CONCEPT
The New Superorganic
F. Allan Hanson’s 2004 extension of Kroeber’s thesis—the claim that AI’s participation in social action renders untenable the assumption that the human individual is the ultimate unit of cultural agency, and that culture must now be analyzed as including non-biological participants.
In 1917,
Alfred Kroeber argued that culture constitutes a level of reality above individual psychology, operating with its own developmental
trajectory. In 2004, anthropologist F. Allan Hanson published “The New Superorganic” in
Current Anthropology, arguing that artificial intelligence had vindicated Kroeber’s thesis in a form its originator could not have anticipated. Hanson’s specific claim was that the incorporation of AI systems into social action—systems that make decisions, generate outputs, and shape outcomes—had rendered untenable
methodological individualism, the assumption that the ultimate unit of social action is the human individual. If non-biological agents participate in cultural production, then culture is not reducible to human psychology, and
the superorganic is not merely a theoretical abstraction but the appropriate level of analysis for a civilization in which the instruments of cultural production are no longer exclusively human. The large language model is, in this framework, the
cultural current encoded in a queryable form—the accumulated