The soviet A. Stolyarenko wrote in his book "The Psychology of Management of Labour Collectives" 1983;
"Not a single deviation of the subordinate from legal, moral, or socio-psychological norms should escape the attention of the executive and the collective without proper evaluation and reaction suitable to the circumstances."
No one's proposing that level of coerced uniformity and destruction of personal liberty here but it's fair to flag the no go area.

Now consider a typical company in a free country, how much tolerance is there for deviation from the norm? In my experience it is ok-ish, anyone labelled as 'a bad apple' is not going to be promoted though, but at least employees can walk out the door and find a job elsewhere or set up their own enterprise.

The companies that win awards for being the best places to work make great efforts to balance individual and collective priorities. At the opposite extreme, the managers and owners of the hive are ruthless, workers pension funds sacked and the hive driven bankrupt for example, total betrayal.

Human civilisation is already a complex set of hives. The family, the neighbourhood, the community, the region, the nation, the trading bloc, the world, and in parallel with our democracies a seperate hive power structure, the world of business. All have certain rules and sanctions for non-conformity.

At the moment for example we have the WTO deciding food labelling policy in what can be called chocolate or should GM appear on labels. The pressure from many corporations via their puppet politicians is to leave out imformation so that they can compete, this is bad, we are to be kept in the dark about what we eat and drink, a classic example of what Noam Chomsky pointed out is "socialise the risk and privatise the profit". The hive system today is already beset by a cancer and we need to find a cure.

In discussing what the internet could become, we get various views of what is and isn't fair. If this hive can work out fairer relationships (and a better word than hive), these can feed back into the offline world. It's already happening. The internet is enabling the development of a mindset that steps beyond mere internationalism to socio-globalism.

At the same time as I desire this I have the same fears as Kevin. Freedom and risk go hand in hand, I'll take that bet to an extent, it suits us to have some security too. In business and government more transparency is needed, but personal privacy requires us to trust at that level. Say if we could wire our minds to the net, the first thing we'd want to know is where is the off switch to escape the din and how do I keep my thoughts to myself. I wonder what it would be like if we could all read each others minds...

We don't have to design heaven here, but letting our imaginations loose we may better address the glaring problems. It's a fascinating brainstorm.

If we consider a community as an organism, that does not imply only that bigger organism is important and the members of the community don't matter anymore. On the contrary, a community can only exist when it is better for all members than the alternative is.
When membership is a disadvantage for some community members, we could consider that a disease, and if it is not cured it may eventually lead to the death of the community.

Let's consider the internet again. It is under constant attack from smaller groups that want more than their fair share of benefits on one side and groups that want to limit its growth because it removes some of their power on the other, and it works around these problems more easily than any community before it, ever. It does not only not need regulation, it also works around any regulation that anyone tries to force on it.

How is this possible? Simple answer: every member of the internet community can decide for themselves if they want any business with another member or not, and every pair of members that does want to communicate can do so. On the internet the problem of space does not exist, everyone is as nearby or far away as you wish them to be.

Of course this is not entirely true. There are a few near-monopolists we cannot avoid, and it can take a lot of time to find likeminded individuals to cooperate with. Maybe it will always be so because even the internet has its technical constraints, but I like to be more optimistic.

I don't believe such a thing can exist, really. I think collective means "putting the effect on the community before the effect to one" and I think being a free individual inherently means thinking of yourself.

The difference is that I don't consider selfishness to be a bad thing until you have to directly harm others. An example: A political figure raises money for a charity to gain votes. I consider this a good act, that benefits others, and has selfish return.

Democrates even hit on this point: When it is a disadvantage for someone to be a member of the community. Why would ANYONE join this community of their own free will if it didn't have benefit to the individual? They wouldn't.

It's this selfish, but totally acceptable and ethical, thinking that, by it's mere existence, means we will never truly have a living interenet, hive mind.

With a specific focus on the internet I compare it more to a library, like the library of Alexandria, where information was protected, shared and treasures. Open to anyone who wanted it, encouraged to add to it, free to ignore it and opposed by lots of people.

The library of Alexandria was no more of a hive mind or organism that the internet is - it is merely a tool used by people to do other things.

Actually, although you say you don't believe a collective of fully free minds can exist I think you almost exactly described how it actually can exist.

That's it, the key is making selfishness actually serve what would otherwise be selflessness. In other words, making it in your own self interest to benefit the collective. This is the formula upon which the collective can both be a collective and a group of completely independent and free individuals.

And this is why I think Free Software ecosystem is a great example of it. People make what may otherwise seem to be completely selfless acts, writing code and sharing it with the world, but they do so because this means others will share the code with them as well. People give when they know that they will be given as well. There is a lot of selfishness there, but in this case what you are doing is being selfless for selfish reasons. And that's the key.

Exactly, it's not a black and white choice that either I put myself first or last in all cases, we choose to co-operate to mutual advantage. In feudal times some lords and kings were hugely popular with the people because they brought law and order. People were sick of insecurity, thieves acting with impunity, traders failing to hold up their end of a wager etc. Really the legal system we have while a work in progress is pretty much there.

The internet has brought a new global capacity to assemble, and this is nicely in accordance with Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights;
"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."

Unlike the UN, the global internet community is not diluted by representative politicians, each one of us can engage directly. For many people this personal interaction enforces a sense of kinship with their fellow man. But the framework is key, collaboration or civil discourse yield benefits, but fighting a corner can easily lead to greater division, look at soccer supporters. Frame the meeting in co-operation or competition and the results can be very different.

I share your optimism, if peace in Northern Ireland can be achieved...
(People eventually get sick and tired of war, in time the same will happen with the global economic war, and it's the Internet which will enable the movement to grow.)

Aside from technical constraints I think the language barrier is the biggest challenge. Translation technology could benefit greatly by getting the parsing right prior to publication, similar to a spell-checker, a parser presents me with alternative interpretations so I can verify the meaning rather than leave it to contextual implication which is hard to code for. This process yields a meta-lingual core document that can be accurately expressed in any language.

Sounds like an universal translator might first be developed for the internet and then possibly grow into something like one in Star Trek, but now that seems logical.

Google are going hammer and tongs at (afaik post-publication) translation technology, so yes I guess that'll come first, but will that go mainstream?

It would be to their advantage to release code under gpl which allows pre-publication generalisation, it's the only way to get reliability, even though you can't get around people expressing nonsense.

Unless, how about an AI logic checker, and have it learn from your previous work... Hmm, would have to be implemented with social skills or it could annoy authors, but I'd enjoy a logic checker with messages like;
"Logic Error 69: Utter crap, just like that rant about boneless bananas yesterday. And you still haven't mowed the lawn loser."

You'd need a version for women that is ultra sensitive on a monthly basis, possibly replacing error messages with praise at those sensitive times.

You mean one that replaces errors with ads for buying chocolate online .

But seriously, while occasional jokes like this are okay, we'd like to keep libervis.com friendly to men, women and "other" alike.

It's a fair cop guv!