I think that the way the internet has sped up communication is turning us into single neurons of a global form of consciousness- and we should be deeply concerned that we don’t understand our role as single neurons yet. As single neurons, we are supposed to amplify or suppress signals that change the behavior of the larger organism we’re a part of. In many cases, we’re so overwhelmed with tasks that most of us can only play the role of a logic gate- something that spits out a 0 or a 1. Speaking binary. No one of us is remotely capable of knowing all available knowledge (which was actually feasible for a really intelligent person up until, say,a few centuries ago).
We’re used to being localized self-decision-makers- like the processing neurons of an octopus’s tentacle– and now we’re being roped into some rote processing work for a far, far larger and more complicated organism. We read an Amazon review and vote if it was helpful or not. We may write a review, which despite its potential complexity is essentially boiling down to a binary logic- buy or don’t buy. We downvote bad Reddit posts. We repost heartwarming stories on Facebook. We retweet news- some of it fake, that merely sounded truthy, and others true. We see an amber alert put out on social media, and have to decide if it’s worth cluttering our Facebook timeline with it. We hesitate- wondering if it’s a scam. We’re making all these binary choices of what is true and false, what is worth repeating and not.
I think our public forums are a kind of collecting point of these ideas, and our likes, comments, and reposts are able to shape the moods of all our friends and anyone forced to see our posts due to the engagement reached on them. Our neurons, billions of them, analyze all these data and it affects our mood- and therefore next, our behavior. We’re bathed in messaging that then shapes behavior and creates reality- even if the behavior is “paralysis from information overload.”
The earth’s most intelligent species has drastically sped up its communication speed- with our own meatware being largely the same model we used to coordinate working as a team to spear a mammoth to death after cornering it against a cliff. To say that it’s a massive software ask being put on an old hunk of meat, is an understatement.
The idea of the planet as an emerging single consciousness, of a self-preserving single organism, is definitely not a new idea. It’s roughly predicted or described in the works of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. The argument, in essence, is that as biology starts and marches towards increased complexity, it perpetually shapes the non-biological environment- a macro version of a clam building its shell out of excess environmental calcium- and shapes it in its favor. Individual lives seeking self-replication are also, by proxy, shaping the whole planet in life’s favor.
I think that the Gaia Hypothesis of a “living planet” is an oft-misunderstood pop culture trope at this point, so there are some things to keep in mind. Some folks who probably tried one too many experimental unions of man and mushroom turned it into a mystical thing, breathlessly repeating talking points that were short on physics and long on mysticism, until the view got dismissed by many tie-and-dress-shoe types who tend to make big decisions. Like many good truths, it may have been ignored by key people (tie and dress shoe folks) due to the people they were most likely to hear it from (mystics with poor communication skills). But strip away the mysticism, and the idea was salient, prescient, and predictive. Meaning…it was, and is, probably a truth that had the ability to elucidate other truths, and should be grasped by those in power or likely to be in power. (Side note, if you’re in a democracy or republic, YOU COUNT as being “in power or likely to be in power,” though admittedly it’s a very diluted power in the US, where the electoral college and a lack of ranked choice voting means that we’re frequently under minority rule.)
What are some of those truths? In my opinion, one truth is that individual people can act as kinds of binary logic gates- they can emit ones and zeros, yea-or-nay votes to ideas, beliefs, and most importantly, actions. While you’re an incredibly complex being with a lot of local decisions to make, a lot of planet-affecting decisions actually come down to being these gates.
We, the 8 billion, are the main logic gates of our planet.
The speed and ease of communication has just made the information processed much quicker, and increased our nodality. You used to only get news or gossip from your few hundred tribe members. But now, think of the thousands of connections that lead to you now, between social media, the large communities you live in, the newspapers you read, etc. You have far more nodes. You are a receiver of a firehose of data- perhaps overwhelmed. Your nodality is FAR more than you’d ever been made for, and the cracks are starting to show from this.
To delve into the moral implications of this, I want to reference my favorite creation myth – the Silmarillion, by JRR Tolkien.
I’m a big fan of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien- most people know the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit as his most widespread work. When I say I’m a fan, it’s a bit of an understatement. I typically re-read the Silmarillion once a year. If you’re not familiar- the Silmarillion is the dense, meaty tome of prehistory, the tens of thousands of years of history before the events of the Hobbit, et cetera. The first chapter is the creation story of the universe that the stories are set in.
I won’t try to “Cliffnotes” the whole thing for you, but I’ll be referencing it, so some explanation is in order.
There is a single, most-powerful God named Iluvatar. Somewhat like the Greek or Roman pantheon, he is surrounded by some lesser gods, called the Ainur. The opening scene of the Silmarillion has Iluvatar and his buddies hanging around. Iluvatar “spoke and propound(s) to them themes of music.” That is to say- he invites them to start a music session, while giving suggestions of a general theme or tempo. At first, each of the Ainur tries out a solo, along the lines of Iluvatar’s theme. A few of them start to harmonize together. Most of them being beings of pure intentions, they start to really hear and understand each other’s harmonies and bring their works closer and closer to each other.
That’s when the session really picks up- they start building on each other’s works. I think of the best Irish session music when I read this part of the book. A good session shows skilled players subjugating their ego or flash, and letting emergent order come out of their individual attempts to create beauty. Not to jump ahead on analogies- but more net beauty is created by the subjugation of individual melodies, than is gained by the showboating and focus on solos.
Back to the Silmarillion (specifically the Ainulindalé chapter, the Song of the Ainur), the ainur start to unite and harmonize their themes and play off each other. At a moment, Iluvatar makes a motion for them to stop making music- and discusses that as beautiful as this harmony is, that it’s still important for their individual melodies to be made and added to it. He’s saying- the first part was amazing, but let’s keep the individual identities present as well, and build off of each other.
The Ainur continue, being as harmonious as ever, but also individualized- with space for solos that are then rejoined by the rest at a certain point. They’re really engaged with each other’s music while creating their own, and the theme unrolls as one massive creation. It’s the perfect blend of harmonized music and individuality.
It’s at this point that Tolkien’s primary antagonist enters- Melkor. I won’t digress too much on him, but he is a single Ainur who falls into vanity, playing a solo in the background, stealing the best melodies of those around him and trying to add his own showy twist to them.
This kills the session mood, and fast-forward (okay, now this is cliffnotey of me)- Iluvatar reveals that their entire music session was the creation and playing out of the universe. Every time two Ainur had riffed off each other in good fun in desire of harmony, at no cost of individuality, they had created things that worked well- rivers and mountains, bees and flowers. All of what was good in creation was the individual melodies of the well-intentioned Ainur. All of the synergistic beauty of creation in the world was the harmonizing of their music.
Even Iluvatar had jumped in with his own music, which was the creation of Elves and Men. We were sort of an echo pedal- a reverb, a refrain- of the best of creation. Made of earth (like Genesis’ “made of clay,”) and water, and other minerals- we are a distillation of all the most interesting parts of the universe- at once its highest creation and its most capable of flaws, due to a dash of free will. Little godlets made of the music of the gods themselves, crystallized into material being.
Melkor, the Satanic or devilish of the Ainur, had created the discord. His solos were in fact an entire playing out in history, of selfishness, desire for power, manipulation. They were also jealousy- where you could not rejoice for another’s creation merely because it hadn’t been you who’d made it. His constant interference with the session was in fact the creation of war, violence, the Orcs (as a corruption of Iluvatar’s creation of Elves.) He so strongly interfered with the music that became Mankind that we were given a Melkor-streak a mile wide- both fully capable of understanding Iluvatar’s pure, loving thought, and capable of falling for the worst of Melkor’s faults like vanity, jealousy, fear, lust of power, etc.
I’ve lately thought a lot about how our fast communication on this planet, and the media we can create, share, and consume in a flash, are like the music of the Ainur. We, in parallel, are the most powerful beings on this planet. In other writings, I’ve even been bold enough to say we’re the gods. We really kind of are (forgive me if your religious sensibilities make you uncomfortable with that comparison.) We similarly have the ability to create and amplify themes and melodies- to create harmonies or riff on solos.
I think that the scary thing is that we are wholly unprepared for this- and similar to the Ainur, I think we’re waking up to realize that the music we’ve all been making has been actually crystallizing into reality. Ideation eventually evolves into action.
Bringing this all together, I think that our very real emerging global consciousness has lessons to learn in the analogy of the Ainur. The difference is that if we are smart enough, we will pause mid-music and come to understand that we’re creating our next reality, before having to have it revealed to us. The thing is, I do not believe in any Iluvatar-like figure who will do that revelation, so it’s totally up to us to notice and to conduct our own music- under similar guidelines.
It’s like since the popularization of the internet since the ‘90s, we’ve been just out there riffing on it, using its newfound power to amplify our existing tendencies. But it’s just now in the 2020s that we’re realizing the thoughts and ideas we let play out on the internet (“not the real world”) were actually creating our next reality. We’re like the Ainur making music, somewhat “innocently” (or better put, ignorantly), and realizing we were actually delivering ourselves our own deserved but defective product.
Breaking away from the analogy- I will also emphasize that I see the mathematics as problematic. At 8 billion people and all the insane amount of data you’d need to know to know all of human knowledge, we don’t get to be like the Ainur- an elite group of several dozen lesser gods with close access to a perfect being to follow as a guide or example. Instead- our population count and explosion of data have put us in the position of having to be far smaller processing points than we’re used to being, with far more information sources than we historically would handle.
We have to do this, all in a mathematical environment that I cannot stress enough- we were not made for. Evidence suggests that for millennia and millennia, we typically only handled groups of dozens of other people- and hundreds at the most. I’m not referring to Dunbar’s Number here, the popularized idea that humans can only typically handle a maximum of àround a hundred and fifty close relationships. Interestingly, this idea has been disputed, and is not what I’m discussing here. I just refer to the anthropological evidence that our groups have stayed very small for a long, long time and only recently has mass communication changed the number of information-sources you have to keep track of.
It’s why most of us cannot sift through enough fake news in a day. It’s why most of us have no choice to take expert’s words on things, but we have that system constantly hijacked by charlatan “experts”. We need to be robust, discerning logic gates that still maintain their individuality (kind of an anti-malware feature if you think of it), and spit out appropriate signals that are highly likely to create the very reality, the next reality, that we will have to analyze and shape.
An example of this unfavorable math- you can now see the hundreds of negative comments on a single Facebook post, that would have taken you years of old-school street canvassing to hear. It used to be physically impossible, while living in a wandering tribe of several dozen people, to hear more than half a dozen mentally distressing pieces of information in a day. I can do that now with a five minute doomscroll of Facebook or a tune-in to cable news.
This is NOT to say to unplug from being aware of the very real dangers our world faces- after all, the exciting thing about this communication is that it could enable us to act fast, and in near-unison, on really important issues. We also have to learn how to channel the distress into meaningful actions at individual, corporate, and governmental levels.
We can also spend five minutes on Facebook finding heartwarming stories, innocuous posts that at least dull some of the doom. We can be supportive, educating, engaging, and kind. We can use ourselves as a platform for awareness- after using wisdom to filter what needs awareness-raising and not.
So- that’s my point. We have technology that has turned most of us, most of the time, into nodes and if we don’t carefully make it work in our favor, there’s no reason that it won’t spiral us into literal self-destruction- if not the metaphorical self-destruction of our “soul”- the part of us that most closely resembles our Ainur-like role as benevolent creators. Who else is deeply drained by most aspects of social media, or completely tired of the comments section of news stories?
Of course, we’ve all got daily lives to live, as individual, local decision-makers, and our current biology can work kind of okay for that. But much of our largest problems will be planet-sized and better solved on that same scale.
Consciousness crystallized refers to how our thoughts- actually both conscious and unconscious, turn into physical manifestations in our bodies, in our clothing and tools, homes, the environments we create or destroy, and therefore our planet. Like crystal formation, there are some seeding events that favorably allow the accumulation of materials, like salt crusting on a dockside rope or ice preferentially starting on the rim of a bucket and new crystals building off that. Runaway physics can run against us and also in our favor, but the starting point may choose that.
One of the things that can lead to self-destruction is despair- which I hope to not leave you with. I’ll start to wrap up with a quote from the New Testament of the Bible- Philippians 4:8 (New International Version), which can perhaps be a rough guide on what we can amplify. I think wisdom can be found, in snippets, in many traditions, and I think this is one of them.
The Wandering Farmer (an feirmeoir fánach) 
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