Mind-Server
So many foretold a future where man is forced into a collective mind, forced to sacrifice identity and individuality; they didn’t predict so many would choose it. Linking brains together you can form a mind-network of sorts the way it is done between computers in offices. This group becomes a thing of mood rather than a place for interchange of thought; specific thought is repressed but the body functions as normal and performs menial tasks with increased efficiency. If you see one of these nodes, they move just like ordinary people; you may notice that while they look to be daydreaming, they perform their work with a single-minded fluidity.
They can’t think but they’re not alone. It is like two young lovers clawing at one another, trying to break through each other’s skin, wrapping around one another, never achieving this oneness, only at best a concerted duality. Now they can be together at last. Their linked minds hum their song together, one chord with harmonics.
In the end the proponents of individuality sounded so condescending and difficult to relate to, preaching that they were superior because they wanted to retain their unique minds. I suppose they couldn’t make being one of a kind sound appealing enough: people didn’t want to be one of a kind, they wanted to be part of a kind.
What was it they said? They said that personality is more than navigating through countless pre-selected purchasing options; that the very idea of individuality has been methodically perverted and robbed to make better consumers out of us; that linking is the end, the final end toward which our capitalist republic has been progressing all along, a consciousnessless hum of producer-consumers. It didn’t work. People just understood they’d be less alone. Not together exactly, but less alone than they had been.
Walking down the street you can’t tell who is linked and who isn’t. It looks exactly the same as before. Nobody said hello to one another then, either.