As information about people will be easier to access (think Google Glass) it will be natural to start grouping strangers together based on various scores. So when you see someone in the store their profile gets pulled up and you see an assessment about them. At that point the individual goes away and their AIDs (Aggregate Identities) become more important because it's just easier. From there instead of trying to grow as an individual people will try to grow in these identities or try and get the right scores to switch identities. If we enter into an age of abundance there will have to be a means of dividing up resources. Since there will be fewer jobs for many people (I ask you to assume this in a broad context but we could unpack it further to see if it has legs) they will fall back on their AIDs to determine what their share of resources should be. There won't be a reward for doing your own thing because doing your own thing won't be recognized in any of these identities. At that point you're just reading from whichever script you believe will get you the most points and you cease to become a human being, you become a neuron.

Let's start with news aggregators to talk about ideas winning out on a massive scale. One thing news aggregators do is act as a sort of activation function for ideas. For a given news aggregator an unpopular idea within the group will get tamped down while a popular idea within the group will get magnified. For example, an article about how Rust is awesome will get more points on Hacker News than an article about how Rust isn't any better than C. So when we use news aggregators we learn how to be heard and what to avoid. It's almost so bad that you can see an inaccurate version of history being written before your eyes sometimes. For example, during the last presidential election Reddit was awash with extremist left wing propaganda because those ideas were rewarded and magnified on that site. Meanwhile any centrist or right idea was immediately tamped down. The aggregator has spoken! Again, we see what to avoid and what to do to get a reward. So we trade our autonomy for internet points. I guess that is why they call it the hive mind.

To me it seems like our ideas are becoming more unified even as our population expands. I think this is because ideas spread easily on social media. But at the same time it's just easier to do things at scale. It's easier to build cookie cutter houses than homes for individuals and honestly it's easier to live in a cookie cutter house in a cookie cutter life and give up some of that autonomy so that you can focus on what matters to you. e.g. so you can specialize or just provide the best possible life for your family. But even in specialties there is a strong demand to conform to popular consensus. That's why, to me, it seems like we are outsourcing many parts of ourselves. We give up a little autonomy here so that we can focus our energy elsewhere but when we're expected to give up our autonomy there too we again become nothing more than extremely hard working, unappreciated, and unfulfilled neurons. *At this point it might sound like I am talking about myself or that I hate my job, lol. Just to clarify, I actually do enjoy my job but I know what it's like to work in a web development dungeon.

The last little bit about Orwell I don't think makes a whole lot of sense now that I look at it again. He surely could have imagined a dystopian future where a power hungry government turns its citizens into slaves by controlling their access to resources based on invasive monitoring of their "behavior". It just seems a little deeper than 1984 to me because of the psychological impact of living a prescribed life and carrying around a fake smile every second of the day.