Luna Corbden

Twitter truly was a hive mind. We had a decade and a half of conscious thought on a mass scale. I don't know if anyone saw those various maps people did, especially in the early days, these huge academic projects to study how everyone was connected, and what the echo chambers looked like, and it looked like a neural network, or a lab-grown culture in a Petri dish.



Source: https://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/620 I highly recommend opening the full-sized image and zooming in. This is way bigger than it looks from the top level ... just like a brain.

And that's what it felt like being on Twitter. Each echo chamber represented a specified "brain function." Did some of those brain functions fight each other? Yes. Savagely. But tell me you've never been at war with yourself. Or that one part of your brain has never tried to kill another part of your brain.

We had these massive conversations, over years, and came to conclusions. That's one reason we got so mad at people who raised issues long ago settled, crossed lines that were so long ago drawn. They weren't there when we had that discussion, and no one was in any mood to have it again because it was brutal the first and second and third times we had it.

We decided things like, do Black lives matter? Are they/them pronouns singular? What is the purpose of content warnings, what should they be called, and how mad should we get when they're not used? What should we do about trolls? What was wrong with Twitter and how should it be fixed? How should we organize? Should we bother voting? How do we decide who is most expert at a topic and who should we defer to or not defer to? What is considered ablism and what isn't? Is autism a disorder, disease, or difference? How do you know if you're really trans? Is it ok to say "bisexual" or is that nonbinary-exclusionary? How much racism is there, really? What are the best forms of activism? How do we measure moral behavior in the most consistent way? What is our relation to power? Does that end justify this means?

Sometimes we were wrong. Sometimes we were right. Sometimes I didn't agree with a mass-decision but usually I did., because reasons were so often well-expressed, properly challenged, and backed with evidence. I got to participate in all of these conversations and more, so so many. (Please, in the comments, let us know some more of these kinds of questions that got answered long ago and became part of the culture on Twitter.) Sometimes I was just reading the various positions on a topic until I made up my own mind, and sometimes I jumped in an argued my points, got my vote in for how it turned out.

I was a single neuron in a massive network of functioning thought by an organism that was too big for any of us to fully recognize. I even wonder sometimes if there were enough of us, and did the right mechanisms exist, for it to have been even, dare I say it, self-aware? Was the sum greater than the parts?

It's funny as I come back to "LJ," think about who I was when I transitioned from online journalling and to Twitter microblogging. "Here" on LJ, on my old account, I was a libertarian and an Ayn Rand Objectivist. Yup. That was me. Against all forms of collectivism and then I went and joined one of the larges collective minds that has ever existed. Arguably the largest of its type. (It's smaller than a government or military, religion or corporation, but the rapidity with which us as neurons could connect and the level of contribution we each individually got to make made it different than those kinds of organisms.) I got to be part of a hive mind and it turned out, it wasn't as scary as my Ego thought it would be. It was actually pretty neat.