Notes on Collective Intelligence

Prologue

• Levy is making the argument that technologies produce subjectivities and that the changes brought about by digital technologies makes us nomads w/r/t our subjectivity: we are exploring a new realm of existence.
• on xxiv, he specifically connects this new emergence to Teilhard’s concept of hominization. He is saying that, contra someone like Fukuyama, the human project is just starting. In fact, with its images of refugees and such, I wonder if this is a rebuke of the end of The End of History and the Last Man.
• “We are no longer in historical time, with its references to writing, the city, the past, but within a moving and paradoxical space that comes to us from the future” (xxv).
• “Either we cross a new threshold, enter a new stage of hominization, by inventing some human attribute that is as essential as language but operates at a much higher level, or we continue to ‘communicate’ through the media and think within the context of separate institutions, which contribute to the suffocation and division of intelligence” (xxvi-xxvii).
• “Collective intelligence is less concerned with the self-control of human communities than with a fundamental letting-go that is capable of altering our very notion of identity and the mechanisms of domination and conflict, lifting restrictions on heretofore banned communications, and effecting the mutual liberation of isolated thoughts” (xxvii). This is connected to his understanding that the neanderthal died out because generalized solutions to the problem of climate change could not be communicated, due to the lack of a common language. Levy seems to be suggesting that this is the reason we need a new supra-language.
• “The problem faced by collective intelligence is that of discovering or inventing something beyond writing, beyond language so that the processing of information can be universally distributed and coordinated, no longer the privilege of separate social organisms but naturally integrated into all human activities, our common property” (xviii).
• “Transcending the media, airborne machines will announce the voice of the many. Still indiscernable, cloaked in the mists of the future, bathing another humanity in its murmuring, we have a rendezvous with the over-language” (xviii).

Introduction

• “It is worth bearing in mind that collective intelligence is a universally distributed intelligence that is enhanced, coordinated, and mobilized in real time. To prevent any possible misunderstanding, I would also like to specify what it isn’t. Collective intelligence must not be confused with totalitarian projects involving the subordination of individuals to transcendent and fetishistic communities. In an ant colony, the individuals are ‘dumb,’ they have no collective vision and no awareness of how their actions are integrated with those of other individuals. But although individual ants might be ‘stupid,’ their interaction results in an emergent behavior that is globally intelligent. Yet the ant colony possesses a rigidly fixed structure; the ants are sharply divided into castes and are interchangeable within those castes. The ant colony is the opposite of collective intelligence in the sense that I am using the expression. Farm from leading us in the direction of the knowledge space, the ant colony precedes the earth, it is prehuman. Any attempt to assimilate the operation of society to that of an ant colony should be considered barbarous and reprehensible” (16).
• “Through their interaction with diverse communities, the individuals who animate the knowledge space are, far from being interchangeable members of immutable castes, singular, multiple, nomadic individuals undergoing a process of permanent metamorphosis (or apprenticeship)” (17).
• “This project implies a new humanism that incorporates and enlarges the scope of self knowledge into a form of group knowledge and collective thought” (17).