Everyday Miracles of Cooperation
“We live in a world—in the real world—that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” – or so we are told by one of those rowdy power-hungry individuals who have already way too much power.
This article is part of a series that starts from a different observation: every day, billions of people cooperate peacefully across borders, languages, and beliefs to keep the world functioning.
The Phone in Your Hand: A Million-Person Miracle
You pick it up without thinking.
A rectangle of glass and metal, warm from your palm, already alive with messages, maps, and distant voices. It tells you the time, the weather, the mood of the world. It connects you—instantly—to someone across the planet.
It feels simple. Personal. Almost weightless.
But the phone in your hand is one of the most complex collaborative achievements in human history. Before it ever rang, hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of people across dozens of countries have already worked together.
This is the story of that invisible collaboration.
The story begins underground
Long before a phone exists, someone is digging. In central Africa, miners extract cobalt—essential for lithium-ion batteries. In Chile and Australia, lithium is pulled from brine and rock. Copper comes from open pits in South America. Gold from mines in Africa, China, and North America. Rare earth elements from refineries that handle materials so reactive they must be processed with extraordinary care.
These are human efforts of miners, geologists, engineers, truck drivers, safety inspectors, mechanics, cooks, surveyors. Tens of thousands of people are involved just to extract the raw materials for a single smartphone — spread across continents, climates, and cultures.
None of them knows your name. Yet their work will sit inches from your heart.
From rock to chip
The raw materials must be purified to astonishing levels. Silicon—derived from ordinary sand—must be refined until it is 99.9999999% pure. This happens in industrial facilities in countries like Germany, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States. Here, chemists, process engineers, equipment designers, quality-control specialists, and maintenance teams work in tightly choreographed systems. One contamination event can ruin weeks of production.
At this stage alone, tens of thousands more people contribute indirectly to your phone — often working shifts that pass responsibility like a relay baton across time zones.
And then, the heart of the phone—the processor—is born in a semiconductor fabrication plant. Inside cleanrooms more sterile than operating theaters, engineers in full-body suits guide light through masks to carve billions of transistors onto silicon wafers. The machinery costs billions. The expertise took decades to develop.
A single chip may involve hardware architects in one country; circuit designers in another; verification teams elsewhere; manufacturing engineers halfway across the globe. Thousands of highly specialized professionals, coordinated with near-perfect precision are involved!
The silent writers: software without borders
While matter is being shaped, code is being written. Operating systems involve millions of lines of code, written and reviewed by developers scattered across the world. Some work for large companies. Others contribute to open-source libraries—often unpaid, driven by pride, curiosity, or belief in shared knowledge. Security researchers test vulnerabilities. Localization teams adapt languages. Accessibility experts ensure the phone works for people with disabilities. Documentation writers explain what engineers built.
At this stage, with OS developers, App developers, Open-source contributors, software security teams, and cloud infrastructure engineers, hundreds of thousands of people cooperate across borders, religions, traditions, and life-style choices. Their work lives inside your phone but you may never know their names.
Assembly: where the pieces meet
Eventually, components converge. In large manufacturing facilities—often in East or Southeast Asia—workers assemble screens, batteries, cameras, and circuit boards. Robots assist, but humans still guide, inspect, and correct. Each phone passes through many hands: Assembly workers, line supervisors, quality inspectors, logistics coordinators,…
A single factory can employ tens of thousands of people, operating in shifts that keep production moving day and night. At this moment, the phone becomes real. THIS is the real world!
The unseen web: networks that make it alive
But a phone without a network is not more than a beautiful paperweight. Cell towers must be designed, built, powered, and maintained. Fiber-optic cables—many laid under oceans—carry your data across continents. Data centers route your messages, photos, and calls. Behind a single text message are network engineers, tower technicians, cable-laying crews, satellite operators, data center staff, and more.
Globally, millions of people work to keep the communications infrastructure alive—often unnoticed unless it fails.
So how many people does it take to make your phone work?
There is no exact number. But even if we count only direct contributors, a single smartphone represents the coordinated effort of hundreds of thousands of people. If we include the shared global infrastructure that makes it useful, the number rises into the millions.
And not one of them could do it alone.
All of them, in fact, depend on and work hand in hand with not only on those other millions of people involved in building and operating your smartphone. They all depend on and rely on a functioning power grid – another vital network with similar complexity, constructed and operated again by hundreds of thousands if not millions of people around the globe. And all of these depend on the global transportation network of goods, on roads and rails, ships and planes. Millions of people more around the global who work hand in hand. All of them, all of us together perform daily miracles!
Your phone is not just technology. It is cooperation crystallized. It is proof that humans—across languages, borders, ideologies, and time zones—can build something extraordinarily complex, trusting systems and each other instead of slogans, day after day.
In a world that often frames international relations as inevitable conflict, a battle of good against bad, a world where those who have great power are free to ruthlessly exploit it, the phone in your pocket quietly tells a different story:
Every day, we all rely on global collaboration—and it works.
The tragedy is that we notice such cooperation and how much we depend on it so little.
From a phone to a planet
If it takes hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of people to bring a single smartphone into your hand, next time your phone vibrates pause for a moment and consider something even more astonishing:
Eight billion people live together on this planet—mostly without killing one another.
They speak thousands of languages. They follow different religions, traditions, and political systems.
They disagree—often passionately—about how life should be lived.
And yet, on most days, in most places, people cooperate. They grow food others will eat. They transport goods they will never use. They maintain power grids, water systems, hospitals, schools, and communication networks for strangers they will never meet. The global social network that keeps humanity functioning is far more complex than the supply chain of a smartphone. It involves emotions, trust, culture, memory, law, and moral restraint—not just materials and code. If humanity were incapable of large-scale cooperation, civilization would collapse within weeks.
But it doesn’t. Or let´s say: so far it didn´t.
War is sabotage of worldwide collaboration
Against this background, war begins to look less like an inevitability and more like a deliberate disruption. Wars are not caused by “human nature” in general. Over and over again, they are initiated by small minorities: Power-hungry politicians, profit-driven industry leaders and other profiteers, rigid ideologists, …
Compared to the millions required to design, build, operate, and sustain a modern phone—or a global food system, or the internet—the number of people needed to start a war is shockingly small. As is the number of people capable of totally eradicating humanity by waging nuclear war on us: one is enough, and at least 7 have that insane power.
War does not represent humanity’s nature. It represents humanity being overruled. Peace is interaction at planetary scale without collapse. That is an achievement far greater than any single device. We marvel at technology because it is visible and shiny. We tend to overlook peace because it is quiet.
What this means for stopping war
If millions of us can cooperate—across borders, languages, and interests—to build something as intricate as a smartphone, then we can certainly cooperate to stop a minority from dragging us into war.
How so?
By refusing to accept war as “normal”. By refusing to accept it as unavoidable if you don´t want to be oppressed by the others, as the price for freedom… By strengthening international cooperation instead of undermining it. By looking for the human values we have in common rather than valuing ideologies that divide us. By recognizing that our daily lives already depend on mutual restraint and shared rules. And by limiting the power of those who have too much of it and abuse it to wage war on the rest of us [yes, the rest of us, for have you realized that those most loudly screeching to fight, to be ready for war, to be scared of the others, are never those actually finding themselves in the trenches at the front, getting blown to pieces?]
Holding the argument in your hand
The next time you hold your phone, consider this: You are touching the condensed effort of a global civilization that works together! If that civilization can coordinate atoms, energy, logistics, and knowledge across the planet, then we, the people from all over the world, can cooperate to stop the saboteurs of peace from waging war on us!
But we need to do it. They will never stop by themselves. They use their power every day trying to make us think we need to fight the others. That it´s either us or them. And its the same propaganda with inverted roles on the other side. This is the mental prison in which we are held. The prison in which media, military, politicians, and other profiteers try to trap us everyday. It leads to the prisoner´s dilemma that undermines international collaboration, leads to arms races, and ultimately to war. But more on that another time.
Meanwhile the phone in your hands tells a totally different story. Listen to it.
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