Humans are the only organism reliant on technologies that are not integrated into its DNA. If you take an insect or animal and move it to a new habitat far away, it will always have a much higher chance of survival than a human. This is because all of its technologies are in-built: all of its skills, talents and inclinations come inscribed in its genetic code. They travel wherever the organism travels.
By contrast, humans have become the partially dislocated limbs of a technological network, a technosystem of external peripheral devices. We represent a tiny part of a vast network of gadgets, infrastructures and technologies that depend on one another. We cannot live without electricity, and electricity cannot exist without us. From transportation and refrigeration to work and communication, every facet of human survival depends on technologies that can easily vanish during a collapse. This makes us vastly more vulnerable than almost every other organism on Earth.
We may still be composed of organic chemistry, but we are essentially a technophytic organism: we can only survive through technology. Even our food, although biological, requires a tremendous amount of technology to be produced and to be scaled up to quantities that can feed 8 billion technophytes.
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