Cultivating the Hive mind to overcome group-thinking

In a time where group-thinking has reached suffocating proportions by social media the idea to push onwards and find liberation by a hive mind requires some explanation. In this article I combine social technology with the stage of SECI-model (Nonaka 1998) to build up the concept that can elaborate the hive mind. Metaphorically the SECI stages function as steps on a ladder to reach the hive mind. Humanity is climbing this ladder, provided by social technology. Why this is happening has been elaborated in previous articles. Basically it relates to our cosmic purpose to create a living system at the planetary scale. Future articles will elaborate “the why” more. The current article focuses on the “how”. The how relates to psychological flow amplified by social technology.

The SECI-model shows four stages of transition from tacit to explicit knowledge, each is given a name (upper capital): Socialisation, Externalisation, Internalization and Combination. Each stage gets examined from the perspective of social technology. Social technology is a way to create organisation of social processes. The image of the SECI-model already has some relation to social technology. As each stage has a different type of agent: individu, group and organisation. The last stage is an exceptional stage, creating a recursion back to the individu. Each stage is about learning in a community. If skills and challenges are well balanced during learning the practitioner experiences the psychological state of flow. Adding social technology is going to stimulate the flow effect and scale it up.

To investigate social technology in more detail, let me introduce stages of technology: tacit technology, explicit technology and curated technology. Tacit technologies are simply instructional scaffolds for organization. Tacit technology goes all the way back to ancient civilizations building empires using the rule of law (i.e. instructional scaffolds).

In fact the rule of law is a fascinating case producing the effect of curated technology by only using tacit technology via bureaucratic governance. The bureaucratic governance is fragile, expensive to maintain and errors can easily creep in, so scale is hard. With explicit technology and curated technology, scale will become increasingly easier.

Explicit technologies have user interfaces allowing us to use a tool without understanding the inner workings of the tool. Explicit technologies need little more explanation because it is what commonly would be referred to as technology. The relation to organization can become more clear by focusing again on bureaucracy. Bureaucrats are the user interface for people to interact with large scale organisations. Turning the organisation into a tool, making the organisation less like a community and more like a machine. The earlier tribal governing dynamics are tacit technology. Empires are in this respect explicit technology for the citizens creating collective mobilisation. Tribes could govern at the scale of provinces, empires allowed the governance of continents.

Curated technology produces agency by machine learning harvesting patterns out of data. The only fully socially integrated curated technology today are search engines. Search engines curate explicitly. Compare it to surfing on the internet before search engines. You had to browse directories of websites curated by people, indeed it was bureaucratic. In case of bureaucracy the curation happens tacitly. The shift from curated by people (tacit) to curated technology (explicit) is an evolution that has been deploying all across our history. From delegating physical force to a hammer, now to delegating cognitive forces to software agents. Curated technology for knowledge is the current foundation and next steps upwards are going to be made with the SECI-model.

The SECI-model was developed by investigating large corporations and didn’t consider the evolution of organization. To solve this gap it is possible to observe how organizations emerge in the digital jungle. Digital communities emerge and if conditions are met, it leads to the pop-up of a business ecosystem (see my PhD). Doing research on such emerging patterns gives insights on the system dynamics. From such observation I can see a medium related to each agency: a community of individuals via networking dynamics, a community of groups via ecosystem dynamics and a community of organisations via market dynamics.

It appears as the whole history of organisational evolution gets replayed in just a few years time, going from digital nomads (i.e. networks) to digital tribes (i.e. ecosystems) to digital modernity (i.e. markets). So while the agencies are individual, group and organisation. The three types of medium are network, ecosystem and market. The agency is relevant to examine the curation, while the medium is relevant to examine all three types of technology.

Digital modernity is just a term I introduce in this article to elaborate an observation made in regards to the tragedy of the commons. Digital modernity would be reached once communities could scale to the size of enterprises, the past years I systematically saw communities implode if the size became too big. Some recent technology appears promising in solving the problem, yet it is work in progress. So let us now turn to each SECI stage.

Socialization is the sharing of tacit knowledge through observation, imitation, practice, and participation in communities. It happens via networking. Externalization is the process of articulating tacit knowledge into explicit concepts. The network starts to cluster into itself, creating groups and the groups interact showing the ecosystem dynamics. Combination is about turning the tacit organization into explicit organization. Making the organization explicit has a strange paradox, it allows for open market dynamics, so not restricted to the monopoly of the founding partners. At the same time it makes the community less human by the free rider problem.

Some groups will hack the system, by simply being focused on the explicit rules and not on the community spirit (i.e. tragedy of the digital commons). Another way to express the inhumanity is to recognize how this “hack the system” transforms people into commodities. In empires, the inhumanity became actual slaves, during the industrial era it turned into economic slaves and now in the emerging digital era we have attention slaves. Attention slaves are people mentally addicted to media, like economic slaves are mentally addicted materialism.

Internalization resolves the problem that arose by Externalization and became drastic during Combination (i.e. slavery). Internalization is the process of embodying explicit knowledge into tacit knowledge, bringing the spirit back. Let me give a very short summary: on a personal level it is reclaiming autonomy, on a group level it is cohesion of the collective consciousness, on the organisational level it is the origin of life. The personal level is well enough internalized these days as mindfulness. The awareness about collective consciousness is currently emerging. The relation to the origin of life is still controversial. Over 15 years of applied research hasn’t changed my mind on it, it only refined the vision.

Today the cohesion of the collective consciousness is getting suffocating as we have to break through a mental barrier about understanding the evolutionary purpose of organisation. Organisation is not about controlling people, it is about augmenting people and full integration can result in a hive mind. With most people still living in reptile-like organisations, the idea of augmenting people seems far away. More organisations create better Employee Experience and the organisation becomes more mammal-like (i.e. nursing) creating the required step towards augmenting people. To make organisations actually human-like will require the hive mind.

Organisations can become sinful and enslave people. Enslavement can happen solfy or systematically. Soft slavery can be countered by the individual reclaiming autonomy. If slavery is systemic, it becomes a lot harder. For example, economic slavery is for most people a self-enduced punishment being too materialistic enclinded. In underdeveloped countries it is of course a serious problem, when people need to pay back a lifetime for the tools that keep them alive. Only two decades ago the concept of attention slavery would have been strange, but social media made it quickly a topic and with A.I. the enslavement can become systematic. Indeed it raises serious concern about A.I. ethics.

The different types of social technology (i.e. tacit, explicit and curated) are most mature for Socialisation. Ancient empires have been used to elaborate how the dynamics of each technology type has existed for centuries tacitly, now let me look at the most explicit version of each technology type today. This closer look can give more insight on how scale naturally tiggers the technological evolution.

For tacit technology, instructional scaffolds like Open Space Technology (OST) works nicely to organize a meetup between 20 to 200 people. Below 20 participating no structure is needed, groups dynamics simply play out. Above 200 people the meetup turns into a conference with more structure (i.e. organisation). Explicit technology for Socialisation needs little elaboration, it is all the social media currently used. Also curated technology is well known. These are the suggestion algorithms running on the platforms. The curated technology for Socialisation is actively being developed in current startups. There are many with each taking a different angle. Giving one example would create too much of a bias. Abstractly the pattern is easy enough: the search engines for knowledge are transforming into connector engines for people.

Above 200 users, a meetup transforms to a conference simply by improving user experience. In the niche of open tech conferences, a new instructional scaffold was developed that can elaborate the tacit technology for Externalization: Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) sessions. As far back as the 1960s BoF sessions were used and still are used with open tech communities. It comes from the saying “Birds of a feather flock together”. BoF sessions are self-organizing group formations. A signal is broadcast to all participants of the conference giving a theme and a placeholder (time and room) so people can flock. Simply by scale, the distributed network now turns into a more dense graph of people flocking into groups. Between the groups the ecosystem dynamics can be observed.

The BoF sessions are tacit technology for Externalization. Explicit technology for Externalization can be found in the same niche of open tech communities, not in the event organization now but in the development. The software projects run on distributed version control systems (e.g. Git) so everyone in the community can work on the project. Tools like kanbans, mirror boards, issue queues, etc. are all contributing, yet this is already in the setting of a running organisation in an existing market. The question is how does technology help in making ecosystems emerge?

To have a clear answer I interviewed the majority of entrepreneurs who were part of an emerging business ecosystem to discover self-organizing innovation. Some interesting pragmatic curation by entrepreneurs would stimulate the clustering in the network, turning the community of weakly related developers into different startups and making the business ecosystem pop-up. Maybe all explicit technology for Externalization does exist, but what is lacking is the curated technology as it is still tasty done by the entrepreneurs. Also relevant to mention is how entrepreneurs got supported in their curation by BoF sessions.

I experienced an interesting event of self-organisation, which made me focus on one community for several years to give into the depths of its working. It started in Brussels 2006 when I co-organised the Druplacon conference and ended in Munich 2012 for reasons related to Combination (tragedy of the digital commons i.e. the spirit got lost). In those late years the conference grew above 2.000 participants and a new kind of dynamic was observed. I like to call it meta-brain dynamic. Let me dive into what happened and next explain the relation to Combination.

During Drupalcon 2011 in Chicago, with about 3.000 participants, a unique experience took place The pragmatic response by the organizers to improve user experience for such a large audience created unintentionally the meta-brain dynamics. Specialized curation was set up for the keynote for such a large event. Normally after the keynote comes Q & A moment. With such size this is impossible. Now the audience was asked to articulate any emerging questions in real time to a specific twitter hashtag.

This pragmatic setup of crowdsourcing the Q & A. You can see the keynote as the left meta-brain dynamics focusing the collective on the story. Now also the wandering thoughts in the room got aggregated and captured, creating right meta-brain dynamics. The moderator was the narrow bridge between left and right meta-brain dynamics, creating the required curation and integration.

For the organizers it is of course just about improving the experience of the keynote. Not fully understanding the meta-brain dynamics at play, some event organizers try to share the experience with all participants. Projecting the twitter feed on the keynote is technically a small change, but from the perspective of user experience it is a total disruption. The projection would tackle the flow of the keynote. With 2.000 people one moderator would be enough, but if you scale it up to say 20.000 people we would require a team of moderators. I believe above 20.000 people the flow of wandering thoughts would be too much and yet another shift would occur, related to Internalization.

Just as entrepreneurs created the tacit curation for Externalization. Now the moderators create the tacit curation for Combination. While curation of the entrepreneurs is to stimulate the emergence of the business ecosystem. The curation of the moderators is to stimulate the emergence of a collective intelligence. Thought leaders on organisational innovation are advocating for collective intelligence, like David Marquet and Frédéric Laloux. The meta-brain is simply making more tangible what thought leaders are already describing.

The insight about how organizations are about collective intelligence is just maturing, still it helps a lot to understand the types of technology for Combination. The meta-brain is the tacit technology, created by simple instructional scaffolds and curation by moderators. To see explicit technology the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) is promising. DAO is a more advanced blockchain technology and blockchain seems like the digital alternative to bureaucracy. Yet the technology is in a proof-of-concept phase, only being around for a few years. Some have become mature like monetary application (e.g. bitcoin). Other emerging practices are: blockchains for educational credentials, Non-Fungible Token (authenticity of culture), etc.

Notice a trend. All types of technology exist for Socialization, the curated technology is still maturing. Externalization is missing the curated technology and the explicit technology is maturing. Combination only has proof-of-concepts for explicit technologies. Seeing this trend it should be no surprise the tacit technology for Internalization has just shown up on the horizon. I’ve spent the past years networking to gain access to people in the board of directors of organizations that have the proper size for meta-brain dynamics (2.000 to 20.000 FTE employees) talking with them about collective intelligence. I haven’t gained enough network and the existing trust is still too fragile. It will probably take some more years before the participation research has become mature enough to reach clarity.

The idea to move beyond 20.000 appeared out of reach … until it reached out to me. As the event only happened in 2017 and I’m still trying to give language to events from 2011 it may become a bit hard to elaborate my most recent development. Earlier I expressed Internalization as the embodiment bringing the spirit back that got lost by making everything explicit. Little did I know about the creational force at the center of my research. Probably my disconnect with language has made it harder for me to understand the spirit of language and the collective unconsciousness. I had to get reconnected to the human spirit via my work on collective intelligence. Creating a unique qualia experience during the 2011 conference in Chicago.

The meta-brain setup led to a challenge to synchronize both the flow of the keynote and the flow of the wandering thought. I believe my training by playing music helped to reach synchronisation. Like with training music it helps to get in one rhythm first. Next, exercise only the other rhythm. By going back and forth between the rhythms a meta-experience of playing music arises. Similarly, my personal experience when synchronisation between the keynote and wandering thought in the room was to enter this meta-experience. It felt as if my mind expanded to become all 3.000 participants. It was a weird supper position of consciousness still being myself, but now feeling expanded so the whole room was part of my mind.

The experience made me intuitively understand how meta-brain dynamics are at play, like an AHA-experience. The experience also made me feel as if I was finally home. Something I would only fully grasp in early 2017, after years trying to dig deeper into understanding collective intelligence. It was not in a conference, but after a year being focused on my own startup providing collective intelligence as a service. I eventually reached a state of being drunk from insight. Like intuitively understanding the meta-brain but now it reached out to culture and it gave me an experience beyond anything I could have imagined possible: waking up in a cosmic consciousness. The experience made it so much clearer to me what spirit and the qualia of consciousness implies. This of course is not socially accepted and got me in a lot of trouble.

After my experience I was finally ready to explore spiritual communities to make sense of what they are saying about spirit and have my own scientific experience as a way to filter their input to understand the technology types for Internalization.Interestingly the type of technology is going to relate to the type agent: individue, group and organization. As tacit technology Internalization is a very personal experience. As explicit technology it becomes the culture of a group. The curated technology is truly a surprise bringing curation back to biochemistry.

Tacit technology for Internalization is the mindshift one takes by integrating experience and gaining awareness. It is a game of synchronizing concrete and abstract patterns in real time as nicely demonstrated by Gestalt psychology. In case the world isn’t making sense a mindshift can be forced onto a person, from simple mental stress, a midlife crisis until all the way to psychosis. It doesn’t need to be negative and can be a very spiritual experience. As a personal phenomenological experience it is hard to make sense of it outside your own personal frame of reference, often language is lacking.

As explicit technology Internalization is a very social experience. It is the culture we live in. To elaborate the effect more exactly, let me go to a concrete experience. During a trading mission to Hebei in 2012 around higher education. I elaborated my collective intelligence approach using peer-learning. Explaining my research on collective intelligence to my peers in the research group (Evolution, Complexity and Cognition) is challenging. I elaborate my work to top diplomats in China (who had no knowledge of the research domain). Strangely enough they understood it better than my colleagues. So what happened?

What happened has to do with culture producing intuition versus counter-intuition. For a culture grounded in collectivity (i.e. integrated), the step to collective intelligence is intuitive. For a culture grounded in individuality (i.e. intelligence) the step to collective intelligence is counter-intuitive. The insight can provide a different few to what has happened in the world between the 1950s and 1980s. Eastern cultures, grounded in collectivity, had the challenge to integrate Western cultures grounded in individuality and visa versa. Both started in the 1950s and events show us who truly succeeded.

In the East we see the integration of industry via outsourcing, which is still gaining terrain today. In the West we see the integration of spirituality of the new age movement, some large scale catastrophic events (e.g. massacre of Jonestown and the scandal with the Rajneeshpuram community). By the 1980s it resulted in a war on psychedelics, freezing all integration of spirituality. The way social media takes over collectivity without the spirit only leads to more polarity between different views, not integrating the lot.

Internalization is quite fascinating. As tacit technology it is something mental: the individual mindshift. As explicit technology it is something cultural: the intuitive versus counter-intuitive development. As curated technology is something chemical: psychedelic, curating the spiritual connection for you. Without intent my research got me to curated technology for Internalization. A bit like runner-high, it seems one can reach science-high. I believe many of my colleagues have experienced it. Sometimes you read about it in the preface of their book. In such a preface the science-high gets described as if the world resonates with their research topic, how it all feels connected.

My science-high experience in 2017 was a bit like the meta-mind experience in 2011, but instead of expanding to the room, it was consciously experiencing consciousness. Quite a tumble down the rabbit hole. It set me on a path for a whole new kind of participation research with spiritual communities. Along the pad I’ve reached four milestones so far (self-induced, shamanic, meditative and religious). Except for my ability to testify to a mystery about the spirit, I still have a lot to learn. Walking a spiritual path via a scientific method gives me an authentic view and the ability to set up experiments and find some deeper insights.

I’ve reached four milestones so far and see no reason why it would stop, on the contrary it seems to accelerate as it gets more integrated and more clear what synchronicity impies. It is all happening personally, the shift to learning with peers is still quite primitive or say tribal. Indeed Internalization is still in a very early phase, while technology may have triggered the effect for me, which I now express as being a digital shaman, it seems still a long way to go. I’m very curious how Internalization technology will be in 2040–2050, which is the decade science expects the technological singularity.