Our evolution as a species happens in more than one realm. We biologically evolve. We socially evolve. We culturally evolve. Our biology hasn't had to change all that much since we first walked out onto the savanna. Sure, some minor mutations here and there to fight local diseases and the like, nothing major. Homo sapiens is a pretty steady definition. Socially, we've had to evolve a few times. The invention of writing. Gunpowder. Trade. The invention of printed text, paper, and so on. There was some rocking of the boat, but the seas settled and society changed to deal with this new technology in short time. Then came the telgraph, the telephone, then the television all in quick succession. The airplane then within a lifetime, men walking on the moon. Soon after that, the rise of home computing, the early internet, and then the World Wide Web, in only 21 years. And in those 30 short years since WWW was unleashed upon the world by unwitting programmers, a world still rocked by violent and frequent waves on the boat, life is practically unrecognizable to that of the year 1990.
The cultural evolution happens once the rocking subsides and people can grok how this new tech is going to fit into their lives, for better or worse. Leaders slowly get used to the fact of a printing press. People get used to loud oily machines doing their farm work. The idea of a telegram is cemented into just an everyday wonder of modern life.
But fucking hell, we're at a pace now where we can barely breath. Our brains are still wired for the small group, simian communication that made us the alpha predators of the entire planet. Our society is still wired for 30 years ago. Our culture is wired even worse for what it needs to be. Everyone knew the Atomic Age was a double-edged sword of Damacles. The Information Age is too.
And no one saw it coming, everyone just thought the internet would unlock this wonderful utopian world of information flowing everywhere, they just assumed that information would be true. Our minds aren't wired for social media. Our minds aren't wired for any of this. We're not ready. And until we blow ourselves up it's not going to slow down or stop anytime soon either. We're in the vertical looking part of the exponential curve. The world is a massively different place every month, let alone a single year. You take a peasant farmer from France in 1200 and drop them in France in 1400, more or less, they're probably going to get on fine. Things hadn't changed that much. Take someone from the year 1820, and drop them here and now? Or now to 2220? We look at people born in the late 1800s, early 1900s as having seen so much, from horse drawn carriages to space stations and bullet trains, from the postman to video chat on a wireless glass slate in your pocket. What the fuck are people born now +/- 30 years going to see?
We not wired for this pace. Not with the crappy wetware we have, wetware designed for the bare minimum survival out in the wild, designed for the protection of the tribe, for animal urges, for every little emergent fault in our psychology, and the Internet amplifies those faults to a degree we never saw coming.