All Hail The Egregore!

Smartphone Hive Mind

Handwaving Freakoutery has a new post about how our smartphone hive mind is driving civilization into the abyss. Here's a brief introduction to the concept of an Egregore:

Briefly, smartphones allow us to outsource certain critical thinking processes from our brains to our phones, from road navigation, to scheduling, to morality itself. The sensemaking content within our phones primarily flows from like-and-share mechanics within our social feeds, meaning whatever is popular within our chosen echo chambers becomes “true” to us in a postmodernist sense. Media organizations are financially rewarded for feeding our echo chambers things they want to hear, so each echo chamber manufactures its own truth in real time. The media doesn’t control the echo chamber, the echo chamber controls the media. The narratives that form within these echo chambers, then, are driven by popularity instead of by objective truth. For example, “healthy at any size” is obviously not true, but because being lazy and eating sugar is popular “healthy at any size” becomes “true.”

The users who propagate the narratives evaluate a series of stimuli called their “feed” and like or share things based on some generator function within their brains, just like a neuron does in a human brain. The users are the neurons, the feed is the dendrites, and the “share button” is the axon. This creates a living, thinking, artificial neural network of people in which a set of behavioral indoctrinations, or what the postmodernists called “metanarratives,” can evolve and literally learn. And because each metanarrative is vying for purchase in the overall human brainspace, they compete with each other by trying to out-learn each other and become the most viral. These entities are the egregores – bundles of evolving behavioral indoctrinations summoned like demons by a mindless cellphone zombie mob to rule that mob and dictate their actions.

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Egregores have only one motivation - to spread. They have no ethics, no morals, and do not care if humans live or die. If someone captured by an egregore would sacrifice two years of their own child’s mental development to appease it, would they not also go along with nuclear war to appease it?

If you want to understand why your fellows have apparently lost their minds, I recommend you read the whole thing.