Preface
Communication is an innate inter-human quality, reaching as far back as primitive times. Though a refined art and science in more modern times, today’s world has imposed a fantastic, machined interposition within humankind’s communicative effort. Our usual sharing of thoughts, sounds, text, and touch have taken a litigious turn as never seen before.
How?
Today’s cyber world is as beguiling as mythology’s nymph-goddess Calypso of Ogygia, but this time she won’t be releasing Odysseus home to his amorous loved ones. Today’s hominins have sailed to a new hometown, like Calypso’s, one of alluring tune and control, fed by a web of cyber entanglement. And though human beings are not yet machines, machine programming is catalyzing that process in ways previously viewed as mere science fiction, while machines are becoming fictionized humans to boot.
Any machine and human communicates. Humans have a long-standing history of this—very long, like around 300,000 years for our species, and millions of years for our genus. But machine intelligence is merely in its embryonic stage, though infiltrating people at an alarming rate. While communication has evolved from its primitive roots of phonics, artwork and eventual hand-written text, to more sophisticated versions of these forms, in only the past 15 years such exchanges have not only transformed electronically, but with notable psychological, communicative, and humanistic control. Texts, abbreviations, emojis, ghosting, clips, chats, sex, meetings, media, banning, befriending, defriending, harvesting, hacking, chipping, marriage, divorce, religious service and more have plunged into what was birthed as the communication information highway, segued to a cyber meta-super-freeway, almost all formerly propelled by human interaction.
Our behavioral patterns of today reflect this lightning transformation, with communication serving as the lightning rod. The 1960s’ Summer of Love brought on a communicative counterculture, voicing their disapproval of the conserved framing between parents, kids, and societal norms over centuries. It was a shook-up time from a backdrop that survived history’s ancient-to-modern epochs. 1969’s release of Led Zepplin’s song, “Communication Breakdown,” was foretelling. Though it was a different era than today, the song’s stirring insight was timeless and markedly lasting.
The 1970s continued the communicative stir with women’s rights, war on drugs, racial explosion, anti-war riots and continuance of the sexual revolution, all born out of the previous decade. The 1980s found expression of pride in the gay community and the extreme generation’s spinning a radical expression on games and sports, adjoined by the world’s first, modern-day suppression from the AIDS pandemic. And the 1990s would fertilize the next several decades of in-person isolation, from Y2K’s scare/scam, to the Coronavirus pandemic, and into today’s effervescing cyber world.
Our intrinsic psychological wiring is being transformed from its historic DNA map to that of a mechanized, electrified, virtual world of short-circuit operatives. These range from sporadic phonics, words, texts and video clips, to unobstructed streams of emotional discharge, video/gaming addiction, AI dependency, dopamine infliction, and loneliness. In-person communication is hanging on for dear life and in need of emergency surgery. Time gives it about a 15% chance of survival as any hopeful anesthesia wears fast and thin.
This book is about the history of communication from long ago, to today’s digitized world. Its undertow lies beneath a democracy of forces ranging from everyday exchange of ideas, emotions and thoughts, to intimacy, political sway, and automated intelligence. However, that very current is flowing to a communicative harbor of cards, with reconstruction costs to humans’ well-being of litigious proportions.
The writing that follows will explicate the fundamentals of interhuman communication (vocal, text, touch, sexual, virtual, and more), and ways people bond within a plethora of circumstances. Not all electronic communication is bad and not all in-human communication is good: balance is key, and understanding this will impose some immediate surgery for most.
The universe gave us the richest provision to communicate within our diverse species, the most sophisticated means of any phylum on earth. But the present machined world of AI, bots, computers, smartphones, and virtual reality is making in-person communication fearful, awkward, doubtful, and isolated. Therapy is today’s new buzz for mental appeasement, just as Tai Kwon Do classes became the country’s last resort to instill traditional discipline among kids. The kicker: communication has become fast, fleeting and impactful by way of aural, text, and simulated means. It is broader than ever in its provision, yet more waring psychologically and physically. Novocain to numb these effects seems to be rapidly waning. Is there a fix to the communicative side-effects plaguing society today, and if so, what?
To that point, the universe miraculously summoned me to the authors’ operating room amid a freezing, outdoor, kung fu weapons workout (of all times for a brainchild), January 16, 2026, to answer that question. Today, January 17th, I have begun surgery on what I feel is one of the most important operations ever: human communication. Is this intrinsic art form salvageable between relationships, families, occupations, politics, consciousness and non-verbal exchange? Find out the answer as my writing opens up this vital aspect of humanity and attempts to operate on its evolution. ChatGTP, go back to your room; you’re not welcome here.
Please enjoy this book and thank you for letting me share my innermost thoughts on this subject.
Targeted completion: 2028
