At The Freeman, Nicole James discusses the experience of being immersed in a social media swarm or hive mind phenomenon:
Ever noticed how your social media feed doesn’t sound like “independent thought” so much as a stadium of people chanting, “Yaasss, queen!” in matching sequins? One minute you’re scrolling idly, the next you’ve been recruited into a sect with better lighting filters and the odd ironic dog meme. All it takes is clicking on one video of a dachshund in a raincoat, and suddenly you’ve been ordained High Priest of Sausage Dogs, condemned to a lifetime of puddle-splash reels and algorithmic sermonizing. That’s the hive mind. It’s the Internet’s favorite parlor trick, turning ordinary humans into synchronized swimmers thrashing about in a soup so murky it makes the Hudson on a hot July afternoon look like Perrier.
Bees and ants nailed this millennia ago: buzzing, working in lockstep, worshipping a terrifying queen—basically the Kardashians of the insect world. But instead of honey, humanity now churns out TikTok dances, Reddit debates about whether Die Hard was a Christmas movie (it wasn’t), and Facebook is where your uncle accidentally joins a cult.
Yet this collective buzz can tip into something darker. Collaboration can harden into groupthink, flattening individuality like a raccoon on the New Jersey Turnpike.
Cristina Dovan, a life coach based in the UK, calls the hive mind “group decision-making where individuals meld into one big throbbing consciousness”. Which sounds noble, and also like the worst hangover imaginable.
Collective intelligence can shine. Wikipedia (on a good day), Reddit’s problem-solving posters, Kaggle competitions, GitHub fixes. It’s a brainstorming session without the burnt office coffee and stale biscuits.
But history, and the Internet, remind us there’s a darker wing.
Psychologist Irving Janis, who coined “groupthink,” pointed to the Bay of Pigs invasion as Exhibit A.
Let’s return to 1961 where JFK is young, popular, and surrounded by Very Serious Men in suits. The CIA pitches a plan to topple Fidel Castro that went roughly like this:
- Train a ragtag bunch of Cuban exiles.
- Drop them on a swampy stretch of coastline actually called the Bay of Pigs (because nothing says “stealth” like announcing your arrival in Pork Bay).
- Hope the Cuban people spontaneously rise and overthrow Castro, preferably in a neat anti-communist conga line.
Everyone in the room knew it sounded dodgy. The beaches were wrong, the surprise was nonexistent, Castro’s army was enormous and very much awake. But instead of saying, “Excuse me, Mr. President, this is bananas”, the advisors all nodded along as if they were trapped in a corporate retreat exercise called Let’s Pretend We’re Bold Visionaries.
The result? A fiasco. Castro’s forces crushed the invaders in three days flat. America looked ridiculous, Kennedy was humiliated, and “Bay of Pigs” became shorthand for “the world’s worst team-building activity”. In short, a textbook case of groupthink, or as we’d call it today, “watching as your drunk mate climbs onto the shed roof, yells that he can backflip, and you cheer instead of calling an ambulance”.
