The above picture shows a close-up view of a Koala’s hand. As you’ll note, there are clearly five fingers in total, two of which are thumbs. This is rather odd considering the overwhelming presence of one-thumbed species and raises the question of how two thumbs may have come to be superior to one. But this past month, hidden scrolls, unearthed from beneath the sands of the Great Victoria Desert in Western Australia, revealed some clues that explain this phenomenon and could save all of humanity.
Today, Koalas inhabit the Australian wild. They have a diet composed almost entirely of eucalyptus leaves and are also known to sleep for approximately 20 hours a day. But the scrolls, written in an ancient script closely resembling Snapchat emojis, revealed that, thousands of years ago, Koalas had built a complex society revolving around a democratic rating system (somewhat like the one seen in Black Mirror Season 3 Episode 1). Essentially, Koalas were able to rate the banter of other Koalas using a simple thumb up or down. The banter rating, or banter score for short, would then be accumulated over countless interactions into a single score for an individual Koala and would translate into their rank within society.
To understand how such a society would have necessitated the development of two thumbs, one needs to look no further than the state of our modern day internet forums where fake internet points exist. The upvoting and downvoting of posts on the vast majority of these forums, and certainly on the largest ones, is based almost entirely on preconceived notions held by an individual before even seeing the post instead of on the merits of the post as well. It has made most sites incredibly toxic to multiple viewpoints and most subcomponents of websites turn into self-affirming and shallow environments hostile to both opposing and to nuanced viewpoints.
Given the sorry state of our internet, one might imagine that a society built upon this type of framework would suffer immensely if a better system did not develop. This is where the 2nd thumb comes in. The addition of a 2nd thumb doubles the variety of reactions one can exhibit. Whereas before, people could only “love” or “hate” something, now they could “like” it or “dislike” it. Much like how humans rapidly evolved to support lactase persistence, Koalas quickly developed two thumbs. In an aggressive, feudal, honor-based society, a single thumb-down often started wars and led to quick and bloody deaths so those with one thumb were quickly wiped out, leaving only those with two.
Once the norm became two thumbs, there was a golden age for the Koalas. But as all good things must come to an end, so too did the Koala golden age. It was cut short by vicious corporate greed attempting to commodify thumb configurations in order to game the system. They bought out click-farms in Bangladesh in order to increase their ratings and solidify the nobility. The ensuing thumb wars devastated the local economy and the Koalas never recovered, their cities laid to ruins, and their lands turned to desert. The few who survived had reached a level of enlightenment that humans have yet to attain. As a society, we have moved further and further away from doing labor so that we could have more time to do nothing at all, or to sleep. The Koalas who survived had found out how to manage to do almost nothing all day and still survive. That is how they ended up sleeping 20 hour days and eating minimally. Incredible creatures honestly.
If there’s anything to learn from all this, its that we need to move our index finger further to the inside of our hand so that we have two thumbs. Then, web designers will have to redesign all of their websites to reflect this change in our biology and thumbs up and down will instead have to take into account our multiple thumbs. I predict that this will save the internet.
Furthermore, in the spirit of being bold and making risky predictions, I predict that this change will occur within our lifetimes. Until that day!