Fire in a Wire

Electricity Empowers Human Evolution Beyond Homo Sapiens

Steven Reed Nelson

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English

Massaemett Media
31 July 2025

""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

""Provocative...accessible and enjoyable...

Steven Reed Nelson is a free range thinker."" -- Charles Giuliano, Berkshire Fine Arts

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, electricity is enabling 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 Homo sapiens is the sole surviving species of human. 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 artificial intelligence 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 before 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.

Nelson's journey of discovery about electricity and evolution began in the Peruvian Andes, where he lived without electricity among descendants of the Incas. It took him through ventures in cutting-edge applications of electricity - solar energy, computer software, rock concerts, video production and fiber-optic internet - leading to a flash of insight resulting in this book.

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.

By: Steven Reed Nelson
Imprint: Massaemett Media
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 140mm, Spine: 16mm
Weight: 358g
ISBN: 9780578890098
ISBN 10: 0578890097
Pages: 228
Publication Date: 31 July 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

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.