GoChet.com

Welcome to the Hive Mind.

Yep.  The internet came.  What a rush.

And with it, we’ve started to experience the result of group-thinking that prior to this was unimaginable.  In the beginning of the internet (which was really a very, very short time ago), we started to communicate one-on-one (with email), because that’s all we knew.  We just duplicated the phone and typed letters, because that’s what we were so used to.  But then came things like ‘comments sections’ and ‘chat rooms’ and ’social media’.  We began to communicate in group-fashion.  And look to the group for answers, opinions, and positive reinforcement.  Now we continue to push the boundaries of group-think with tools like Facebook and Twitter.  Once bandwidth and processing power become more available and inexpensive, we can expect to see real-time group interaction with audio and video to become more available and ubiquitous.

Even a quick look at the most popular sites on the internet confirms that what we really want to do is share information with each other.  We share photos, music, video, ideas, and our stuff.  We appear to be built to communicate this way, but just lacked a piece of the puzzle that now, apparently, is being filled by technology.

I’ve already spoken about how the internet has come to change, modify, and potentially disable a fantastic number of formerly viable business models.  But that’s not even the tip of the iceberg.  I also think that the internet has also begun to fundamentally change what it means to be a human being.

Even already (and I submit that this will become much more noticable in years to come), we’ve begun to see that when people (especially young people, even in other countries) are disconnected from the internet (or ‘cloud’), they become increasingly irritable.  I think that we’ve created a new step in the evolutionary chain, and have actually developed a way to participate in a hive-mind.  And furthermore, I think that once activated, our brains prefer this, and react negatively when this option is removed.  Most of the realities of the hive-mind are much more apparent in young people simply because they are the first generation of people to have a hive-mind available to them since birth or youth.  It is a much more difficult and frightening world when you don’t have the hive to answer your questions or participate in your conversations and your world.  I cannot express my dismay when I need an answer, and Google is unavailable.  I cannot imagine the reaction of fear and isolation from someone who has never had to live without it.

The hive-mind rarely, if ever, agrees with itself.   Which I think says more about the complicated nature of the world in which we live than it demonstrates any inherent flaws in the human condition.  There are simply many different ways to look at frog.  The hive-mind has much internal strife, disagreement, and cognitive dissonance, because we’ve not yet learned to assimilate the information overload that comes from looking at a frog from every conceivable angle all at one time.

But it knows that in order to be more accurate and make better decisions, it must consult the hive.  Most of us just call this ‘Googling’, but it’s the same thing.  We now are experiencing an age where information and content is increasingly no longer for sale, but is freely distributed (whether your broken company likes it or not), and new content and ideas are being developed by the cloud, not just by the individual.

Give it two generations, and the entire experience of being a human being will be a different experience than it is today.  The road to this new place will not be an easy one.  There are large and powerful corporate interests that have much to lose if we start collaborating in this manner without their newly irrelevant services.  I fear that perhaps our new ability to collaborate as a species may require revolution in addition to evolution, and I wonder how hard the fight will be to change the status quo.  This is the most frightening thing that many people can imagine, but I maintain a more positive view.  I think that this is the thing that will set us free.

The hive mind is here to stay, and may its implications be as far-reaching as I think they will.