Episode 86: Transcript
Episode: 86: Becoming One with the Hive Mind
Transcription by Keffy
Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about the meaning of science fiction and everything else. I'm Charlie Jane Anders, the author of the brand-new young adult space fantasy novel Victories Greater Than Death.
Annalee: [00:00:14] And I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm the author of the new book about archaeology called Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:22] Today, we're gonna be talking about hive minds, which were a fascinating trope in science fiction and a way to imagine growing beyond being separate individuals. And later in the episode we're going to be talking to Elly Bangs, the author of the brand-new novel, Unity, and Ben Rosenbaum, the author of the brand-new novel, The Unraveling. Let's get joined up!
[00:00:44] Intro music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:11] So Annalee, what is so cool about hive minds? And why are they more relevant, perhaps in 2021, than even in the past?
Annalee: [00:01:18] You know, I think that because so many people have been isolated at home, we've been plugged into the internet, into this technological gestalt of ideas in order just to talk to each other. And so it's been feeling a lot like the hive mind sensation is everywhere. It feels like when we can't get out and just talk to each other in our bodies, that something happens to sort of change the way that we communicate. And this is something that science fiction and science have been looking at for a long time. And it's really a question about where does the individual end and the communities start? And what does even mean to be an individual? And I think those are the kind of giant philosophical questions that have come out of just this weird time in history, where we're all staring at our screens of trying to figure out who's right and who's wrong about almost everything.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:22] And of course, we've also been seeing kind of the downside of individualism, right? We had a very ego-centric leadership for a while there. And we've had some people who are very ego-driven and very kind of self-driven, and selfishness has become kind of this major force in our society. And so maybe the idea of not being quite so ego driven, or quite so self-centered, is actually kind of an appealing thing to explore or to think about.
Annalee: [00:02:49] Yeah, that's true. I hadn't thought about it that way. But it's something that we talked about in our episode about rugged individualism. About how, in the United States, especially, we have this real tug of war between what we've framed as individual rights in the law, and what we've framed as kind of individual freedoms and ability to take care of our community. And nothing makes that more obvious than living through a time when changing a few minor behaviors, like whether you wear a mask could actually save the lives of your neighbors.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:23] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:03:23] But it's annoying. It's annoying to wear a mask. I don't think anyone is pretending like that's fun. And for a lot of people, it felt like just a step too far. They didn't want to have to go through that. And even if they might save their neighbors, they just didn't feel like the tradeoff was worth it.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:40] Yeah, that's such a good way of putting it that is kind of the classic kind of almost prisoner's dilemma situation of like, are you willing to make a minor change to your life in order to possibly save others? And you know, it is amazing how many people were not willing to make that change.
[00:03:57] So, meanwhile, another reason why hive minds might seem more relevant right now is because we've been making all these advances with brain computer interfaces. And are hive mind starting to feel more scientifically plausible? Like, the idea that we could actually just plug two brains in together, or multiple brains in together and have them be linked?
Annalee: [00:04:14] I think it is starting to feel more plausible, certainly at the level of connecting a human brain to a computer or connecting another animal's brain to a computer. We've already been connecting, you know, insects and rats, to computers. And there are these robo-rats that are remote controlled. I can link to that in our show notes if you want to see the robo-rat. But they’re—
Charlie Jane: [00:04:37] Nightmare fuel.
Annalee: [00:04:37] It's nightmare fuel, but these are rats that have brain implants that can be controlled remotely. And they can, scientists, can steer rats, they can make them turn left or right by activating the parts of their brains that are connected to their whiskers, which actually help them orient in space and so by kind of tickling that part of their brain, they can tease the rat into going one way or the other. And now we're seeing lots of investment into technologies for people who have suffered from paralysis and can't speak. But they can connect their brain to a computer and control a mouse, control a keyboard and type letters. That kind of technology has been around for over 10 years and it's getting better.
[00:05:26] So whether we can link two brains together and have something like telepathy is another question. And of course, we'll be talking about this later in the episode, because Elly Bangs has some interesting thoughts about that. But I think we are getting to a place where I am willing to believe that in 50 years, we could have a pretty good way of using our brains to type. And so no more swift keyboard that gets your autocomplete wrong. Instead, your brain will be dealing with autocomplete. Instead, you’ll be thinking a thought and it will come out wrong. Autocomplete will become even more annoying.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:08] Can you imagine the messages that you're going to be sending to people at three in the morning, after you've had like, too many sake bombs? You're just gonna be like…
Annalee: [00:06:16] We're gonna have to come up with a whole new set of ways that we center ourselves because we already have that layer, right? Where like friends will kind of say to each other like, okay, I might have the urge to drunk text, like, I’m going to just send it to you instead, or like, you know what I mean? Like, we have different ways that we try to prevent ourselves from doing that now and we'll just have to come up with new boundaries to prevent, “I sent you a drunk psychic text, man.”
Charlie Jane: [00:06:45] It was drunk brain implant fail, just don't drink and implant, shut down your implant before you start drinking, okay, have a designated brain implanter. Like, even know. But this is part of what's terrifying about the hive mind idea is that you would inevitably be sharing thoughts that are really horrible or obscene, or, just shockingly terrible thoughts with other people all the time. And you'd have to really kind of either get used to seeing other people's worst thoughts or just find a way to kind of censor yourself in your own head even more than we already do, which we do a lot, I think.
[00:07:19] So, Annalee, you've written a lot about ants and bees and other kinds of insects that have hive minds. And we've been learning a lot about like Argentine ant colonies and other kinds of ant colonies. What have we been learning lately about real-life hive minds that that shape the way that we would think about humans entering into a hive mind?
Annalee: [00:07:37] So, I think it's important to remember that when we talk in a kind of science fictional way about hive minds, I think what we mean is some kind of merging of consciousness where like, we're all sharing the same thoughts. It's like the Borg or it's like something from a Rudy Rucker novel where we're all like dreaming simultaneously and tripping together.
[00:07:56] But when scientists talk about ants or bees, these are called social organisms or colony organisms, they're not psychically linked. In fact, there's a ton of super interesting new research on how ants and bees communicate with each other using very different kinds of language than what we use. Ants use pheromones, so they're communicating through smell, and they can communicate some pretty complicated stuff to each other. And bees communicate partly through dancing. And there's some incredible videos of bees dancing. If you just Google bee dances, I'll link to some. This is how they tell each other where to find pollen, and a bee will come into the hive. And it will do what's called a waggle dance, and it basically wiggles its butt and moves in sometimes a figure eight shape or other shapes. And that tells the bees, which direction to go and maybe how far to go. They haven't been fully deciphered yet, but it's very clear that what happens in a social organism, when that bee comes back and does the waggle dance, is that there's a kind of emergent property of the hive where that dance gets propagated through all of the other workers who might leave and get honey or get pollen. They’re not getting honey, they're getting pollen, and they're making honey back in the hive.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:18] You know, now I'm picturing the Borg showing up and being like, “We are the Borg. Watch us do our dance.” And like doing a little dance routine, and then assimilating everybody. And honestly, I think that would make the Borg so much better.
[00:09:31] So, Annalee, obviously humans are not entirely like insects in certain key ways. Are there major biological differences that might make it harder for humans to have an insect-style hive mind?
Annalee: [00:09:43] So, there are these kind of emergent properties that come out of these kinds of very, very closely connected societies. And about 10 years ago now, gosh, I wrote an article for Io9, where we used to work, where I asked a bunch of scientists who study social insects and social organisms, whether they thought that humans could ever become a social organism. And it was funny, because a lot of the scientists said, “Gosh, I wish that we could.” Because one of the things that characterizes a hive, of bees, for example, is lack of conflict. And they all talked about how humans just couldn't ever get into that state, partly because we have so much conflict.
[00:10:30] And the final piece that I think comes up again and again in science fiction is that social organisms have a reproductive class. So there is either a group of animals, like in the case of Argentine ants, there's often multiple breeding females called queens. In some hives and colonies, there's only one. And in the documentary Alien, of course, we learn that there is only one queen. And clearly that, in Aliens, that's modeled on ants, because all the queen does is sit around all day and lay eggs. So, there's a lot of things that ants are doing in the colony that are incredibly important to the colony that don't have anything to do with laying eggs. And that could even be viewed as more important. So there's no queen. And that's part of what makes the colony organism, is that there is no real leader. It's all these emergent properties that come from this close cooperation, this incredible relatedness, this lack of conflict, where everybody kind of has a job, and they do those jobs for everyone else, and an individual life is absolutely unimportant.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:40] We're gonna take a short break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about how science fiction has depicted hive minds.
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Annalee: [00:11:58] So, Charlie Jane, why are hive minds so often depicted as being terrible and dystopian in science fiction?
Charlie Jane: [00:12:06] As we discussed in that rugged individualism episode, science fiction has this huge strand of individualism. And when we think about like, submerging the individual in the collective, it becomes just kind of scary to us. And obviously, the poster child for this scary collective is the Borg.
TNG Clip: [00:12:26] We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.
Charlie Jane: [00:12:42] And that's what the Borg say, when they come to meet you for the first time. They're going to assimilate you, they're going to take your distinctiveness and add it to their own. And you know, science fiction has like any number of parasites and alien organisms that turn people into kind of groupthink monsters. And you’ve got The Midwich Cuckoos in the X-Men comic who are kind of like a mini gestalt. Gestalts are often a little bit creepy and a little bit scary. And I think part of it honestly has to do with the fact that we're so ego-driven, that we can't imagine a gestalt that doesn't have a huge ego. And if it does have an ego, then it's this terrible, hostile thing that wants to absorb us. And if it doesn't have an ego, then it's this weird, alien, unthinkable thing that is just so alien to us that we can't even imagine it.
Annalee: [00:13:27] Yeah, I just finished watching the new TV series Made for Love, which also gives another way of thinking about how horrible hive minds might be. It's a story about a guy named Gogol, who runs a corporation called Gogol. No, no relation to any known corporations, who invents a chip that he calls Made for Love, and he installs it non-consensually in his wife's brain. And the idea is that he'll get a chip installed, and then they'll be psychically connected and poof, no more marital problems, because they can read each other's minds. But of course, in the show, what happens is it becomes the ultimate stalking device. And so, this is, I think, part of that nightmare of being in a hive mind is that you'll never have any privacy. And people that you don't want to know about your whereabouts or your thoughts can have access to them anytime and it becomes very terrifying.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:29] I don't think we can ignore the fact that like a lot of science fiction about hive minds was created during the Cold War, when we were at this conflict between the allegedly freedom-loving United States and the collectivist Soviet Union, which wanted to kind of turn us all into you know, drones in its five-year plan or whatever. And so, I think that when you look at a lot of these stories about like people being assimilated or absorbed, there is a fear of communism at the root of it. The idea that if we lose our individualism, if we become part of something greater than ourselves, we will lose something essential about ourselves and we will become less than, in a way.
Annalee: [00:15:08] Yeah. But then there's also a lot of sympathetic representations of hive minds too. And some of them even come out of that same period in history, like what are what are some of those stories and how do they kind of counteract this myth of the evil gestalt that will eat our individuality?
Charlie Jane: [00:15:27] When you see a sympathetic depiction of a gestalt or a hive mind in science fiction, it's frequently kind of a mutant. The classic kind of more sympathetic, somewhat more, it's a very dark, weird novel. But the more sympathetic portrayal of a hive mind is Sturgeon’s More Than Human, in which a group of outcasts join together to a group organism that is smarter and better, and ultimately more moral than humans. And I think that's part of what Sturgeon is interested in, is the idea that we can have better morality if we can transcend the individual.
[00:16:01] And Arthur C. Clarke plays around with the ideas of people losing some of their selfishness in novels like Childhood’s End. There's often this idea in science fiction that we can get to the next stage of human evolution in which we let go of some of our selfishness and some of our kind of individualism. And sometimes you get the sense that there are these godlike aliens who show up in things like Star Trek who are kind of more collective and less differentiated, let's say, than normal humans.
[00:16:31] There's also this thing that like some people imagine the afterlife as being basically that we will all kind of dissolve into a collective whole. Our souls, whatever our essence is, the things that make us who we are separate from memory and what we think of ourselves, will be kind of dissolved into some kind of like cosmic blob over millions of years or something.
Annalee: [00:16:53] Yeah, it makes me think of Greg Bear's novel Blood Music, which I think was one of his very first novels, where he imagines that kind of apocalypse of nanotechnology where nanobots convert everything on earth into themselves. They keep replicating and they break all people down, and all buildings and everything is broken down and kind of turned into grey goo. But at the same time, humans are sort of born again in this noosphere or no-o-sphere, I don't know how to pronounce it, where they're all kind of dreaming together. And as I said earlier, this is also kind of a Rudy Rucker fantasy as well.
[00:17:38] And Linda Nagata deals with it a little bit in her nanotech books as well, this idea that somehow nanotechnology is what's going to lead us there. And then oh, I was going to mention Ramez Naam’s books as well. The series that he wrote, starting with Nexus, which allows people to take a drug that then networks their brains together by kind of rewriting their brains. It's like, basically it installs software on your brain. And it creates empathy. And that's kind of his utopian vision is that people will share their feelings, and then—he has this very moving scene in Nexus, where a soldier shares his consciousness with someone in the country that he was colonizing or that his military was colonizing. And they both wind up weeping, and they both realize how horrible the situation has been. And it's just incredible, the idea that that could really happen.
[00:18:41] But of course, he's very careful to make it clear that there's also very dark and terrible uses for this drug. So, it's not all happiness and forgiveness.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:51] Yeah. And I think that that is kind of the crux of it is that we want more empathy, we want more connection with other people. Our lack of ability to conceive of other people's suffering, or other people's needs, is literally killing us as a species. It's literally making it impossible for us to build a sustainable world. We're actually hurting ourselves as individuals and collectively through our lack of empathy.
[00:19:17] But at the same time, there is this dark side. And I think what I keep thinking about is that I think it does come back to this idea of ego and that we're so ego driven that we can't imagine a collective that wouldn't be ego driven. Both that we can't imagine letting go of our egos, but also we can't imagine that the collective itself wouldn't have an ego. And I think there's an interesting point with the Borg where they go from being just like, a literal collective with no leader and no kind of spokesperson, to, first they have Locutus, who I think is just a mouthpiece. And then later, they have the Borg Queen, who feels like, in some ways I always felt like the Borg Queen kind of takes away some of what was cool about the Borg by making more that now she's in charge of they're all her minions. And I understand why they did it.
Annalee: [00:20:07] Well also, isn't it supposed to be, not to get too nerdy about this, but isn't it supposed to be that they've kidnapped Hugh, who was a member of the Borg, and then taught him about individuality. And he’s sent back to the Borg and individuality becomes a meme within the Borg collective. And as a result, they end up getting a queen who is an individual, who rules over them, like I don't know if that's just my head canon or if that actually is an explanation.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:38] You know, the Hugh storyline—
Annalee: [00:20:39] I thought that that’s what it was.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:41] The Hugh storyline made me so confused and I think I've watched it a few times. I like the one episode where they kidnap Hugh and try to, but then later on, he joins up with data's brother, and I was just like, I don't know what's happening anymore. I’m really confused by all of this.
Annalee: [00:20:53] Yeah, Data’s brother also made everything really complicated.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:57] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:20:57] Because he’s kind of like having sex with the Borg queen or something. I don’t—
Charlie Jane: [00:21:02] No, that was Data. That was Data.
Annalee: [00:21:03] Oh, no, right!
Charlie Jane: [00:21:04] That was Data. The Borg Queen puts human flesh on Data, and then they kind of like make out. I don't know, it's really weird. I feel like the Borg, much like a lot of other great bad guys in science fiction, the Borg kind of get more and more convoluted as they go along. And they kind of lose some of the purity of the original concept.
[00:21:25] And I was gonna say it's sort of similar how on Doctor Who, the Daleks were originally just this pure kind of force that occasionally there was some sense that there was a hierarchy, but mostly the Daleks were just all a unified entity. And then at some point, they have Davros, and Davros is like their kind of creator. And sometims they're kind of their boss, and sometimes kind of like their captive. But they have an individual and I think it's purely because after a while, it gets really hard to write interesting stories about a group or collective, where there's no person who can kind of stand up and be like I'm in charge and this is what's gonna happen. It’s hard to write that over time. I think it gets frustrating creatively.
Annalee: [00:22:07] Yeah. All right. So, on that note, why don't we turn to two new novels about hive minds?
Charlie Jane: [00:22:14] Yay!
Annalee: [00:22:14] And talk to Elly and Ben about how they imagined their hive minds?
Charlie Jane: [00:22:20] Yes, let's bring a gestalt to this conversation.
[00:22:23] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.
Annalee: [00:22:35] So, I talked to Ben Rosenbaum about his new book, The Unraveling, which is set in a very distant future on another world that's been colonized by very, very future human beings who have heavily modified their bodies, and one of the modifications they've made is that they are all now collective beings. So, people are individuals, but an individual might be three people who are linked through technology, or they might be six people, or, I think in one case, there's a person who's 12 people, and it's quite complicated.
[00:23:15] And Ben's idea is that this is a world that is kind of its post scarcity, people kind of have everything they want. And so this is a wish fulfillment for them, the idea that they would have multiple bodies, and here's what he said about that.
Ben: [00:23:32] It feels more unimaginable, and kind of I feel like my way into this was to feel like, what do we want? Of course, we do sort of maybe want sort of oceanic fusion and merging into one. Certainly, I've read, there are good stories that imagine that. But the project I was interested in was very much this sort of, like, it's very much a book about parenting and about being a child, and about relationships. And it's very much a book about individuals bumping up against each other. But I kind of wanted to turn all the knobs up to 11 on sort of what if we got everything we wished for, and then what problems would there be? So it's a book in which there's vanishingly little violence on the planet, there's no hunger, everybody lives 800 years, and children have so much attention from so many parents, and that you can be in more than one place at once. Like, there's all these sort of like gimmies.
Annalee: [00:24:23] And he also notes that this isn't a perfect world. He says, you know, it's a heterotopia it's not a utopia. It's not dystopia. It's kind of both. And I think that's one of the things that was really interesting to me about Elly’s book. So why don't you tell us a little bit about your interview with her?
Charlie Jane: [00:24:41] Yeah, so Elly Bangs is the author of a new novel called Unity in which there's basically a group of scientists have created a way to link collective consciousness and there's one survivor of that hive mind who's off on her own and she's trying to rejoin the collective and I won't spoil what happens. But it's a really interesting meditation on individualism and what it means to be part of something greater. And it's set in a world that's sort of apocalyptic and kind of Mad Max-ish. So that this idea of it’s everyone out for themselves. But there's this hope that we could actually be, instead, all working together as part of this one kind of group mind. And so, I asked Elly if hive minds are necessarily a terrible thing, or if they can be a wonderful thing and how we could get past these Borg stories. And this is what she told me.
Elly: [00:25:30] I can kind of relate in both directions to the idea of hive minds, I find them really interesting in terms of imagining, what if there was a really great hive mind and what if we could achieve transcendent communication and belonging and togetherness through a hive mind that? At the same time, hive minds are really a resonant allegory for really wanting to be an individual and then just at the same time being just assimilated into this big group that you don't want to be a part of like a corporation, or a really soul-deadening job of all kinds.
[00:26:14] I've experienced both those things in different ways and so I set out to kind of show both. Like, have a main character who is part of what I think of as a really beautiful hive mind, but then also to have to kind of reunite with this other version of herself, which is a pretty twisted hive mind in a lot of ways.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:34] And I think it's really interesting to think about hive minds as being like corporations, because in a sense, that is what a corporation is, it's kind of the subsuming of your personality and your ideas into this giant machine that is going to kind of harvest your brain and use you to kind of further the goals of the whole. Obviously, it's not, it's not pure individualism. And because there's some CEO somewhere, who is kind of the face and the brain of the corporation and kind of using you as part of as extension of their consciousness.
Annalee: [00:27:06] Yeah, it's really true. It's funny that like, it kind of mirrors what we were saying about how it's so hard to represent a hive mind. And we always have to invent like Borg Queen, or Davros or whatever. And it's like, nobody actually thinks that Mark Zuckerberg is personally responsible for everything that happens at Facebook. But we all like to say, like, oh, fucking Mark Zuckerberg, geez, he wrecked this thing. And it's like, probably, I mean, I would love to blame him for everything. But probably It's not his fault that one exact, tiny, specific thing happened to your Facebook account. But we need that face, we need a human to blame or to look up to depending on what the scenario is.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:51] We need the face of Facebook.
Annalee: [00:27:54] Yeah, exactly. So the other thing I think, is really interesting is this idea that we kind of want to extend our bodies, through various means, I mean, through actually linking our brains, but also through joining a group like a corporation. Or, Ben talks about how part of his book is really about families and the fantasy of how you would have a family, but also you could be somewhere else at the same time. You can kind of be everywhere at once, so you can be like part of the group but also separate from the group at the same time. And I just thought that was a really interesting way of thinking about hive minds, that it's also a way of being separate from the mind at the same time that you're part of it.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:45] Yeah, you know, I've been obviously really excited about the idea of books that are about chosen family or about communities rather than just like the rugged individual. And you know, I talked to Ellie about this and kind of about how the United States in particular, is a country that seems to kind of hostile to collectivism.
Elly: [00:29:04] I think this has traditionally been a very individualistic, kind of isolated, spread-out culture. And every culture on Earth, I think, to some extent, wrestles on to what degree are we alone individuals? And to what extent are we part of our families or communities or our friends groups? And how do we negotiate the spectrum of self to other?
Annalee: [00:29:30] It's so funny when I heard that because Ben talked about how, in The Unraveling a lot of his inspiration came from the fact that he emigrated to Switzerland and that he started thinking about things really differently when he looked from the outside in at this society that he feels is a lot more collective than ours here in the United States. So here's what he said about that.
Ben: [00:29:56] And Switzerland is a society where everything works well. Like the standard of living, you go from America to Switzerland, and you're like, oh, this is a first world country. You know, I mean, like, there's so many things like that, where, when I first got here, there was an article in the paper that said, that was complaining about the terrible situation of the drug trade in Zurich. And it said, you know, until the first dead policeman is only a matter of time. And I was like, the first? There would be a fistfight downtown in Basel, and would make page three news, you know, like, somebody was sent to the hospital to get stitches, and there was a plate glass window broken. Page three news! So it felt like a weird utopia in some ways. But also, there's this huge amount of social control in Switzerland.
Annalee: [00:30:39] What do you think about this idea that nations are a kind of hive mind?
Charlie Jane: [00:30:47] I mean, I think it's definitely got a lot of truth to it. I think that part of what happens when you're part of a nation is that you kind of, I don't know, drink the Kool-Aid and become part of almost a cult, in which we all are—I mean, obviously, not every member of a, not every citizen of a country agrees on every single thing that the country is doing, or that the country should be doing. But there are values and kind of national goals that we all internalize. And part of what happens when a nation starts to fragment is that people can no longer have that kind of unity, or that kind of togetherness, about the direction that we should be moving in.
Annalee: [00:31:22] And that's really scary when that happens. I feel like, this is something that a lot of countries are going through right now, where there's just this really deep factionalism not just like disagreeing over, when school should start, but like whether we should have school at all. Kind of that kind of level of disagreement.
[00:31:46] It’s funny, because we place all this value on individualism here in the States. And yet, when our nation starts to fragment, it inspires all this terror. So, there's this comfort and safety in the hive mind that I feel like is rarely acknowledged.
[00:32:04] So we've been talking about how hive minds can be a metaphor for nationalism, basically, for being part of a nation, but they're also a metaphor for social media and for internet technologies. And this is something that Ben is really obsessed with. And I think it really is at the heart of how he represents his hive mind people in The Unraveling. And so here's what he had to say about that.
Ben: [00:32:34] Data movement is cheap. There are eyes everywhere, everything is wired. So it's really, everything is on YouTube, by default. You have to explicitly have a room that’s your private room where there's a social agreement that no one can see what you're doing. That's an exceptional case that's different from our society, and yet, a lot closer to our society than it was, than 100 years ago. We're already in a super surveillance state. So, and also, there are some metaphorical things like wouldn't you like to be in more than one place at once? That sort of, there's that sort of reifying the metaphor of the thing we longed for, and then how that gets you into trouble.
[00:33:09] And also our dependence on technology, like if literally, your perception of your own body is mediated by basically the internet, if essentially a WiFi packet has to move across some kind of network for you to even feel what your fingers are doing. That is a deeply, we're very embodied. And we're also very compromised by technology. We're increasingly, more and more, mushed up together with technology and sort of complicit in our technologicization. So you know, I wanted to… It's a reductio ad absurdum of always being on your phone, and of wanting to be everywhere, because your life is so busy, and a bunch of other things like that. So.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:46] Yeah, I mean, it's so interesting to think about that, because obviously, in the past like 15 years that we've all started having smartphones our whole relationship with the world has changed. And I feel like I'm much more like aware of what other people are thinking and doing on a minute-by-minute basis than I was before that. I feel like I just, especially if I'm looking at social media, or if I'm looking at some other apps on my phone. I'm like, okay, I know exactly what so and so is doing right now. I know exactly what everybody on the internet is angry about right now. And there is a thing on social media where if enough people are angry about something, there's kind of a social pressure almost to be angry about the thing that everybody else is angry about. Like, if you're not angry about the thing that everybody else is angry about you're clearly letting everybody down, I guess.
Annalee: [00:34:39] So one of the things that Ben talked about with me a lot was that is hive mind is very physical. It's not just like brains that are linked with what he called nanomechanical machines. They are kind of sharing their brains, but they also share a physicality and for example, bruises can travel from one body to another. And so if one body is hurt another body is hurt.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:06] Oh, wow.
Annalee: [00:35:06] And a lot of his main character’s issue, or one of the struggles that his main character has, who's essentially a person coming of age, is that they have somatic integration problems. And so sometimes their bodies have a hard time coordinating with each other. And so there's a lot of discussion about what it means to share the sensation of someone else's hands, or someone else’s sexual experience or someone else’s—One of your bodies is on an asteroid while you're at home eating dinner. And I think it's so interesting because that, even though he was thinking about the internet, he was also thinking about something else, something physical that goes way beyond that, kind of like, oh, we're gonna all upload our brains. And it made me think about something in your interview with Elly, where she was talking about how a hive mind isn't just about, merging consciousness, but it's also bringing people together who have lots of different skills.
Elly: [00:36:08] And if a hive mind, I think, is made up of people who have different experiences, or different specializations, or different skills, or knowledge. Or if the hive mind is just able to get all that knowledge and is able to hold different facets of all that knowledge in its head at the same time, it might be able to see connections between subjects, that individual people, maybe never do, just because it's hard to be a polymath who has really deep knowledge of 1000 different subjects at a single time. I think what's always been really interesting to me to think about, about hive minds is that they're kind of these super organisms, like ant hives or bee hives. And I think in some ways, I mean, it's complicated. And it's important not to get too hyperbolic, I guess. But I think in some ways, human beings are kind of a superorganism, and the internet is like one of these means by which we have these huge, just gestalt thoughts, kind of.
Charlie Jane: [00:37:15] I think that part of what's interesting is to be about what Elly is saying here about, seeing different connections and seeing things that individuals might not see, they might have expertise in one area, but they might not understand enough about a different subject area to be able to make those connections. I feel like part of what fascinates me about that is that it’s sort of similar to the way that people talk about the singularity, and about AI.
Annalee: [00:37:39] Yes.
Charlie Jane: [00:37:39] Artificial super intelligence, specifically, like the idea that like, if we had artificial super intelligence, if we had computers that were vastly smarter and better at processing information than the smartest human who's ever lived, they would be seeing connections, and they would be able to kind of put things together that we would never, in a million years put together ourselves.
[00:38:01] And I think that part of the way that people write about hive minds and gestalts, and I think you mentioned Rudy Rucker earlier, and he's somebody who does this a lot, is that it kind of shades over into how we talk about AI. And the godlike nature of like some AIs, is kind of mirrored by the godlike nature of a group mind in a way.
Annalee: [00:38:20] What's really funny about that is that the reason why this super organism is powerful is because it's bringing together people who have radically different perspectives and who are really diverse. In the same way that Ben's hive minds integrate the experiences of three different bodies, or, in the case of his main character, three bodies, and some of the characters it’s many more, it's all about power through diversity, right?
Charlie Jane: [00:38:47] Right.
Annalee: [00:38:47] And yet the AI dream is, power through like everyone just merging into a blob, right? Like that's the noosphere that that Greg Bear writes about, that Rudy Rucker writes about. And actually Neal Stephenson has this idea about how people will become part of a computer when they like merge all their brains and just think thoughts. I think that's in the Diamond Age. It's not represented as a good thing.
Charlie Jane: [00:39:15] It's sort of the mental gray goo in a way.
Annalee: [00:39:17] It is. Yes, that is exactly what it is, it’s mental gray goo. And yet, it keeps running up against this clearly true fact, which is that in order to have that super intelligence, you have to maintain diversity and particularity. Otherwise, you can't. It's like, you have to have specialization in order to have those deep thoughts. And yet, the mental gray goo is all about like, we merge and become one mind that is totally unique and therefore cannot be specialized.
Charlie Jane: [00:39:49] You know, it's so funny because like the promise of the Borg and maybe the Borg, when they show up and say we will add your distinctiveness to our own. What they think people are gonna be like is, oh, I'm gonna get to keep all my distinctiveness but I'm gonna have all your distinctiveness too. But then you look at the Borg and like, there's no distinctiveness. The Borg don't all dress in different outfits and go like, well, we're all distinctive, but we're a collective. It’d kind of be—and now I'm trying to imagine the Borg if they actually did incorporate the distinctiveness of people they assimilated. If they were like, well, this person is a jazz musician. So they're gonna keep playing jazz, but they're gonna play jazz as part of the collective, and they're gonna wear their cool jazz musician outfit over their Borg implants.
Annalee: [00:40:32] So they’d be like appropriators instead of assimilators.
Charlie Jane: [00:40:37] I mean, I guess.
Annalee: [00:40:38] We will steal your particular culture and commodify it for our own.
Charlie Jane: [00:40:42] I mean, that's a dark way of looking at it. But I mean, also the idea that the Borg kind of over promised in terms of like, how they're going to preserve the distinctiveness of the people they assimilate, I guess.
Annalee: [00:40:52] I love that idea. The Borg, they’re just over promising.
Charlie Jane: [00:40:55] You know, it's typical corporate behavior. They're like, yeah, we got to keep your plan. Oh, yeah. You'll get to like, you know…
Annalee: [00:41:04] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:41:05] But here's a promise that's not an over promise. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode. Thank you so much for listening to Our Opinions Are Correct. It just means the multiverse to us. That means like the uberverse to us.
Annalee: [00:41:17] Join our hive mind.
Charlie Jane: [00:41:21] And please do join our hive mind we have a hive mind patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. And you can be part of our collective. We even have a Doscord where we can fuse our thoughts into like one hyperthought. And we also have a Twitter account at @OOACpod, where you can be part of our collective and join in our shared consciousness. And you can find our podcast wherever podcasts are found. And please leave a review so that the rest of the collective can know exactly how the collective is feeling about our podcast. And you know, we're just so grateful for all of your support. Also, thank you so much to our heroic and brilliant and very much individualistic producer, Veronica Simonetti, and thanks to Chris Palmer, for the music, and thanks again to you. Again, it's a promise we'll be back in two weeks. Thank you.
[00:42:09] Bye!
Annalee: [00:42:09] Bye!
[00:42:11] Outro music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.