how did human information networks start? Direct cultural learning (imitating to absorb skills and knowledge) let early humans pass wisdom from a lifetime (e.g. how to build a good shelter) to others—who in turn passed on their own, often unconsciously. The puzzle of reality would thus get ‘solved’ a little more with each piece of generational wisdom being added to it. With the arrival of spoken language, knowledge didn’t have to rely solely on demonstrations and observations - it could be taught and contextualised. Stories, instructions, warnings, and newly conceived symbolic concepts (gods, moral codes, numbers, minerals) could be distributed within a community. But oral transmission would suffer from the distortions and limitations of the human relays – an inter-generational game of Chinese whispers. Knowledge sufficiently distorted is no longer knowledge – it’s just noise.
The capacity for passing on knowledge to our descendants upgraded significantly when humans learned to write. Knowledge assembled within a single lifetime by one or more individuals could be transferred through space & time to others who might have had no direct experience of the subject matter or the person creating it. It gave a small group of educated scribes in each emergent civilization the ability to write enduring stories about Gods and kings, grain storage, hunting practices, philosophy, important battles, geometry, and so on – including some that live on to this day.
In 2500 BC, roughly 4 civilizations (Sumerians, Egyptians, Elamites, and Indus Valley) knew how to write but their writing systems were complex and hard to adopt. A first cultural plateau that lasted about 1500 years.
It was the invention of the phonetic alphabet (~1000 BC in Phoenicia) that made writing itself an ‘open source’ technology easily adaptable to any other spoken language (such as Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek or Latin) and allowed speakers of past oral traditions to instantly share their own unique accumulated knowledge and stories with their trading partners and descendants equally. The phonetic alphabet accelerated the adoption of writing because it associated a simplified symbol (letter) with a consonantal sound thus making writing more accessible and efficient to adopt. This represented the first major non-linear acceleration of information networks, culminating in equally great cultural development.
Intellectuals and proto-scientists across the Eastern Mediterranean began to exchange ideas through written correspondence, synthesize new paradigms, and develop better explanations of the world that would survive - ‘Recorded History’ itself was invented soon after, allegedly by Herodotus. This mode of communication would endure through several substantial empires and dense communities of thinkers, for another 3000 years, capturing and preserving for later generations the ideas of Confucius, Socrates, Archimedes, Chuang Tzu, Jesus of Nazareth, Marcus Aurelius, Muhammad, Al-Khwarizmi, and Alcuin of York, to name just a few. But, like early cell-phones, this technology was still relegated to a select few within each civilization. In a sense, these early human information networks had reached another plateau limited by scale.
Meta-Capability: Creative Thinking & The Scientific Method
In spite of the modest distribution of writing, the regular knowledge-exchange amongst the co-located thinkers of that period produced significant scientific breakthroughs including trigonometry (Hipparchus of Nicaea, 161-127 BCE) and experimental chemistry (Jābir ibn Hayyān of Kufa 721-815 CE). Most importantly, it gave birth to the scientific method (Ibn Al-Haytham c. 965–1040 CE), a conceptual tool for developing and testing explanations that supercharged our ability to understand and transform the world.
Al-Haytham said of his approach: “If learning the truth is the scientist’s goal… then he must make himself the enemy of all that he reads”. The emergence of this meta-capability cannot be understated. What makes science powerful, unlike inherited knowledge or belief systems that seek certainty, is that it assumes incomplete knowledge—our task is to keep adding pieces to the Puzzle of Reality and discarding those that no longer fit.
Equally, creative thinking is central to science and an essential meta-capability within human networks. The discoveries of Newton and Einstein were fundamentally creative acts later confirmed by observation (e.g. “riding on a beam of light”). When attempting to advance collective wisdom, imagination is indeed more important than knowledge (credit A. Einstein). “Humans don't just observe the world; we create explanations that were not logically deducible from previous data” as David Deutsch astutely argues in ‘The Beginning of Infinity’.
Deutsch goes on to articulate that humans are "universal explainers" — capable, in principle, of understanding anything that can be understood. This then leads us to create tools that allow us to better observe the universe (microscope, interferometer) and then manipulate matter to advance our goals (iron smelting, optics, rockets, and semiconductors). (It’s worth noting that humans created the tools of language and writing before becoming universal explainers because language informs abstract thought).
Meanwhile, the writing, translation, and diffusion of information remains a core driver of creative thinking as metacapability. Einstein’s breakthroughs in 1901 rest on centuries of discovery and deliberate cultural transmission between thinkers separated often by thousands of years and thousands of miles — Indian mathematicians’ zero, Arab algebra, Newton’s laws and calculus —all woven into a conceptual fabric that let him conceive space-time. We will explore the methods of this transmission further in the second article of this series.
The Importance of Error Correction
Part of what makes our ‘collective brains’ so effective is that their nodes (individual people) play the role of identifying incoherence and errors in preceding theories. ‘Error correction’, what Deutsch calls the process of identifying an idea that doesn’t make sense, is what fuels progress. Feedback loops—criticism, testing, refinement, ruthless elimination of bad ideas—are the engines of that progress. By having a large diversity of thought and experiences, the chances of proper error correction increase - as the network expands, so too does its capacity for judging the quality of its own thinking; thus consciousness also grows. Therefore, the capacities and emergent properties of a network become greater the more informed nodes it contains and the better equipped those nodes are at correcting errors.
Following the Islamic Golden Age, the scientific method would remain so localized, freedom of thought and creativity still so rare, that it almost disappeared entirely. It turns out that inherited cultural knowledge (much of it unconscious) can easily vanish if the people and documents tasked with preserving it disappear. Thankfully, shoots of this meta-capability would begin to (re)grow in Europe via the Renaissance but continued to be limited by a shortage of new writing, minute literacy rates, very long feedback loops, and periods of intolerance.
The Wrap
So far we’ve observed the following:
Writing allowed collective intelligence to build across generations without dispersing. As knowledge accumulated across time and space, thinkers were able to build on each other’s ideas and form a shared intellectual foundation.
The phonetic alphabet made writing scalable. Simple phonetic symbols opened literacy to far more people and sped idea sharing between cultures.
Creativity and the scientific method gave us tools to explain, test, and correct ideas—accelerating our mastery of the world. It allowed the accumulated cultural knowledge to be explained and refined within shorter time-frames—laying the groundwork for a more coherent human network.
These breakthroughs didn’t just improve how we stored and transmitted information; they expanded the very boundaries of human cognitive capacity. For the first time, individuals could reach beyond the limits of their known lifetimes and local communities, transmitting insight and coherent explanations across centuries and continents. This was humanity’s first great Time & Space Shift - a civilizational leap that allowed knowledge to accumulate, compound, and evolve. It is astounding that thousands of years after they were composed, we can still read the writings of Plato (c. 428–423 BC) or the Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2100–1200 BCE).
But despite these advances, access to written knowledge remained restricted for centuries. Creativity and error correction – the twin engines of progress – were locked inside small localised clusters of thinkers. In effect, civilization had learned how to develop and preserve cultural wisdom, but not yet how to spread it widely or refine it fast. We could read Plato but couldn’t debate him.
And so, for all its brilliance, this early system was fragile – because without a capacity for generating coherence (feedback loops) at scale, civilization teeters between stagnation and collapse. The world was waiting for its next major information technology unlock – a new tool or tipping point that could trigger another avalanche of progress.
In Part 2, we’ll explore how mass replication of content and fast connectivity – via the printing press, mass literacy, and transportation – unleashed the next burst of cultural progress, and how the human network, now bigger and faster than ever, entered a new phase of evolution, with ever tighter positive (and negative) feedback loops.
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The next instalment of this series will be released in July 2025. In the meantime, for the comments or your own thoughts, consider what responsibilities we each have as nodes in this human information network; and which (new) tools could foster more coherence, rather than noise?
The Zulu take
European (day)dreaming:
For a generation, the EU promised peace, prosperity, and freedom of movement. Today? Young people face economic stagnation, rising authoritarianism, and borders hardening once again. What are we rebuilding in its place?
Foreign Students in America:
America lures the brightest minds, then strands them. If they can’t return home and can’t stay, what future are we offering the world’s talent?
Political Flip Flop:
When you campaign for years on peace-making, it’s one thing to take longer than hoped, another altogether to a war-monger. Whatever one’s position on Iran, should there not be greater consequences for so great a betrayal of your voters?
Are democracies inherently good:
Sadly not, because history proves otherwise but also if a majority of voters in a democracy are brainwashed to believe in something awful, then it’s no different from having an evil dictator
- Herodotus