Communication and Collaboration -- The Big Upgrade
paulbuchheit.blogspot.com
paulbuchheit.blogspot.com
That's a beautiful way to phrase it, Adam. But I am tentative; I'm not sure just how far the analogy extends. I think that modeling civilization as a 'human-like' intelligence or deity is probably a pretty loose approximation. For one thing, both humans and deities (as usually conceived) have that ability to hold their attention on something.
Indeed, in many meditation disciplines, practitioners are called upon to focus their attention on a single thought or object. This is supposed to heighten awareness of the world and one's self -- it is thought to be one of the most fundamental aspects of intelligence. And though it may seem like society can focus its attention on a single event, its interpretations are so diverse, and its focus so fleeting and diffuse, that it seems that the attention of a society and the attention of a person could be fundamentally, irreducibly, different.
I just read your post 'Elephants all the way up.' To cop an analogy from physics, there are many situations where the behavior of a collection of particles becomes sharply different as the scale or energy or number or density changes. We would call these 'phase transitions.' It seems to me that though large groups have many of the elements of a human-like sentient being, either in scale, type, or connectivity.
Or perhaps the lack of attention is an inescapable flaw as long as the rate of communication is so slow. Perhaps our collective attention will improve as our communication tools become more instantaneous and pervasive. Or perhaps focused attention is NOT a characteristic of the "greater-brain" - after all, it is fundamentally different, like the anthill is different to the ant.
I certainly think that tools like Friendfeed bring us in that direction (though I can't seem to be bothered to actually use it yet... twitter works fine for my purposes). Although, I do think that we'll have to wait until Friendfeed version 20 before we get to the "super-mind" stage (on the good side, with the current rate of innovation, that shouldn't take more than a few years!).
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb
[2] The merits of impressionism aside, it would have been an improbable development without (relatively cheap) tubed oil paints. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_paint
I suspect that in many cases, a blog-wiki wouldn't be terribly useful; there simply aren't enough interested readers to do much (though I've had many people point out simple corrections on my own blog). But in certain circumstances, a blog-wiki could be very interesting. One could imagine that the blogs of particularly prominent personalities could take on lives of their own.
(For git, substitute your choice of DVCS.)
The point of this being that if you pick and choose patches deliberately, with of course the opportunity to modify them as you go, then you can end up with something collaborative that still has a strong editorial voice. That might be something new. It'd have to be very open and easy to use to work at all, but it might.
You can create a repository to collaborate a post with your friends. Whenever you want to publish the post, just push it to the http://yourname.github.com repository.