Preamble to The Hivemind
co-authored by Arjun Sethi
My partner Arjun at Social Capital and I were watching the latest Star Trek movie last month.
Spoiler Alert: in the opening act, thousands of enemy fighters swarm The Enterprise in perfect unison and cripple the ship. What quickly becomes evident is how ineffective a centralized concentrated model is (a single-expensive ship with a large crew) versus an army of autonomous ships acting in sync (a hivemind).
As we looked beyond Star Trek, we noticed others writing about this theme in military applications. From this, we came up with a hypothesis — our basic premise is that we are moving to a world of a hivemind — where everyone can know everything that is happening to everyone else at the same time
In the investing world, when we think about what’s happening in the world of consumer we try to understand the way in which the world is heading to identify structural changes.
We are all driven by a survival instinct. However, the 21st century definition of survival is a far cry from our pre-internet brethren. While we may no longer fear death from infectious disease, we fear becoming irrelevant from our online peer groups.
Being part of a hivemind allows individuals to be able to experience the totality of the human experience synchronously and act in unison with each other to achieve better outcomes than any single static individual could by him/herself or in the absence of participating in a hive.
By participating in a hive, we are guaranteed greater outcomes and as a result greater survival, be it social connectivity (Snapchat), mobility (Uber), communication (Discord), or productivity (Slack).
So what are the innovations needed to power the creation of hives? How will the next generation of hives be built? If history is any indicator, we will need systems and technologies that allow for a greater amount of information to be transmitted (bandwidth) as close to real-time as possible (synchronicity).
As we look to what the future holds, we’ve got some exciting thoughts ahead to share on the hivemind, and specifically, companies we see embracing these trends. We invite you to join us in this exploration.
You can read our inaugural post here
