8BitKid: Living Bit by Bit

“The current state of the net, which wasn’t around before humanity established its existence, loosely forms a subconscious mind; one which is split off from mankind’s consciousness. This mental level net and the electronic network now cover most of the world. The subconscious mind they give rise to is done so in the form of the general consensus of the whole.”

- Ghost in the Shell, Stand Alone Complex: Season 2, episode 15

If it isn’t obvious through the limited exposure you may have had to me through this blog, I am a fan of anime. Specifically, of philosophical anime with sci-fi themes. One of the shows that struck a chord with my mind is “Ghost in the Shell, Stand Alone Complex.” The series is built around the idea that a collective subconscious can give rise to copycats that are mirroring each other while lacking a singular shared source to mimic. In other words, since the near-future society of the series is a place where the internet enables people to constantly share information with each other, multiple people arrive at the same conclusion simultaneously.

This notion of how the internet can function as a collective subconscious had a marked impact on my own outlook as someone who works in web tech. In this age of del.icio.us, Youtube, and Facebook, we are, as users, continually aware of what others are doing. This is the power of non-verbal communication (a theme I will delve into at a later date). Just because people may not be consciously and intentionally exchanging information, the very nature of the internet gives rise to its more current incarnation as a largely crowd-sourced medium. Since the internet itself is a product of collective shaping, its content, in turn, seeps back out to the users, thus redirecting this collective pool of thought.

To me, this is not just a theoretical concept in a TV show, but an idea that has implications that are relevant to building a model of understanding why we seem to be rapidly moving towards certain conclusions simultaneously online, even when existing in isolation oblivious to the others. It is because we are all being exposed to the same information that the probability continues to increase that a subset of similarly-minded people will encounter a high percentage of the same data. The substantial extent of the commonality in ingested information leads these individuals to the same terminal point. This is a philosophy that can provide insight into how we currently interact with particles of information and illuminates the truth about the impact of the inevitability that we will, as a collective, be continuously linked through the web in the future. As we accelerate the pace at which we become interconnected through the fibers of the internet, it will, in turn, increase the osmosis of the digital collective subconscious that guides us independently towards a singular conclusion.