Hive mind
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Hive mind
/haɪv/ /maɪnd/ (n.)
The theory of consciousness that asserts that a new and better personality emerges from the networked personalities of those in an organisation and by itself generates ideas that are, therefore, not traceable to any particular individual mind in the hive.
The theory seems nice, accords with evolution and so on, but it is still hard to identify brilliant ideas that have emerged in that way, since the first thing that anyone will do should they stumble on a brilliant idea that has formed unbidden out of the collective is to claim credit for it.
What we are left with, therefore is a welter of transparently preposterous ideas that have emerged from the hive mind.
Debt value adjustments. Mark-to-market accounting for non-existent forward markets. Performance appraisals. SMART goals. Non-fungible tokens. Environmental, social, and corporate governance.
These ideas will persist and flourish as long as plausible livelihoods can be made out of them, but they have a habit of imploding, catastrophically and without warning. Here the hive mind comes into its own: as an emergent property of a super-brain, these bad ideas no one’s idea and therefore no-one’s fault.
In vain will regulators, auditors, and prosecutors look for culprits among the dazed staff, stumbling around outside the building clutching Iron Mountain boxes.
The exploding whale
Take the celebrated exploding whale of Lane County, Oregon, from 1970. See the entertaining news report in the panel.
What is most amazing here is not that onlookers, held behind barriers a quarter of a mile away, had to run for their lives while brick-sized lumps of stinking, fetid, whale flesh rained down on them from from the sky, but that no-one — not the highways authority, not the project manager, not the forklift driver, not the reporter, not the film crew, not the gelignite vendor, not those hundreds and hundreds of spectators, fleeing for their lives — not one asked: “you are proposing to detonate a rotting sperm whale with half a ton of dynamite. Have you completely lost your mind?”
Well, one man did, and this is where the irony gets positively Homeric.
That fellow, one Walter Umenhofer, was a military veteran with explosives training. He came to the area to take advantage of a “Get a Whale of a Deal!” promotion in a nearby car dealership. When he heard the plan, he warned anyone who would listen that half a ton of dynamite was far too much. Four kilogrammes would be plenty.
But no, the hive mind knew best: his advice went unheeded. The hive mind went with half a ton.
Miraculously, no-one was hurt during the blast, which showered a half-mile radius with brick-sized bombs of rotten blubber.
There was just one casualty: a brand-new Oldsmobile Regency 98, purchased off the lot that day, which was flattened by a hunk of meat the size of a truck tyre. It was parked up while its owner, one Walter Umenhofer, beseeched the project manager, in vain, not to be so stupid as to use half a ton of explosives to remove a deal whale.
A whale of a deal, indeed.