i think the strength of memes can be used as a proxy for overall collective intelligence.
the memes now are much more potent than they used to be. this makes sense, because not only are there more meme locii in the hive (on account of the hive being significantly larger) but also on account of the interconnected nature of the hive.
on your average day in 2004, you might use the internet for just a half an hour a day. so to internalize a meme and propagate it if you used the computer once a day.
in 2010, things were much more advanced. mean meme internalization time was shorter, because you would be on the computer for 4, maybe 5 hours a day for the average user so your meme propagation time was even lesser.
now, people are connected to the internet almost continuously. meme internalization across the hive is on the order of hours... maybe, in some limited uber connected subset of the hive, minutes.
i call this the meme internalization time, or MIT. We have seen it go from hours or days on average, to a couple hours, to, now, minutes, in a limited subset of the population. This Average Meme Internalization Time (AMIT) can be seen as a proxy for the intelligence of the hive.
we have already seen glimpses of the power of memes. recent elections are an obvious example, but memes also hold a sway over companies, countries, ideologies...
now here is where it gets very interesting. imagine, for a moment, an instantaneous internalization of memes. across the entire hive. This is an AMIT of 0—not technically possible, because of the laws of physics, but approachable. under such conditions, memes could evolve instantaneously. at this level, the memes themselves would be unintelligible—simply a proxy for collective intelligence. a new collective intelligence, one that could be used... for purposes indeed beyond understanding...
truly, it is a new era
