The Rise of Collective Consciousness

 

            It has been a solid truth since the beginning of democracy, but it should be blindingly obvious, especially now, that we cannot always put our trust into our elected leaders.  For though they command vast resources, and they profess to mean well, they are a mere handful of fallible humans who lack the perspective and experience to deal with the greatest of crises from the top down.  Even in the corporate world, leaders frequently hand down mandates to their employees and make sweeping decisions without the slightest idea of the effect it will have, and when the shit really hits the fan, they jump from the sinking ship, leaving struggling underlings holding the bag.  Meanwhile, the inflated bureaucracy that they have created spends more time deciding how to cover their asses rather than fix the situation.

It is becoming clear that top-down management in general is beginning to see its decline.  Good business and good governments know this, and the rigid hierarchical structure of companies past has definitely begun to pancake.  They’re pushing the team mentality more and more, trying to make management more robust in its ability to solve problems.  There are just too many good opinions about a great many subjects at the bottom and not nearly enough at the top. 

When the meek inherit the earth, it may have absolutely nothing to do with control freak managers deciding to give up their power – it will happen all by itself, for our destiny is not to have one person dictating to us from on high.  The future lies in collaborative networks of ordinary and not-so-ordinary individuals who can create sort of an anarchistic framework for perpetuating the knowledge of humankind.  The free Internet started this in earnest, and now the progress of our civilization has been telescopically and irreversibly accelerated.  Humans as a collective today are smarter than they have ever been, and they are getting smarter.

            The phenomenon of wikis, or web applications to which users contribute their own information, is an incredible example of this collective consciousness at work.  The first of these was created in 1995, but only now are they beginning to truly become mainstream.  The site wikipedia.org, a wiki-based encyclopedia, has an exhausting amount of information in it, which is updated as events happen.  In fact, the name comes from the Hawaiian word wiki wiki, which means quick.  Entries in these vast databases are not subject to a rigid, biased editorial board, but are edited by users themselves, and have revision control built-in so that the occasional nasty post or factual inaccuracy from a problem user can be undone.  It certainly sounds like a recipe for chaos, but it works, and works incredibly well.  I have seen entries in Wikipedia, specifically about Space Shuttle missions and Hurricane Katrina, which had detailed accounts of things that happened that very morning.  I have seen entries about obnoxiously obscure subjects, ones that would never be published or even considered in something like the Encyclopaedia Britannica, such as definitions of vulgarities (such as shart) referenced by two movies in all of history, and descriptions of lesser monsters from the game Dungeons & Dragons.  This is more than just 24-hour news.  This is fast becoming the entire compendium of our race’s knowledge, and it is being updated on-the-fly.

            We are in a new age where lies are becoming increasingly difficult to support and maintain, because it is so extremely easy to fact-check.  So much of the human experience is now documented exhaustively by amateur and professional alike, and it certainly makes the writers’ and politicians’ jobs more convenient, but much more exhausting.

And to power all of this collaborative genius, open source software, such as Linux, is beginning to take over computers all around the world.  This is software not developed and tested by some mega-rich, secretive megacompany in Washington State, but by a huge community of users who report bugs and fixes, constantly trying to break and improve the systems that they use.  Rather than having a company put out a press release about a security flaw in their software which hackers can then exploit, hackers are on the side of good from the very beginning to constantly audit the software and make sure the loopholes are closed before those on the side of evil can even begin to take advantage.  The cliché in this case might read:  Several thousand heads are better than several dozen. 

            Even if one does not have vital information to contribute to a wiki, or patches for important security flaws, they can share the minute details of their lives through blogging communities, which are often linked to the blogs of dozens of friends, forming a new collective network of personal information and support.  In these enlightened times, I rarely have to tell people what’s new in my life, because they’ve already read about it a few hours earlier, and I can share my opinions in a place where I know they will be read by those who truly care about me.  This is something I certainly never would have envisioned four years ago.

In the absence, of course, of a brutal singlemindedness, a crowd of diverse individuals will perform greater than the smartest person in the crowd.  There are researchers who study the power of a crowd versus the power of a single leader, and the results are definitely promising.  But the greatest of experiments are happening in our world right now, in real time, with no control group.  This is the ultimate grassroots revolution, and now that we are all banding together to solve problems, the future is starting to look at least a little bit brighter.  All we need to do is get the rest of the world out of poverty and connected to each other, as quickly as we possibly can.

 

Further Reading: Suroweicki, James. The Wisdom of Crowds