Becoming One With the Internet

Robert Wright says that the Internet is scattering our brains, sacrificing individual coherence for a superorganism where people are but single cells of a greater, electronic being. “I personally don’t think it’s outlandish to talk about us being, increasingly, neurons in a giant superorganism; certainly an observer from outer space, watching the emergence of the Internet, could be excused for looking at us that way…Fragmenting at the individual level translates, however ironically, into broader and more intricate cohesion at the social level — cohesion of an increasingly organic sort. We’ve been building bigger social brains for some time.”