Frugal Living for Our Collective and Mutual #Bestlife on a Distributed and Global Electronic Hive Mind

What is not as commonly identified as an optimal life #bestlife is living #frugal, and yet, there is a global electronic hive mind about how to live sparingly based on highly variant local realities. There are blogs about living on a shoestring, stretching funds, cooking in, engaging in a DIY economy (bartering with like-minded others), living off the grid, taking low-cost and simple vacations, maintaining a food garden, raising food animals, and forgoing the more spendy aspects of modern living. The narrative goes that saving up and retiring early enables low-pressure and intentional lifestyles (and an ability to focus on family and friends), low-carbon footprints (with low impacts on the environment), and the embodiment of a frugal virtue. This chapter explores what a #frugal living EHM looks like and how it brings together people around shared values and lifestyle practices for personal peace of mind, social justice, and long-term sustainability.

Early Mapping of “Electronic Hive Minds” on the Web and Internet

An “electronic hive mind” (EHM) is conceptualized as a type of temporally limited social consciousness (held by people, cyborgs, and robots) around shared interests, enabled by social media and information and communication technology (ICT). EHMs may be understood partially through combined prior research in the areas of social psychology and social media. Other research work is novel and requires the application of a range of methods and technologies to identify EHMs from publicly available social media residual data in various digital modalities. To this end, some initial mapping techniques to understand EHMs will be shown in this chapter.

Defining Collective Personalities, Dispositions, Temperaments, and Moods of Electronic Hive Minds

An electronic hive mind, a temporal shared consciousness (or massmind) of people interacting through online communications technologies and other means, may be thought of as having collective personalities, dispositions, and temperaments. These human-based features may be seen from various dimensions: the public (and private) messaging (textual, imagistic, audio, video, and multimodal elements), the collective culture(s) and practices, the human membership and member motivations, the group actions (virtual and in-world), the sociotechnical systems, and others. This early work explores some dimensions of collective and more stable personality, dispositions, and temperament that may be inferred form EHMs, as well as more transitory moods. These aspects of EHMs may inform on future actions and provide a predictive function.

Being and a Trolling State of Electronic Hive Mind

Trolling others, broadly defined as communicating provocative messages (and even threats) online, has been a pervasive part of the web and internet and even information and communications technology (ICT). While many consider trolling a net negative, some do suggest that it provides counter-viewpoints, encourages caution in mainstream participants online, and broadens conversations. This chapter studies trolling as a state of electronic hive mind and being in two main forms: (1) organically emergent, decentralized, and organically evolved troll coalitions for both personal member and group interests; and (2) created, instrumented, centrally supported/funded “troll armies” created for political and other purposes. Through the prism of “trolling,” a part of the electronic hive mind will be explored, the pathologically aggressive, angry, aggrieved, and vengeance-seeking side.

Buy/Hold/Trade or Sell/Divest/Disengage

An electronic hive mind (EHM) can be a distributed virtual community and a mental space for information-gathering, analysis, and ultimately, decision making; it can play the role of executive functioning (in the same way a frontal lobe does for a human brain) and inform real-world actions. To see how this might function, the EHM around cryptocurrencies was explored from multiple social media platforms. This topic addresses an issue that is not fully defined and is of broad-scale mainstream interests. Cryptocurrencies may be everything from virtual ephemera and hot promises to a life-changing innovation. As a phenomenon, it has instantiated in different ways around the world, with cryptocurrency “farming” centers, nation-state-issued cryptocurrencies, government efforts at regulating such exchanges, and volatile gains and losses for cryptocurrency speculators and investors. How people engage with cryptocurrencies can affect their real-world net worth as well as other aspects of their lives, so this is not merely a theoretical issue but one with real-world impacts. This work explores three hypotheses around social messaging, the general membership of the target electronic hive mind, and mass virtual executive functioning and discovers a mind hyped on seductive promise.

Expanding the Imagination, Thinking, Knowledge, and Relevant Skills

“Creatives” online, those who innovate as a regular part of their work and lifestyles, are likely one of the most diverse electronic hive minds, with often highly dissimilar and heterogeneous members. As a general group, they are specialists in their respective areas but often engage online with professionals in their respective communities of expertise as well as with others in disparate fields in order to benefit from the cross-fertilization of ideas. They are by nature and practice exploratory and often sharing. This chapter explores what the pursuit of inspiration looks like for the EHMs based around creative work.

Micro- to Meso- to Macro-Scale Coordinated Individual and Group Action(s) on Electronic Hive Minds

So many human endeavors are dependent on others' actions and interests. On an electronic hive mind (EHM), coordination online may spark and sustain actions by the body (the members of the EHM). Such coordination occurs over a range of human endeavors and continuously at different scales: micro (individual, dyadic, and motif levels), meso (small to large groups), and macro (system-wide, societal, web-scale levels). This chapter explores EHMs as planned-action entities and offers some early insights about some common practices based on multiple exemplars and the application of abductive logic.

Consigned to Temporal or Permanent Oblivion?

Mass and partial forgetting in electronic hive minds (shared consciousness enabled through socio-technical spaces, social media, and information and communications technology [ICT]) is conceptualized as something gradual and organic based on the functions of human memory and accelerated in other cases, depending on the adaptive needs of the EHM. How EHMs form, the proclivity to certain attitudes, favored meta-narratives, the exposure to a wide range of ideas (vs. filter bubbles), and other aspects affect what is retained and what is forgotten. This sheds some light on how some EHMs may coordinate to maintain memory on “critical issues” and “issues of facts” and the roles of those who act as “folk” historians and commemorators and the roles of technology as affordance/enablement and constraint. This work focuses on the hard effort of maintaining collective memory in the ephemera of transient EHMs. Methods for identifying blind spots and invisible spaces in memory in EHMs are suggested, and this method is applied in a walk-through of a portion of a star-based fandom and followership-based EHM. This chapter explores some of the nature of forgetting in EHMs.

Ferreting Out Silences and Invisibilities in Electronic Hive Minds

An electronic hive mind (EHM), as a distributed swarm intelligence, is about shared information and resources and the interactions around those elements. A lesser-studied aspect in such electronic-enabled collectives involves unshared information, silences, withholdings, and other invisibilities. What is shared depends on socio-technical systems and how people engage and think socially, and these factors result in various absences, latencies, and shadowing of messaging. Here, an early mechanism-based approach is taken to understand the inflows and outflows of information from an EHM and areas where messages may be unformed, dropped, misapprehended, or obfuscated, resulting in knowledge gaps. Finally, this thought experiment suggests that EHMs should be understood as constructs with shimmering and incomplete versions of reality, and “what you see is all there is” (WYSIATI) would be an illusory approach.