TheCollective

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TheCollective is the set of agents that cooperate either consciously or unconsciously.

An economic collective is a group of individuals who share costs and proceeds. Sometimes the collective is a collaboration between producers and consumers. Lots of hippy grocery stores are economic collectives.

In many countries, farmers come together to form collectives (for example, the Mexican ejido). In the U.S. and Canada farmer cooperatives were formed in most rural communities in the early 20th century to obtain crop inputs (feed, seed, fuel, lumber; later, chemicals and fertilizers) and to make markets. Most of these were consolidated or privatized in the 1970s and 1980s.

Artist collectives are groups of artists that use mutual support to (for example) create works, manage work or display space, promote events, etc. Often, the artist collective downplays the role of the individual artist, and may avoid using individuals' names or reputations whatsoever.

A collective can also give rise to CollectiveIntelligence. Trekkies also know this as the happy bunch known as the Borg. However, the Borg is some cross between a HiveMind and a CollectiveIntelligence. They are more like a DistributedMind.

Due in part to Star Trek, and in part to sinister Stalinist connotations, "TheCollective" sounds ominous and foreboding. Maybe it should, but collectives form naturally in many places.

Some criteria for a collective are:

Must be formed from autonomous, individual agents;
Must be self-organizing;
The agents must interact in some way;
A purpose for the collective will emerge from the interaction of the agents;
...

A myth is that the agents must be willing to cooperate, but random interactions may cause self-organizing behaviour. Such as from insect behaviour.

A community or society is usually a collective. Many faith communities could be considered collectives, though a considerable number are not self-organizing.

[This has been lifted in part from Wiki:TheCollective ]

Is it really made up of you, AnIndividual? Contrast against the opposite, TheIndividual.

CategoryIdentity

I tried to give some non-Trekkie, non-HiveMind examples of a collective, here. I don't think that collectives have to evolve CollectiveIntelligence, nor that all OnlineCollective?s are that kind of collective, either. I also think it's kind of baloney to say that a collective must be self-organizing. Collectives can be organized from without, and directed to cooperate unwillingly. --EvanProdromou

Evan, that essay has existed in wikidom for at least four years completely fossilized. Thank you for finally improving it. -- SunirShah

I've an example of a non-trek HiveMind, from a collection of books by Ian Banks whose Orbital structures are probably the basis of ringworld artifact in the game Halo.

The hivemind in the collection, is called The Culture and it is made up of various life forms, mostly human, who have created and willingly given over power to their computers who are sentient and run all aspects of machines in their world. Each ""Mind"" is housed in a spaceship of some type or is the ""Hub"" of an Orbital which is a ringworld large enough to spin at 1G once every 24hrs. (Which comes to about two million miles across). -- MatthewKaiser?

TheCollective

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