Un-hiving is Individuating

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It's a hive. Silos are hives on hyperdrive. Like fish schools, bird flocks or bee swarms, thoughts in human hives intersect the group mind. In aggressively herded silos, he detects he's no longer detecting.

Finite hive breaks carve room for insight.

He started an exercise: give hive thoughts a paper interrupt, "so-and-so posted x, wrong?" Warning: pen-directing finger muscles atrophy, fast. Rebuilding takes time. (Ascend a half-step; move to a text file interrupt. Erect an openweb blog! We hear Blogger runs.)

Something else atrophied: his ability to notice when he didn't agree, or did.

Without a paper interrupt, he's swapping thoughts in the RAM of his cranial hard drive. With audio news, and cloud storage, and single-sense print media, that RAM is approaching capacity. Nowhere to offload, outsource into muscle memory. Thoughts swap out, overwriting ROM's yesterday news.

Individuation is a chipping away at growable, invisible umbilical chord.

Humans are social. Hiving is annexing a giant brain. Quantity, quality, tomato. Blocking reverse-individuation requires skill.

Finite hive breaks carve room for insight.


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Further Reading:

Social Media is Ruining Our Memories:   vice.com

Is the internet making us smarter? With caveats, yes.   pbs.org





This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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