And today’s reason we are an endangered species is: social media. Or rather, the social nature of human beings. Does it not boggle your mind that elephants, lions, wolves, but even ants and bees are social animals, just like us, but after millions of years of evolution, they have not collectively turned on each other based on myths, beliefs and hearsay? They haven’t developed tools to make their species go extinct faster and they haven’t deployed their ability to communicate for the greater bad. Then again, we are the only social species that has a collective memory due to language, or as Harari calls it, our operating system and we’ve managed to design a tool – AI – that has now hacked that operating system. So, despite our magnificent intelligence and memory, we’ve been steadily working towards extinguishing our species as a whole, and along with it, numerous others who inhabit this planet and of course, the planet itself.

It is everyone’s God given right – there’s another myth, God – to be stupid, but most abuse this privilege. Social media has amplified and sped up the rate at which human interactions disappear into the abyss: smilies and memes have replaced words – a far cry from Whitman and Shakespeare and an inkling back to the hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt and they’ve vanished – sorry, foreshadowing a bit here.

Our nexus, whatever technology we use to build it, is dying faster because we’ve isolated ourselves, desensitised our moral compasses and refuse to see the other side’s story. We’ve sacrificed our last drop of empathy at the altar of clicks, and cannot seem to find the golden mean any more. It’s somewhere between “I would die for it” and “I don’t give a fuck”. If only our social nature was once again recalibrated to care a tad more about the others in the herd and a tad less about how many likes we get, there might, MIGHT just be a future that’s less bleak than the Sahara. Or Southern Europe in a decade.