Metaman:
The Merging of Humans and Machines into a Global Superorganism

Gregory Stock opens our eyes to a new and interesting possibility: that humanity as a whole may act as a single organism, which he names Metaman.

While Stock's Metaman is lesser than the 'Gaia' of James Lovelock's Gaia Hypotheses, which is the sum total of all life on earth, it nevertheless stretches across the whole world. Transportation is Metaman's arteries; telecommunications its nervous system, and the great cities its structure; Metaman resembles a collective organism, rather like a coral reef.

Metaman reacts to changes and challenges in its environment: but, being so vast, it typically has a reaction time measured in generations. The rise of environmentalism in the twentieth century, for example, is Metaman's quite logical response to the rise of pollution in the nineteenth.