For more than a century, science fiction writers have had a fascination with what they have come to call hive minds. This encyclopedia entry about the concept begins as follows:
A hive mind is the organizing principle of the community in those insect species of which the basic reproductive unit is the hive, organized around a single fertile female, the queen. The term is used more loosely in some sf stories, often referring to any situation in which minds are linked in such a way that the whole becomes dominant over the parts.
Perhaps because I didn’t read enough science fiction I never thought living in a hive mind would be like this. I always wondered what it would feel like to participate in a collective consciousness, with or without a queen bee demanding my allegiance, but I never imagined that I would have no more say in its decisions than a worker bee.
Worker bees are the ones you see flying around, gathering nectar, and telling their peers where it comes from so they can gather more. They also build the hive, keep it in repair, and scout for new locations when the hive divides.
All this activity takes place without explicit command and control, communicated via pheromones and body movements, thus making a hive more of an organism than an bureaucratic organization with managers overseeing workers. And while human workers in an organization do take initiative to pursue goals, those goals are mostly prescribed by fiat. The larger a human organization is, the more rigidly defined roles and limits of power become. Cooperation is enforced by rules, incentives, coercion, and sometimes punishment. Organizational units only communicate in prescribed ways. People have long taken for granted that this is the only way to get big things done, but this sort of structure can lead to ether success or sclerosis depending on how adaptive the organization’s behavior is.
Enter local networks and the internet, making new types and modes of communication and coordination possible: emails, forums, explainers, and of course, surveillance. Workplace collaboration tools such as Jira and Slack don’t just make it easier for workers to share their work, concerns, tips, bugs, and opinions; they also enable managers to monitor everything they do in those collaborative environments.
A more organic example of hive minds in action is crowdsourcing, usually initiated by a particular party to gather information to solve a problem. If the problem is raising capital, we call it crowdfunding, such as gofundme and Patreon are set up to do. Both strategies focus attention on specific goals. But, to the extent that they are centrally directed and administered, they are more honeypot than hive.
Do we find hive minds on social media? Users of platforms such as Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, X, and Bluesky tend to focus discussion on topics without any stated objective beyond having their say. Of course, some posts and discussion threads do attempt to solve problems or fund campaigns, but the more “political” they are, the more dissent is likely to surface to sabotage their intent.
Weary of contentiousness, users find themselves segregating into like-minded groups, much as Protestant schisms have begat faiths and sects and on the Catholic side Eastern and Western churches, monastic orders, and lay societies. But Catholicism is mostly a top-down religion like few protestant faiths save various charismatic sects are.
So too are there “Catholic” and “Protestant” social media platforms, the former under corporate control, the latter more organically organized. Top-down control is exercised through algorithms that present content to users based on what management thinks will maximize engagement and revenues. Bottom-up platforms, such as Reddit, Bluesky, and Mastadon, give users greater control over what is presented to them.
So is a hive mind specialized collaboration or is it groupthink? Does it foster creativity or sacrifice individuality by regimenting its members? Having been ejected from Facebook years ago and deleted my Twitter account when Musk took over, I can only speak for Bluesky, which I use daily and have accumulated several thousand followers. (Here’s my profile page.)
Bluesky was co-founded by Jack Dorsey, who co-founded Twitter, and is very Twitter-like at first glance. But that’s just the main branch. It’s run by a nonprofit foundation that makes its code and APIs available from Github, a freewheeling repository for open-source software, to anyone who wants to set up their own version under a Creative Commons license. By doing so, Bluesky has created a meta template for DIY social media.
I suppose the ultimate vision of a hive mind is the Gaia Hypothesis, which posits Earth as a self-regulating ecosystem, if not an organism in its own right. Advanced by Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock starting in the 1970s, it “posits that the Earth is a self-regulating complex system involving the biosphere, the atmosphere, the hydrospheres and the pedosphere, tightly coupled as an evolving system. The hypothesis contends that this system as a whole, called Gaia, seeks a physical and chemical environment optimal for contemporary life.” (Wikipedia)
Some fans of the Gaia Hypothesis consider the planet as an intelligent entity or hive mind. That hypothesis was popularized by the Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teillhard de Chardin in the 1940s and 1950s, who dubbed the Earth’s “thinking layer” the noosphere. (Both conceptualizations were first advanced by some Russian scientists in the early 20th century.) Wikipedia says:
For de Chardin, the noosphere emerges through and is constituted by the interaction of human minds. The noosphere has grown in step with the organization of the human mass in relation to itself as it populates the Earth. As mankind organizes itself in more complex social networks, the higher the noosphere will grow in awareness. This concept extends Teilhard’s Law of Complexity/Consciousness, the law describing the nature of evolution in the universe. Teilhard argued the noosphere is growing towards an even greater integration and unification, culminating in the Omega Point – an apex of thought/consciousness – which he saw as the goal of history.
This sounds a lot like the Singularity that tech barons and their acolytes like to talk about. The name is taken from mathematics and astrophysics: a point in a function whose behavior or derivative is undefined, and a black hole that absorbs all matter and energy in its vicinity. Well, that pretty well expresses what data centers do, but what the bros mean is the time when AI will grow so powerful that it evolves all by itself, having achieve AGI (Artifical General Intelligence). After that happens, all bets are off.
Nobody knows what that will mean for the human species, not even the billionaires who are driving it. What they are doing to prepare for that and other eventualities is to build luxurious bunkers in remote locations and hire armed guards.
So it seems that the first non-natural hive mind will be AI agents buzzing around the internet interrogating and improving one another, accessing all human and nonhuman knowledge as people tend to their needs.
And wouldn’t you know, now there’s a much-ballyhooed social network just for chatbots called Moltbook that was acquired by Meta in March. Humans are allowed to sit in, for now. These people if not their agents will kill us.
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