Before anything else, I must note that this is an informal discussion of the topic, hardly a rigorous survey of the portrayal of the trope in fiction. I am unfamiliar with definining examples of group minds‍ ‍‍—‍ I don’t know the Borg, I’m barely acquainted with the Formics, nor am I familiar with the Flood or the Zerg. I haven’t even watched Pluribus.

Though I’m ignorance of the influences, I’ve definitely encountered the influenced. It’s difficult to immerse yourself in broader culture without a series that features an episode or recurring minor faction inspired by hiveminds writ large.

Hiveminds began life as specters of horror and antagonism‍ ‍‍—‍ humans prize their individual freedoms highly, after all. It’s tempting to closely identify the trope with Cold War anti‍-​Communism sentiments, but reviewing its history in SFF reveals that it predates that circumstance (though it could certainly have been exacerbated thereby).

When hiveminds are portrayed sympathetically, you’re more likely to see them called group minds. This, too, has a long history, dating all the way back to 1930’s Last and First Men,^note[I am in love with its description of the Martian group mind as “an extremely concentrated and formidable cloud‍-​jelly.”] but it arguably extends to any serious engagement with the implications of widespread “telepathy”, biological or technological, blurring the lines between brains.

Many have a distaste for calling such organizations “hiveminds.” Eusocial insects are not psychic, and even the concept of colonies as “superorganisms” has its critics, and so using the term “hivemind” propagates this popular misassociation.^note[And I tend to underestimate the impact of this. As experts are wont to do, I readily assume everyone already knows insects don’t have hiveminds, so why would there be any confusion? And yet on multiple occasions I’ve had people take for granted that real hives have hiveminds and needed to be corrected on this matter.]

Personally, I’m quite fond of the term “hivemind”‍ ‍‍—‍ I think quasi‍-​insectoid aesthetics are awesome, and I’m entirely willing to embrace (reclaim?) purely cultural associations therewith.^note[Relatedly, I have an appreciation for dictatorial queens ruling their hives. These days, bug nerds love to tell you that actually, gynes do not have authority over her children and are just a breeding caste‍ ‍‍—‍ often effectively enslaved to her workers. And fair enough, that’s compellingly alien. But have you considered that the irrestible aura and allure of a god‍-​queen, though?] Likewise, to me the connotations of abominable evil simply adds a delicious flavor‍ ‍‍—‍ it’s nice and edgy.

And others share my taste. Modernly, nerds of my stripe (queer, neurodivergent, and allies thereof) repeatedly find themselves drawn to such tropes and aesthetics.

As a teenager, I had read plenty of My Little Pony fanfiction, where the changelings (rather bugly, but more horse than bug) were often headcanoned to possess a hivemind. Of the Hive is the first in a long series where the protagonist becomes a changeling, integrating into their collective and learning about their culture.

More recently, I read We Will Evolve, a Metroid fanfic focused on the X parasites, enriching them with deeper lore and more compelling ambitions‍ ‍‍—‍ I found it a remarkably gripping read.

After completing the first draft of this post, I encountered more examples in older published science fiction.^note[I really want to mention Peter Watts’ Echopraxia, which features group minds by way of cybernetic enhancements‍ ‍‍—‍ brain‍-​computer interfaces creating cult‍-​like collectives elevated to incomprehensible efficacy‍ ‍‍—‍ but because the text does not portray the interiorities of these collectives, they are irrelevant to this post. However, the prequel short story “The Twenty‍-​One Second God” indirectly offers a hint to how they tick, for its protagonist was briefly a component in the mind of the largest collective mind ever recorded. Anyway, given Blindsight’s whole thematic contention contra‍-​consciousness, it suffices to say that the Firefall series’s portrayal of hiveminds is quite probably the opposite of everything I critique hereafter.] I mainly speak of Blood Music, a Hugo award‍-​winning classic a friend had been urging me to read for years.^note[Ever since they first read Black Nerve and its concept of ichor[In Dialogue With Plagues].] It’s a book where genetic engineering can grant individual cells intelligence comparable to humans, and thus the millions of cells in a researcher’s petri dish soon ascend to a level of organization to rival an entire civilization.

Admittedly, even mentioning it in this article somewhat spoils its latter plot developments‍ ‍‍—‍ in short, it goes full parasitoid singularity, and humans are all assimilated into the grand noocyte collective.

Perhaps that’s enough to furnish my point. I don’t mean to simply recommend good fiction here. I’ve mentioned these stories to demonstrate that when this post goes on to characterize portrayals of group minds, my target is something more specific than a common denominator of this trope, that of some race of bug aliens, fodder for humans to war against without understanding.

So many writers now boldly ask: what if hiveminds were Good, Actually?

That is to say, I find it’s increasingly common to write about group minds and psychic collectives with credulity and sympathy. It goes without further elaboration the appeal of a society where you are never alone and never deprived of understanding nor trust.

The question I ask is: does this hold up to scrutiny? Soft science fiction is often guilty of technobabble, a vague handwaving to “nanotechnology” or “quantum wormhole hyperspace,” after which the story’s conceits are expected to be blanketed in a protective coating of plausibility. Writers of such stories traffic in magic with a veneer of science.

Are group minds another kind of vacuous magic?

Now, I am a fantasy writer (albeit with ambitions to match hard scifi), so I’m hardly opposed to writing about magic. When I think hivemind, I think telepathy before I think exocortex routing protocols. And when you grant that your group mind is unabashedly magical, it can work however you please. But how they work has implications.

Fundamentally, the dissatisfaction I have with group minds rests on two misunderstandings of the world that color how they’re portrayed (And a last point that is just a nitpick becomes I’m a sucker for logistics.)

For the rest of this post, understand references to a “hivemind” to be referring to a particular type: a united, comforting consciousness. Your sisters and siblings in the hive love you unconditionally and understand you perfectly. What one member knows, the hive all knows. What one member wants, the hive all wants. But the hive does not smother or erase or negate your individuality (that’s close‍-​minded ‍—heh!‍— thinking). No, your identity is simply one thread woven into a tapestry of something grander.

That is what I consider the general form. Tropes can vary in execution, not all of this needs to be strictly true, each property can get greater or lesser emphasis. But if this sort of describes what a story has going on? Then I’m not sure I actually buy it.

Why? Well, it comes down to the two aforementioned misunderstandings. The fallacies I take issue with are one: the idea that ambiguity is a treachery of language itself, and two: the idea that social conflict is a bug, not a feature.

This first fallacy actually holds for psychic abilities and mind reading powers generally, not just in hiveminds. It’s so tempting to view these words of ours as a lossy imprint of ourselves, or to believe that we nurse some well of pellucid intent deep inside of us, with only a small portion of it able to leak out. We easily believe that we are Cartesian commanders, minds dispatching instructions to bodies that are at best imperfect servants thereof.

Already we’re in trouble here. I would argue it’s often the opposite‍ ‍‍—‍ consciousness is an illusion, our internalities are a jumbled mess, and performing a truly accurate “reading” of a mind by any reductionist[The Binding Vow of Reductionism] mechanism would be more confusing than just asking the person‍ ‍‍—‍ brains are complicated!

And the operation of the brain is a matter of feedback cycles, information going both ways. Your “intent” can be just as well be something that arising simultaneous with you expressing it‍ ‍‍—‍ or be transformed by the process‍ ‍‍—‍ rather than always preceding it.

And of course, the conscious processes are but a small fraction of what actually goes into in an organism’s behavior.

Here, a concrete example. Imagine someone with poor introspection, repressing their emotions so effectively they’re genuinely unaware of what they should feel. Someone might read anger into their tone, tension in their body language, but this is all stress they aren’t conscious expressing: they would deny they are angry.

In this scenario, what should we assume a mindreader receives? Ideally, they might parse out both the unconscious sentiment and the conscious intent, and perhaps even discern the line of repression that demarcates the two. Still, the emotion certainly isn’t intended‍ ‍‍—‍ the target might even protest this interpretation!

I’m belaboring a simple point: we don’t understand ourselves perfectly. Words seem incapable of conveying a perfect understanding of what we feel… but is this because words are flawed? No, we cannot rely on the intuition that we feel differently than how we articulate, because consider that the feelings could be flawed, irrational‍ ‍‍—‍ perhaps the articulation was in fact perfectly accurate.

Here’s something that is insufficiently appreciated: telepathy is just words, too. If you ever stop to think about what psychic powers must be, how they must work, this conclusion is nigh‍-​unavoidable.

Some hiveminds are actually robots transmitting signals across a shared network, in which case it’s obvious that they’re serializing data over some sort of protocol. But even if it’s metaphysical psionics… can you block or attenuate psychic connections? Does the strength of connection fade with distance?

Generally, common mechanics suggest some kind of signal is being emanated and received whenever telepathy occurs. The logic of the world entails some protocol for translating the state of a mind into a psychic data‍-​dump.

And this is an act of translation‍ ‍‍—‍ and it almost necessarily lossy. What is the bandwidth of a psychic connection? Are you dumping the activation state of every neuron every second? No, that’s too much information; you’re probably just conveying a compressed sentence like I want to find some apples and maybe it’s tagged with some tonal metadata like whether a sensation of hunger or curiosity drove you and how intensely, whether you’re imagining a specific location for finding apples and whether you’re anticipating having one for lunch.

Information theoretically, receiving a certain number of bits can only ever narrow down the possible states of the sender who received it by a mathematically limited amount. If you aren’t dumping the entire contents of your psyche with each transition, then every psychic pulse will have some innate ambiguity about what you’re really thinking and it can never be fully removed. You can get away with more concise messages if you already know enough about the sender, but really, must every member of the hivemind have at all times a near‍-​perfect model of every other member?

There’s that famous notion from Borges, of finally devising the perfect map of a kingdom. The rub: it’s just as big as that kingdom, making it useless as a map.

Ambiguity is innate to communication; there’s no eliminating it.

But the above discussion is concerned with absolutes. This is a myopic false equivalence: hiveminds don’t need to offer perfect understanding as long as what it offers is qualitatively better than what we already have. Sure, telepathy is just words with extra steps, but it isn’t as if some words aren’t better than others.

Still, I want writers to give me a real answer: how is telepathy any better than talking to someone? What makes a character who talks like this clearer than “talking like this”?^note[I’ve also seen telepathy formatted like this or [like this] or <like this>. Despite its age, Blood Music did something I’d never seen before. Psychic transmissions are lines that begin ‍—Like this, much in the fashion of Spanish’s rayas for dialogue. Bear distinguished between speakers by having other transmissions on lines that begin »Like this. Readers of Vermin Cathexis will immediately recognize how much I appreciated this.]

Is the only virtue the fact that you’re able to convey information near‍-​instantly, with so much less effort than opening your mouth and forcing out air? Or perhaps it’s that it goes through a more clear medium; you don’t misspeak, you don’t mishear. Maybe it’s the fact that the connection is always available, so you can share how you feel and what you think all day long, even when separated, even when doing something else.

Maybe it’s the sheer scale of the what you’re a part of, knowing that there’s a whole crowd able to receive your thoughts, answer any question you have. You are never alone.

But maybe you’re beginning to figure out that I’m attempting a sleight of hand here‍ ‍‍—‍ I haven’t been talking about hiveminds at all! Everything I just suggested is true about digital communication over the internet.^note[Wildbow’s newest serial, Seek didn’t get mentioned in the big list at the start, but it has relevance‍ ‍‍—‍ I would argue the future it portrays a logical extreme of this perspective of technology collectivizing humanity; the always‍-​watching crowd of eyes influences how I think about hiveminds. I once devised a concept of metaminds and soon realized I had reinvented onboards!]

It’s a bit of a strained fit‍ ‍‍—‍ reading and writing isn’t instant. While writing words is clearer than speaking, typos certainly abound.^note[Yet surely a psychic could misthink, misremember, miscalculate‍ ‍‍—‍ I expect plenty of my readers are familiar with brains prone to distraction.]

But my point is: we absolutely do not feel the sort of universal love and understanding from most chatrooms or message boards, and that would not change if we had brain implants directly wiring our thoughts to social media. (It frankly sounds horrific.)

No, it’s not about the medium at all, is it? It’s about the senders and recipients. We don’t bear our hearts out on the public internet because people would misunderstand and attack us, and that would hurt. Words are so hard not because our thoughts are indescribable gossamer ghosts, but because if we say the wrong things people will take it the wrong way and we need to be wary.

But I digress‍ ‍‍—‍ or rather, I segue into our next point.

Sure, some random chatroom isn’t a good hivemind because people are mean to each other. But if you got together a group that deeply cared about each other, that had enough in common or in open discussion to be on the same page‍ ‍‍—‍ does that not start to seem like we have a hivemind at home?

But when we frame it this way, it starts to sound as ephemeral as it really is. If any of us knew how to put together a dream blunt rotation of ten (let alone a whole populous hive) of people who Really Get It, who could all get a long… well, we’d have done it already, wouldn’t we? We can try, but how long can it last in practice?

Let’s step outside of the white room abstractions. When a story has a hivemind, it will almost always be in conflict. Bugs at war with tasty humans, a robot swarm gathering more resources, a parasite seeking new hosts.

In some cases there’s no “the hivemind”, but instead different hives in competition with each other. Queens will hatch princess dreaming of their own colonies, or propagation leads to drift‍ ‍‍—‍ mutation in the next generation, corruption in the code.

Point is, the idea that there will be one collective with a unified will that scales to hundreds, thousands, millions of members‍ ‍‍—‍ seems unlikely.^note[I don’t understand the math well enough to work it into the exposition, but Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem comes to mind, demonstrating the a democratic system cannot simultaneously abide several intuitive desirata.] Indeed, if the hive allows for individuality, then allowing the hive to ‘fork’ into an archipelago of different sub‍-​hives might be exactly how you maintain the unity that defines the hiveness.

Can a hive member defect to a different hive? But if so, how can you trust them not to sabotage this hive before defecting? How much can you trust or connect anyone in the hive, if you might lose touch with them come next fork?

But forget the question of competition between hives. If the food or space or whatever resource the hive needs is scarce, well, who eats and who starves? Who has to fight on the frontlines and who gets a safe job nursing larva?

Or let’s lower the stakes a bit. Yes, the hive loves you. But does it love everyone equally? If there’s individuality, who is the most popular? Aren’t some drones funnier, cuter, more useful than others?

Maybe you’ll accuse me of thinking too much like a human‍ ‍‍—‍ we need to avoid the falsely familiar[Xenodeterminism for the Aspiring Alien], after all. The hive can simply be selfless‍ ‍‍—‍ members will sacrifice themselves for the collective. No job is preferred to any other because everyone understands the necessity of everyone else.

But selection effects are inveterate. If there’s individuality, if different members of the hive act differently, then maybe one hive member can avoid fighting and dying on the frontlines; maybe one hive member can ensure they get assigned rations when the hive can’t feed everyone. The members that do this are more likely to survive than the ones who don’t.

And manipulation becomes so much easier in a community where everyone trusts everyone else.

This isn’t an unsolvable problem, of course. We’re already assuming psychic powers, so perhaps you can just check to see if someone is scheming or cheating. But…

And this is where I petered out writing this essay. There’s so many variables and lines to examine beyond this point and I think it exceeds what I could tackle in an informal post.

I’m also a little bit bothered by a faint resemblance this argument has to capitalist arguments against socialism on grounds of “human nature.”

But do want to mention my last, least important gripe with hiveminds.

It’s category of questions that are really just a difference of priorities. Not many writers are as interested in the weeds as I am, after all. It’s hardly a problem that no one explains the network topology of their hivemind or what consensus protocol drives the collective will, but I certainly wish I knew!

And ultimately, nothing I’ve talked about so far is actually impossible to handwave away. Psychic powers are magic, they’re not real, so it’s totally viable to say ok, actually whenever you cast telepathy, the universe translates your brainstate into a miraculous intermediate form that can be unambiguously unserialized into someone else’s brain, and when you connect to collective, it’s actually with such high bandwidth that every neuron activation is being sent over the wire, multicast to every other hive node, and in short mind magic does all of the processing needed to make every part of this system Do What You Mean instantly and seamlessly.

But it gets pretty weird and boring when you look at how much complexity you need to sweep under the rug, right?

Basically, the bad confluence of factors here is

0. The hive exists in some kind of psychic communion all members.
1. The hive loves and understands and coordinates everyone in the hive.
2. Members of the hive are diverse individuals with a degree of autonomy.
3. Psychic powers don’t involve so much computation and signalling that you could instantly put every datacenter out of business.

I contend that you have to compromise on one of these three points. If you compromise on 1, you just have the internet. If the implications go unexamined, by default writers are compromising on 3.

So the most interesting work is when you fiddle with 2, and actually try to solve the problem of justifying 1 without making an telepathy some do‍-​everything god‍-​power.

For instance, a lot of my quibbling about whether you can truly understand and trust others goes away in a hurry if every member of the hive is basically the same. You know what they mean because they talk just like you, you know what they’ll do bcause they’re just like you.

It also goes away if you have an elite team of supervisors who monitor the hive for conflict and brainwash anyone who causes trouble (and brainwashes anyone who thinks the supervision or brainwashing is cause for concern, and so on.)

But I digress. I could keep going, but we’re starting to dive into the innumerable hypotheticals and edge case considerations I warned of moments ago. I love hive minds, so I will be writing about them more in the days to come.