“A bold thesis…weaves anecdote and analysis…provocative…futurism by way of personal odyssey.”
-- Brian K. Mahoney, Chronogram Magazine
“Congratulations Steve Nelson for your remarkable time and effort to capture this moment in human history! Well done."
-- Rouzbeh Yassini-Fard, inventor of internet over cable
"A provocative invitation to further thinking...accessible and enjoyable...Steven Reed Nelson is a free ranging thinker."
-- Charles Giuliano, Berkshire Fine Arts
"Intriguing." -- Richard Wrangham, Harvard professor, author of “Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human”
“A fascinating read, and springboard into the future.” -- Bill Benenson, filmmaker (“The Hadza: Last of the First”)
“He isn’t just ‘some guy’ with an idea…a long career in communications and technology…his theory is worth reading.”
-- Jennifer Huberdeau, The Berkshire Eagle
If you read SAPIENS by Juval Noah Harari, then you must read FIRE IN A WIRE.
Fire tells the story Sapiens missed, about the most momentous development in recent human history: using electricity.
Just as fire enabled the evolution of our prehistoric ancestors, so is electricity empowering our ongoing evolution now.
Electricity is the new fire. Fire in a wire.
Many archaic humans arose and went extinct, like the Neanderthals. Conventional wisdom says that Homo sapiens is
the sole surviving species of human. But Steven Reed Nelson disagrees. He writes that evolution does not end with sapiens. A dynamic new species is emerging, not in some imagined future but living among us today: Homo electric.
The electrified world is our natural habitat. We use electricity for everything: from providing food to medical care to computing to sex. We can’t live without it. It is fundamentally changing who we are. We can see things, hear things, do things, know things and imagine things not possible without electricity.
We no longer live in the natural world observed by Charles Darwin and governed by “the survival of the fittest.” We can override natural selection. We can alter our DNA. We are taking control of our own evolution. We can, and we must, if
we are to survive threats like climate change.
If you are curious about who we were, who we are and who we yet might be, read Fire in a Wire. It will challenge you
to rethink who you are and who you are becoming as a human being in the Electric Age.
Steven Reed Nelson is neither an academic nor a scientist, but an "outsider." As was the employee of the Swiss patent office who deduced that E=mc2. As was the Czech monk who discovered the principles governing heredity. Steve does not claim to be an Einstein or a Mendel, but he is a rigorous thinker: a math major at Cornell University and a prize-winning graduate of Harvard Law School. He did anthropological research among descendants of the Incas in the Peruvian Andes, experiencing a world without electricity. Since then Steve has lived a life electric and eclectic, often ahead of the curve and anticipating trends. He has been an entrepreneur and marketer of cutting-edge applications of electricity such as broadband internet, solar energy, computer software, rock concerts and video production. Immersed in emerging electric technologies, at the same time he observed their effects on humans with an anthropologist's eye.
