Alex Asseily | Founder, Zulu Group
Introduction
In 2008, Peter Gabriel introduced me to the inventor of a clever solar-powered, Bluetooth mesh-networking technology called Pencil: it would allow the poorest, least literate, people in remote Africa to share a short voice note, which would then ‘hop’ from device to device (including devices attached to roaming animals) until it reached the intended recipient. Something as basic as hailing a doctor from a town too remote to reach quickly on foot might save a life (credit to Tom Donaldson, Pencil’s inventor). Beyond its technical ingenuity, the innovation embodied the human drive to build information networks—even in rural communities with no access to phones and little literacy.
In fact, African countries eventually leapfrogged into the mobile era, skipping landlines altogether. I remember seeing the data—less than 2% mobile penetration around 2000, soaring to over 50% within a decade—and being astounded. This wasn’t merely a tech upgrade; it was a seismic shift in how people connected, learned, traded, and built communities. Some argue it was the single most impactful intervention of that era in Africa.
This rapid adoption wasn’t just driven by curiosity or convenience— humans are wired to build 'collective brains' (Henrich): dynamic information networks that grow through imitation, shared knowledge, and communication. This instinct to connect and co-create, I believe, lies at the heart of every major advance in civilization.
At its most basic level, the human information network is a system of nodes and links—individual minds connected through flows of information, collaboration and meaning. Its output—ideas, decisions, breakthroughs—depends on each node’s cognitive strength, and the speed and clarity of its links.
These seemingly chaotic networks give rise to powerful emergent properties, but only under the right conditions. Three critical elements shape their potential:
Node capacity—the individual’s cognitive power, most often expressed through literacy, learning, critical thinking, and creativity.
Connection speed—the bandwidth of our communication, or how fast and richly we can share ideas.
Error correction protocols—the social and technological systems that refine signals, weed out noise, and steer the network toward coherence and truth.
Understanding these principles is, I believe, key to building a new era of human information networks—ones that don’t just process more data but amplify wisdom and collective insight at planetary scale.
In Africa’s case, mobile technology increased connection speed, enabling faster collaboration within societies that had no phones of any kind. This, in turn, drove economic growth and improved health outcomes.
In 2025, we are living at the intersection of powerful information technologies: smartphones in every pocket, boundless streams of new content, and AI systems that grow more capable by the day. It's natural to ask where this is heading— whether it is strengthening our societies or weakening them. To answer this, I believe we can look backward—to one of the most transformative leaps in human history.
In this article (Part 2 of the four-part Age of Wisdom series), I explore how mass adoption of the printing press drove an unprecedented rise in literacy—a major upgrade in average node capacity. As literate communities multiplied and books flooded into circulation, emergent effects reshaped collective cognition. Improvements in transportation and connectivity then accelerated the speed of ideas, fueling faster error correction and thus increasingly better explanations of the world.
Parts 3 and 4 will delve into digital networks and non-human nodes including AI, but for now, our focus is on how human information networks underwent a major upgrade through a surge in literacy and connectivity.
First, human information networks before 1400 were extremely fragile because hardly any books existed
Imagine waking up tomorrow in the year 1450 CE. You can still read and write but there are no printed books, no newspapers, no articles, no post-it notes, and no webpages of course. You’re lucky, though, because you live in London, which has one relatively large library containing approximately 1,000 distinct manuscripts - just a handful from different historical periods: a wrinkled copy of Dante’s divine comedy, an ancient Greek Bible, some Roman codices, and a copy of Virgil’s Aeneid.
It could take a monk six weeks to bring a single manuscript from Rome to London. Already in 1450, it was clear that creating and preserving knowledge gave cities a competitive edge—economically and educationally.
In reality, medieval-London-you are participating in a human information network that stretches back 2500 years to the first writings –linking ancient ideas and discoveries to your present—enabling you to build and improve on them through critical thinking and experimentation.
Fewer than one in ten people in your city can read—and most of them are monks or scribes. Not for lack of curiosity, but because books are so rare that hundreds must share a single copy. It’s a scene not unlike computing in 1975, when a scientist might queue for time on a mainframe, crunching a sliver of atmospheric data and wondering if this ‘computer thing’ would ever go mainstream. Was it because she loved sharing machines? Or because computers weren’t yet widely accessible or affordable? With hindsight, the answer is obvious.
Back to 1450: the elites mostly viewed mass literacy with skepticism or hostility. Literacy was a tool of religious, political, and intellectual control, and expanding it was seen as a threat to the status quo.
They had no idea what was coming.
Earlier, I explained how human information networks had stretched across space and time, powered by the spread of writing—and they had even planted the seeds of Ibn Al-Haytham’s scientific method. But for all their brilliance, these networks were quite fragile. Their technology wasn’t computer servers and fiber optics—it was stacks of animal parchment. Durable, but rare and precious.
In some cases, a single brittle manuscript was all that linked a few monks in the late medieval era to groundbreaking ideas from antiquity. The fragility of the network couldn’t be clearer than in the case of Thales of Miletus (600 BCE) —a Phoenician philosopher who lived in present-day Turkey. He was one of the first to explain natural phenomena without relying on myth, and Aristotle even credits him as the founder of natural philosophy, a precursor to science. And yet none of his original work survived—likely lost to time, the fire in Alexandria’s library, or the fragility of writing material that carried it.
Even the best ideas can vanish if the network is too fragile to carry them forward. Examples of European ‘reinventions’ of earlier discoveries include: germ theory (Ibn Sina), blood circulation (Ibn al-Nafis), and calculus (Bhaskara II).
"When the Library of Alexandria was destroyed, it was as if the brain of the ancient world had been wiped out." - Carl Sagan
Second, the mass adoption of the printing press drove an unprecedented rise in literacy—and a huge upgrade in collective cognition
The invention of the movable-type printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1450 sparked a revolution—in the scale of idea distribution and in its resilience. For the first time, ideas could truly survive war, censorship, and time. Religion was the first to ride this wave, followed soon after by science and mathematics.
Books—identical, reproducible, and portable—began to circulate widely, accelerating the cross-pollination of ideas. This surge laid the groundwork for the Reformation and eventually the Enlightenment. In 1400, only about 5% of Western Europeans could read. By 1700, literacy had climbed to 50%. That meant when Newton's Principia was published in 1687, it could reach—and reshape the worldview of—half the population.
At the time, books were the entirety of multimedia. They unlocked access to the distilled ideas of hundreds of disparate thinkers, the lived experiences of people across cultures, and the collective wisdom of civilizations never seen firsthand. In other words, a cognitive superpower available to anyone who could read. And as books became more widely available, societies responded. Literacy surged. A literate population meant more collective brainpower—more problem-solving, more innovation, more adaptability, and inevitably more economic growth.
Suddenly, books weren’t rare artifacts—they were multiplying, diversifying, and dropping in cost. Ideas could travel farther and faster than ever before.
Crucially, the link between book production and rising literacy wasn’t just a happy coincidence: it was almost certainly causal. As economist Jeremiah Dittmar notes, “between 1500 and 1600, cities that adopted the press saw literacy and intellectual output increase significantly faster than those that did not.” The machine didn’t just print books—it rewired entire societies to process information at scale by upgrading the cognitive capacities of ten times as many nodes in the network and providing a dependable and cheap medium for ideas to be exchanged and refined.
As literacy spread, the mixing of ideas led to new discoveries, inventions, and ultimately a shift in collective consciousness
Third, improvements in transportation and connectivity increased the speed of idea exchange, fueling faster error correction and better explanations
Books often emerge from deep, lifelong focus: think Plato, Spinoza, Newton, Galileo. As literacy expanded, their texts seeded baseline knowledge into collective consciousness. But books are one-way communication: without dialogue, there’s little room for rapid collaboration or correction.
Before the mid-19th century, long-distance exchange remained slow. Collaboration required co-location or months of correspondence. Intellectual hubs like Syracuse, Baghdad, Andalusia, Florence, and Paris thrived because thinkers lived close enough for frequent exchange and informal peer review. But proximity also limited cultural diversity and, with it, opportunities for cross-cultural error correction.
Take Alexander von Humboldt, the German naturalist who traveled through South America in 1799 to document its ecosystems. His book, Relation historique du voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent, became an international sensation. Long before radio or the Internet, readers across Europe craved fresh perspectives.
Humboldt’s vivid accounts inspired a young Charles Darwin—just one generation later. And yet, they never met. Darwin could read Humboldt, but not engage with him. Even with steamships and telegraphs a few decades later, they might have formed a true intellectual partnership.
Ironically, Darwin would benefit enormously from faster connectivity. When On the Origin of Species was published in 1859—well into the steam age—it sold out 1250 copies on day one. Within a year, the book had ignited fierce debates across Europe and North America—not just among scientists, but among theologians, philosophers, and an increasingly literate public.
Evolution gained traction with surprising speed. Among naturalists, it saw early acceptance; among critics, serious engagement. More importantly, Darwin’s ideas marked a shift in the global information network—where transformative concepts could cross borders and disciplines in months, reshaping science, religion, and public discourse. It was a turning point—not just for biology, but for the speed and scope of human thought.
This acceleration was enabled by mid-19th-century innovations in connectivity. Steam-powered printing presses allowed On the Origin of Species to be mass-produced and widely distributed. Newspapers and journals carried the debate to an increasingly literate public. The expanding postal system let Darwin and other scientists exchange letters quickly across countries, while public lectures and scientific societies fostered live debate.
There was an opportunity for error correction to occur within a matter of months. These tools together created a powerful information network that made it possible for Darwin’s theory to reach—and challenge—the world’s thinking and ultimately for a coherent theory to emerge and to be accepted. What would have taken generations, perhaps centuries, to refine could now occur within a few years.
Fourth, faster connectivity generated a huge acceleration of coherent ideas and groundbreaking innovation
By the time of the telegram and the industrial revolution, a letter could travel from Bern to Copenhagen or Cambridge in under a week. This acceleration in communication made the physicists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries remarkably effective. They not only shared their work rapidly, but invited critique, fostering an environment of continuous error correction and collaborative improvement. Within their scientific niche (physics) they developed a deeper understanding of reality through fast, rigorous feedback loops among diverse yet philosophically aligned minds.
Stripping away the celebrity of figures like Bohr, Heisenberg, Planck, or Einstein (not to mention their life partners and lab assistants), it's more accurate to see Quantum Mechanics and Relativity as products of a dynamic, transnational network (Germany, France, Denmark, UK, Switzerland, etc) with a shared epistemic goal. They functioned as a collective brain: slow by digital standards but powerfully focused and evidently very effective at developing better explanations of the world.
The ‘Puzzle Of Reality’ gained new pieces—scientific theories, wiser ways of living, better medicine, etc, as the human network grew faster at digesting information and refining a coherent worldview. This shift gave rise to the Enlightenment: human reason became accepted (in theory at least!) as the primary source of knowledge and authority, rather than tradition, superstition, or religious dogma. A surge in literacy and collective thinking revealed that societies—and humans—could improve through education, science, and rational reform.
The Enlightenment was perhaps the first widely accepted philosophical theory that advocated for deliberately enhancing human information networks (even if it was not described that way).
Skepticism of religious, monarchal, and traditional authority led to political and social revolutions (American, French, Russian, Chinese) as shifting societies sought better explanations and the freedom to evolve. It seems inevitable that nodes with increasingly similar cognitive capabilities would seek the same rights to participate in and ultimately shape the networks in which they participated, despite divisions of labor.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” (US Declaration of Independence).
It’s worth noting, however, that convergence towards coherent theories in the natural sciences and mathematics happened because these fields rest on empirical and logical foundations that offer clear criteria of success: predictive accuracy. This is reinforced by standardized methods and peer review. Even so, some will still resist well-evidenced theories for psychological reasons — “science advances one funeral at a time," Max Planck famously said.
Domains like ethics, politics, art, and religion are even more deeply entangled with values, identity, and culture. They deal not just with what is provably true, but with what matters and to whom —a hierarchy of needs that is driven by physiology, habit, competition for resources, and mythology. These areas lack universal methods of adjudication, and so, by their nature, must sustain a diversity of worldviews. They don’t so much converge as coexist in (sometimes violent) tension. When we agree on the protocols for co-existence, we create laws and alliances; and then abide by them.
All aspects of human culture - from science to religion and art - are emergent properties of a human information network. Our lives have meaning because we imitate, process information, and connect with others (sometimes divine) to achieve our goals. As the network becomes more sophisticated, those within it necessarily collaborate better through non-zero sum dynamics (win-win rather than win-lose). Greater network sophistication should therefore lead to greater coherence of thought and higher consciousness. The key question is how to accelerate that process.
The Wrap
The Cambrian explosion sparked by Gutenberg’s press undeniably transformed the world—but major weaknesses in the human information network remained, limiting its potential to generate, refine, and share knowledge at scale.
Mass literacy and faster communication expanded the bandwidth of collective human thought. Science and mathematics began to converge with greater frequency, driven by clear standards: accuracy, repeatability, and logical proof. Feedback loops—fast, diverse, and rigorous—became the engine of progress notably in science and technology. Lastly, societies recognized in time that each individual had an equal capacity (and human right) for learning, critical thinking, and contribution to the network.
But despite these advances, the system remained quite limited:
Fragmented networks: Cultural and linguistic silos continued to divide communities, limiting mutual understanding. Even as radio and television spread information further and faster, they often became tools of propaganda—because they were one-way. Without dialogue, error-correction couldn't keep up.
Limited link speed: Communication technologies advanced, but most idea exchange still depended on slow, physical infrastructure. Real-time collaboration across long distances remained difficult for most people.
Uneven cognitive capacity: Literacy spread, but the habits of critical thinking lagged behind. The ability to question, reason, and self-correct was far from universal—and in many places, even basic literacy remained a barrier. Perhaps more importantly, outside of science and mathematics, critical thinking was slowed by attachment to myth and political dogma.
In Part 3, we’ll explore how human information networks became digitally linked—some now operating at the speed of light—opening the door to a true collective brain for humanity. But speed isn’t enough. Networks can amplify truth or distortion, insight or confusion. Propaganda distorts human information networks by hijacking one-way communication channels where feedback loops are weak or absent. Without mechanisms for dialogue or error correction, these systems become vulnerable to manipulation by narrow interests. Instead of amplifying truth, they propagate simplified or misleading narratives. This fragmentation undermines the very strengths that make human information networks powerful: diversity, creativity and the capacity for collective self-correction.
The real challenge is crafting both technological and cognitive systems (for ourselves) that foster coherent thinking at scale.
The future of the network won’t be defined by faster links, but by more capable nodes—and the consciousness they embody. That starts with us, and with the systems we choose to build alongside us: ones that make our societies not just more connected, but more resilient, coherent, and wise.
The Zulu take
Everyone’s A Journalist.
The Gaza conflict has turned every citizen into a reporter and commentator. It has also revealed the limits and narrow interests of corporate media. What’s emerging is demand for authentic independent journalists with a maniacal thirst for truth who answer only to their audiences.
We’re Getting Coldplayed.
If only our media admonished our political leaders for permitting senseless wars of devastation instead of parading our business leaders for a naughty concert hug.
$4 Trillion NVIDIA, $0 Compute Doctrine.
NVIDIA’s market cap is now worth more than France’s GDP and the US still lacks a serious ‘compute strategy’. China is treating AI infrastructure like crude oil - the West should imitate that fast.
Campus Protests vs. Institutional Lag.
From Columbia to Sciences Po’, student protests are outpacing the institutional playbook. University leadership still operates in committees and formal statements. Meanwhile the ‘student streets’ run on livestreams, memes, and moral momentum.
— Immanuel Kant, 1784