In this extended essay, Ian Hodder develops his previous work on the “entanglement” of people and things into a general statement about directionality in human evolution and the forces that drove it. His argument is that there is indeed a directionality and that it results from an ever-increasing mutual dependence of humans and things. Thus humans become dependent on things, which become dependent for their production on other things; these in turn become dependent on humans for their production and maintenance:

However, the book offers a further justification for this focus on human-thing entanglements, a moral one. Our reliance on technological solutions to problems has led to the current perilous situation of the planet and to growing inequality in human societies. Awareness of the complexity and long-standing nature of the mutual dependencies between people and things may help us to think more creatively about ways to escape from the current crisis.

At first sight Hodder's idea of cumulative entanglement as the dominant trend in human evolution is very close to the emphasis on “cumulative culture” of dual inheritance theorists and others, but in fact he excludes any role for cultural transmission. The dynamic comes purely from the interactions between people and things as they pose new problems that need to be solved. The difference between beaver dams and the Three Gorges Dam in China is that humans “go further down the chain of consequences” of their actions than beavers do, not that people have accumulated huge amounts of transmitted knowledge that have created new possibilities. In this respect his views are not dissimilar from those of Steven Pinker and other evolutionary psychologists, who likewise think that cultural transmission has no role and that it is human intelligence that solves problems posed by people's environments: “Natural selection has favored humans with the intelligence to follow down chains of consequences and the ability to use things to fix things” (p. 128).

In many ways the book reflects Hodder's ambivalence about the term evolution, and he is careful to distinguish his view from other familiar versions. Thus long-standing social evolutionary theories of the Morgan-Marx variety are teleological because they assume a “Western” idea of progress. The trend toward increased energy capture emphasized recently by Ian Morris (Why the West Rules—For Now, 2011) is seen as a symptom or consequence of the growing entanglements rather than an autonomous trend or causal force in itself. Darwinian theories, especially the more recent “Extended Evolutionary Synthesis” (e.g., Jablonka and Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions, 2005), have the attraction of being nondirectional but do not account for the directionality that clearly exists in the human case. Entanglement theory “provides a non-teleological framework for understanding humans’ long-term directionality towards greater entanglement and dependence on things as a means of taking more energy from the environment” (p. 128). In this light it is remarkable that two pages later Hodder opts for a definition of evolution derived from the original meaning of the word evolutio, the unrolling of a scroll, on which, of course, the words have already been written; in Hodder's terms, once ancestral Homo became a toolmaker, the direction was preordained.

The emphasis on the growing entanglement between humans and things as a more or less autonomous process ignores many issues. Costs and benefits are never addressed, not least who pays and who gains. The question of how and when innovations occur never arises, because it is implicitly assumed that as problems come up human intelligence will find solutions. Specific examples of human-thing entanglements, such as the wheel, are selected and presented because of their long-lasting “legacy effects,” but it does not seem to explain very much to say, as Hodder does, that

But there are also missed opportunities. The global long-term exponential increase in material culture involvement and energy consumption has been paralleled by an exponential increase in global human population, but this is completely ignored because Hodder rejects the Boserupian view that autonomous population pressure is what drives change. Arguably the Malthusian view is on his side: population only increases when technological innovation raises current carrying capacities, creating new opportunities. Thus, on a long-term global scale, increased entanglement and the associated increase in energy extraction from the environment have led to increased population, and this is one of the main reasons why it is very hard to “go back.”

Although Hodder emphasizes entanglement as a general evolutionary process, the places and times where there have been major increases in entanglement are historically limited. They have spread over the rest of the world not through some triumph of human intelligence but because they were associated with more complex forms of technologically supported organization. This combination has produced unprecedented concentrations of power that have had the capacity to spread and dominate the rest of the world and impose patterns of production and consumption for their own benefit.