MAIN IDEA:

This book is about the history of parallel development of two methods of organization used by human societies and their interaction. Here is the author’s statement of the purpose:” This book is about the past more than it is about the future; or, to be precise, it is a book that seeks to learn about the future mainly by studying the past, rather than engaging in flights of fancy or the casual projection forward of recent trends. There are those (not least in Silicon Valley) who doubt that history has much to teach them at a time of such rapid technological innovation. Indeed, much of the debate I have just summarized presupposes that social networks are a new phenomenon and that there is something unprecedented about their present-day ubiquity. This is wrong. Even as we talk incessantly about them, the reality is that most of us have only a very limited understanding of how networks function, and almost no knowledge of where they came from. We largely overlook how widespread they are in the natural world, what a key role they have played in our evolution as a species, and how integral a part of the human past they have been. As a result, we tend to underestimate the importance of networks in the past, and to assume erroneously that history can have nothing to teach us on this subject.”

MY TAKE ON IT:

I think both methods, networks, and hierarchies, are necessary components of human existence, always intertwined and codeveloped. However, they always have different weights and impacts on the conditions of human societies depending on the phase of human development we are looking at. Judging by what we know about great apes that had developed from a common ancestor some 4 million years ago in parallel with humans such as chimpanzees, we started with small hierarchical bands based on individual physical power and psychological aggressiveness.  Chimpanzees are still there, maintaining hierarchy as the dominant method of organization. Humans, however, moved in a different direction by developing language and more complex brain structures that allowed for a high level of cooperation in hunting, mutual help, and building conspiracies to overthrow whatever megalomaniac attempted to build a hierarchy with self at the top. Over the period of tens of thousands of years, this produced highly egalitarian hunting-gathering societies of people with genotypical and phenotypical features that made them strive to obtain the optimal ratio between being a part of a network of cooperating individuals adjusting to each other needs and free agents taking care about one’s own needs. Then we had about 20,000 years of hiatus in the equality mode when human expansion all over the world forced transfer to militaristic/agrarian societies in which fights for territories and suppression of opposition made hierarchy the most appropriate form of society for individual survival, even if it more often than meant live in misery.  Now, with the new technologies of resource acquisition and networking, stabilization of population, and soon disappearance of the need to work for a living, humanity could minimize the need for hierarchies and all this violence and coercion that are inevitable features of hierarchy. This process is not simple and will probably take a few decades, but I believe we will eventually get there.