by Hugh M. Lewis

Deep in our remote past, hominid groups were scattered across Africa and Asia in small and relatively isolated groupings. Survival rates were probably poor for most of these groupings, compared to standards today. These groupings exhibited a vast range of cultural adaptations that evolved more or less in isolation, though from fairly early on local and regional exchange networks developed, especially tied to mate-exchange and possibly warfare and slavery. No doubt, fire was rediscovered in many different times and places by many different peoples before it became "common knowledge" for all humankind. Similarly so with almost any invention or discovery of noteworthy significance to our shared human cultural heritage.

By the dawn of the Age of European "Discovery" and colonial imperialism in the world, around the 15th Century, the picture of the Non-European world especially was that of literally thousands of human cultural groupings, spread across the entire earth's surface, each locked in its own relatively separately little world, with its own evolutionary trajectory. Thousands of parallel worlds were assumed to be  either frozen in time, "as peoples' without history" or alternative as each evolving in its own independent trajectory. Racial and religious beliefs tended to reaffirm and validate this impression of human culture.

Attention to closer detail demonstrates several things not quite right about this kind of anthropological picture of the world. Human civilizations had been developing from early on in many independent regions, tying together and integrating larger and larger areas and regions, and even fusing on occasion at inter-regional levels in the form of imperial state civilizations. From fairly early, pre-Neolithic periods, evidence demonstrates the development of exchange networks and transportation systems that were far-flung and far-reaching in their cultural diffusive impact. Finally, it is now a known principle that human cultural transmission systems are horizontal and diagonal as well as vertical, and that they do not necessarily completely recapitulate genetic information transmission systems. This is primarily the result of the environmental factor and influence in human learning and adaptation. Though tradition-bound cultures have tended to be conservative, they were also quite adaptive and flexible in their requirements for survival. The consequence was a basic openness to new inputs of resources, upon multiple levels, in a controlled and appropriated manner. Even European "Discovery" and the resulting phases of imperial colonialism on a global scale represented these self-same principles, in spite of the ideological justifications and symbolic rationalizations used to legitimate unfair policies and exploitative violent practices against other human beings.

The argument of this brief article today is that the cultural processes that were occurring 100,000 thousand years ago in the development of human systems, continue in the same basic way today, albeit in a manner that is transformed and entirely more sophisticated.

Fewer and fewer are the "parallel" worlds of yesteryear, in relative isolation developing along their own conservative trajectories, prone to sudden acculturative disruption and historical "accidents." More and more are the roles of horizontal diffusion/transmission systems of cultural knowledge and information dissemination, with the consequence of the emergence of increasing frequency and increasing distribution of what I would call local-to-global simultaneous E-Culture. This simultaneous e-culture is the cross-weave that ties together the diverse tendrils of human group or ethno-cultural/ethno-national development.

In a structurally stratified world, parallel worlds continue to evolve in their own directions, but these directions are decreasingly independent of one another, increasingly relativized to a larger global context of systemic relationship to one another, and increasingly "individualized" or modularized on an individual level in the sense that individual sets of interests and trajectories of development are becoming of greater significance than predefined group trajectories.

The overall consequences of this developing pattern of human systems development appear to be manifold, and include the following points:

1. Sharing of information across conventional/traditional group boundaries, upon multiple levels, has the outcome of rendering these boundaries more porous, more flexible, and "fuzzier"--perhaps even more than many political interests and leaders would like when their power-base depends upon cultivation of strongly chauvinistic ethnocentric orientations and projective prejudice in the maintenance of internal hierarchical control and solid in-group/out-group boundaries. In short--collective human consciousness expansion due to such open and free global transmission has the tendency in the long run to undermine the structural basis for social authoritarian institutionalization and symbolic legitimization.

2. Individual needs and interests, versus the needs and interests of the small or intermediate collective, tend to rise in proportional importance and valuation compared to the latter sets of interests. This is due in part to the new possibilities for empowerment and possibility for becoming being realized at the individual level as a consequence of newly emergent "simultaneous networks" that cross-cut and transcend conventional or traditional knowledge and social relational boundaries. 

3. Socio-structural patterns of stratification and relation on multiple levels (individual, familial/face-to-face, local, regional and global) are becoming at once more horizontally displaced, and more complexly embedded. This will reflect and be reflected in systems relation to shifting patterns of resource distribution, and shifting management and methods of resource management. Conventional bureaucratic/administrative systems are becoming increasingly costly and dysfunctional to maintain, and many of its control functions can be easily automated as intrinsic to intelligent computer-based systems.

4. Traditional and conventional systems will become increasingly strained across generational boundaries especially, as well as across communal cleavages separating ethnocultural groupings, albeit in complex socio-grid patterns of stratification. The rise of simultaneous e-culture should not be received as an all good thing--it is a mixed blessing by any definition, and betokens a futuristic Pandora's box of many new diseases and problems people will have to deal with. One of the central problems will be e-alienation, increasing anomie, atomization and isolation of a highly individualized global E-society. There are as result increasing degrees of freedom for the exercise of human manipulation, exploitation and violence, especially of aberrant and counter-cultural forms. There is general derepression of many libidinal impulses of the ego, stimulated by an "Las Vegas-Tokyo" style glitz, as well as the lure of almost totally vicarious relationships and behaviors as the result of leading "virtual" (i.e., unreal, non-material) lives.

5. The emerging Simultaneous E-culture will be prone to attack, to deliberate, concerted and idiosyncratic efforts at "over-control" or "under-control" by gaining access to the hubs of such systems, and to region wide or possibly even global catastrophic failure--"global digital black-outs." It will beget a global human society that will share many of these same attributes, albeit in behavioral and non-virtual ways.

In closing, I would suggest that if warfare has traditionally been "economics by another means" then world-wide digital integration of human systems may result in the possibility of "waging" war by other, non-violent means. What we can say about Global E-Culture is that gone forever is the sense of isolation that separates people into competing groups, and gone for ever as well is the symbolic basis for the sense of relative ethnocentric rationalization that separated groups of people into parallel little worlds. If all people have not yet hooked onto the information highway, and have not yet caught up with the modern world, the proviso should be kept in mind by everyone, including Bill Gates, that the faster this happens, the better for everyone involved (i.e., the entire species of Homo sapiens).

General Systems Essays, Vol. I