Original post from r/Futurology on Reddit:
I recently stumbled on this post and found the question to be very interesting and also relevant to the saga of GME investors.
The events of January 2021 were spectacular and exciting. Many people on the internet, for the most part on Reddit, had their attention drawn into this wild story that was unfolding, with what appeared to be accelerating momentum, until the incumbents colluded to prevent any further purchasing of shares of GME and other stocks. What has followed has been an interesting ordeal involving hundreds of thousands of individual investors who collectively believe in the idea, to put it simply, that there is way more to this story under the surface.
Many interesting and worthwhile things have been discovered, shared, discussed, dissected, and expanded upon, by these hundreds of thousands of individuals.
What do you call this group of people? I don’t mean terms like “ape”, I mean, like the original question above, what do you call an emergent superintelligence that arises when hundreds of thousands of individuals all work together towards a common objective?
Personally, I believe “hive mind” is an appropriate word to use to refer to the collective combined intellectual power of a group like this. Another worthwhile candidate from that Reddit thread is “collective”.
Either way, whether you call it hive mind, or a collective, or something else, what is interesting to me is the existence of this emergent phenomenon at all. To me it is interesting to think about how this all happened and how, regardless of how it happened, here we are in the year 2023 caught in a game of information warfare, hundreds of thousands of individual investors who believe in an idea that they perceive to be true, versus incumbent power holders that have never had to deal with such a force before.
There is an enormous amount of information out there on the internet and elsewhere. Way too much information for any one person or small group to process themselves. Among lots of good information, misinformation is also present, and much of the effort involves determining what is true and relevant and worthwhile, and what is not.
I like to think of it like a very big jigsaw puzzle, a million piece puzzle. For one person to assemble a million piece jigsaw puzzle would probably be nearly impossible, or if not impossible then so time consuming as to be not a worthwhile effort. But, if you have many participants, all working together to assemble the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, a division of labor so to speak, suddenly it isn’t quite so difficult. And when you work on a jigsaw puzzle, the rate of completion is typically always increasing, accelerating. At first, progress is very slow because you have 1 million possible pieces to work with to put in 1 million possible locations. But as progress is made, there are now less pieces and less possible locations to put them in, so the total amount of work required to make further progress is less. In other words, nobody is going to waste valuable resources (time, effort) trying to solve a section of the puzzle that is already solved. So those valuable resources are able to be spent in a more worthwhile area.
In terms of this story of GME, it could maybe be summarized as such:
It took less than 1 year for this large group of individuals, this hive mind, harnessing the combined intelligence of hundreds of thousands of individuals, to go from being confused and uncertain about what was happening and how it worked and why it was happening, to having figured out basically the main concepts involved and what we can do about it. DRS has existed for decades, but only since 2021 has it had any real relevance in the minds of regular household investors.