Jorg Imberger
University of Miami, USA
Title: Consequences of connecting human tribal behaviour to the internet
Biography
Biography: Jorg Imberger
Abstract
Human organizational tribal social structures have developed over 150,000 years of human evolution. The results is a
nested hierarchical set of sub-organizational groupings, consisting of family groups at the base, social, religious and
activity groupings all functioning within an overlaid governance structure with an elder acting as a leader overseeing the
behavior of all the subgroups. The tribal structure provides a reference point for individual norms, as a ladder to advance and
learn new skills and most importantly, it provided the organizational response structure against real and or perceived external
threats. Advances in communication technologies provided the impitus organizational adaption; first individual to individual
communications via intuition, then gestures, languages, writing, mail, telephone, telex, emails then it became non specific via
websites and social media. Communication is now global via the cloud. This has cut the two way communication within the
human tribal structures which we hypothesise may account for our society’s woes with depression and narcissism. Block-chain
technology is returning individual’s identities, by removed the need for intermediaries and permanent connections online.
The identity, however, is in a global context. In this talk I explore the consequences of breaking the traditional connections
that humans had developed through using our eyes, smell, hearing and touch and replacing these connections with a global
connectivity. Taking the past response of indigenous people when overrun by invaders, the business as usual scenario, will
likely bring a huge increase in mental illness. To insure against this possibility it is essential that humans adjust their tribal way
of operating. The tools to cycle back to tribal connections in a global space are at hand and only involve some straight forward
engineering infrastructure adjustments, changes in our education curricula and a willingness to accept that the world is now
finite.