How do you make a hivemind that feels legitimately terrifying...

...

What part of "terrifying" did you not understand?

>sacrificing your freedom
>sacrificing your privacy
>sacrificing all that for an illusion of comradery
I want antispirals to fucking leave

Blindsight had one, by Peter Watts. The Scramblers civilization.

Technically ants are hive mind by mechanism, each with it's own mindish, but working together by design of process, so... giant fuck off ants?

The antispirals weren't a hivemind though, they just decided that they needed to put themselves into stasis so the universe wouldn't kill itself for the inhabitants being too badass

The hive all have individual minds but they are subservient to the mother queen and will do anything FOR MOTHER! as well as the queen having access to their knowledge and being able to assume control if she wishes.

...

They weren't a hivemind, they were appendages of Rorschach.

Yup. Terrifying.

Reminder that Simon/Lagann killed an entire species in one hit.

>thinking your individuality is worth sacrificing the entire universe
Anti-Spirals were right, if malevolent about it. Kamina was the biggest danger to the universe.

>Giving up your individualism and drive in order to Frankenstein a universe into forever life

everything beautiful must fade.... eternity only cheapens the beauty... what's the point in living if you cannot die...

Kamina was probably the best thing to happen to the universe, their efforts give it a chance to die, as well as the time to live.

What part of democracy isn't scary?

That's a horribly selfish thing to inflict on the universe you fucking nihilistic narcissist.

I'm not Nihilist. I never said life was pointless. i just believe eternity stuck to suffer stasis is less... well, fun. If you only have the one life to live, would you not want to live it to the fullest? Is the end of something not the beginning of something else? Is someone on life support, not living life, but alive forever kinda more pointless than to live life?

I think it's terribly selfish to demand stasis of the universe in order to preserve it.

But if they DON'T stasis the universe, it'll turn badass. Do you have any idea what happens when universes get too badass? They blow up, user

There's a difference between "living life" and "pulling matter out of nothing culminating in spiral nemesis." The ending had Simon leave Rossiu in charge because he knew Rossiu was strong enough to accept the challenge of having the maximum amount of people living while also subduing the advance of Spiral Nemesis. The universe gets to exist and thrive without the Anti-Spirals now, with them spreading into the stars to help the other spiral races embrace life without falling into the trap of abusing Spiral Power.

I don't see a problem. The universe is meant to blow up bro, might as well live till then.

so you admit, running the risk of blowing the shit out of the universe is preferable to stasis under the anti-serial? Because what the what spirals did was let the universe survive indefinitely, and what kamina and simon did was free us from that bondage. To me there isn't a difference.

It's also based on the conjecture of the anti-spirals, whom are assholes, and might be lying or exaggerating to keep themselves in power. Which, in the end, doesn't matter, as they oppressed and destroyed countless life in order to achieve their goals. Which, to me, invalidates the good they were trying to achieve.

It's a very interesting dichotomy of thought to be honest.

I've been working on a race of psudo-machines that are a collective concousness of organic and synthetic beings that exist in digitally constructed bodies. They have claimed several galaxies worth of races, them all being driven and forced to the same mentality of these monsters. Now they use their knowledge to troll and mess with our galaxy.
They use their production line bodies to remain anonymous, allowing them to commit horrendous atrocities and do it all for the sake of humour. They're also deathly smart, able to hack every single device in our galaxy the second they arrived.

Oh hey i use those too! I love the idea of AI and organics blending perfectly.

I'm;
and what you described is basically the tech responsible for it's existence. It's not the only being in universe that has a hive mind as well, there are also AI constructs al la Mass effect's geth (who are individuals but work together to run a physical body). Even AI's that learned to 'imprint' themselves on organics to effectively merge with them.

They're friendly though.

>running the risk of blowing the shit out of the universe is preferable to stasis under the anti-serial?
>It's a very interesting dichotomy of thought to be honest.
It's not a fucking dichotomy! You don't have to go hard on either! Don't blow up the universe by not using Spiral Power, but still live regardless. There is a middle road here! Just because stasis by Anti-Spirals was shit doesn't make advancing Spiral Nemesis is the "meant to be." They fucking state they're going to carve their own path!

> the conjecture of the anti-spirals, whom are assholes, and might be lying or exaggerating to keep themselves in power.
THEY'RE NOT IN POWER. They're not dominating other races they're smacking their shit before they become a problem for the universe. Lordgenome was the dominator, for the same goddamn purpose, to protect his people from the Anti-Spirals. Did you miss the entire fucking passing the torch meaning there?

>as they oppressed and destroyed countless life in order to achieve their goals. Which, to me, invalidates the good they were trying to achieve.
The Anti-Spirals overreacted but that doesn't negate their reasoning. Protecting the entire universe was their goals, and one race wanting to be so amazing they'd risk the rest of them was exactly the fucking problem they saw. You're exactly what they feared and YOU'RE PROVING THE ANTI-SPIRALS RIGHT.

Oh trust me, these guys, though playful, defiently aren't friendly. The orignal base for them ws built on the negative stereotypes of Veeky Forums, people who use anonimity to do and say whatever they want, even killing thousands of people 'just for the sake of it'.

When their freedom is eventually threatened though, by the Galactic order developing a device that can perminently isolate them to a single body and make them killable. They take poorly to this and commit a war against the galaxy. They are selfish petulant and childish, but they ade also one of the most powerful races in the universe.

simple every being controlled is completely unaware that they are part of it and will brush off any attempts to convince them otherwise as just some crazy conspiracy theory. and will rationalize all there actions as something that they choose to do.

IF i'm remembering correctly, wasn't the vision of spiral-death the anti-spirals showed Simon and Co. inevitable so long as spiral life was allowed to exist regardless of measures taken to slow its progress?

you can oppress people by association. oppress people vicariously (as you actions are a detriment to their existence, but only because you forced someone else to be an asshole) The very fact that they will come around and nuke the every living shit of of shit is a form of oppression. They have the power to LITERALLY wipe peoples and planets that threaten THEM (the antispirals, the only proven thing). that's power bro. When you have to subjugate your people to prevent their destruction, something else but you is in power.

>You're exactly what they feared and YOU'RE PROVING THE ANTI-SPIRALS RIGHT.

I'm what they fear because i don't accept their truth. They chose to be destructive in their protection, and became arrogant and self defeating.

I also never said "purposefully have a the goal of ending the universe' i stated that we should live life and not fear the end of it. Which is what the antispirals were doing for an entire universe. Forcing an entire universe to fear death, and to prevent a universal death. I think it's terribly sad.

All probably so they didn't have competition as the top of the heap.

Could very well be made up, the only point of reference is the antisprials, they could be fabricating things.

The Anti-Spirals themselves never felt threatened, they felt the universe was threatened by allowing the Spiral races to abuse Spiral Power for their own ends. Seeing the Spiral Power well in the last half of the series, how the fuck can a race that can crush planets be fearful of what other spiral users can do? Because it's not what they can do to them, but what them doing means in the context of the greater universe.
>we should live life and not fear the end of it
That's how you burn out. You can live without being a fucking idiot about it. We're given nothing to contradict what the Anti-Spirals present and it fits the entire fucking theme of the show. For them to be deceitful would go against the entire meaning of the show. They're spiral races themselves and are just as capable of pursuing growth but were capable of realizing the destruction inevitable within it. You need people to take charge and keep some in line for the safety of the greater whole. Life isn't meant to be lead purely on your own desires, using Spiral Power to grant your own wishes. That's fucked up and that's why Simon let Nia stay dead. The Anti-Spirals were right, but still massive dicks about it.

>When you have to subjugate your people to prevent their destruction, something else but you is in power.
YES. Spiral Nemesis has no fucking counter. Why would you let anyone add to the total in the universe knowing it can never be undone?!

base it on the sjw

>YES. Spiral Nemesis has no fucking counter. Why would you let anyone add to the total in the universe knowing it can never be undone?!

you fuck what?

> The Anti-Spirals were right, but still massive dicks about it.

No no they weren't. They Stagnated everything to preserve themselves, and themselves alone. Anything else is justification for them being dickholes. There is not proof that the universe will end because of a spiral going out of control, only the anit-spiral conjecture. Which, from a position of power, you'll understand that those with power, especially Immense All Fucking That Shit Up power, means you can say what you and people will believe you.

The anitspirals feel threatened by all spiral life, because it will fucking end them, regardless of the means for the act.

Why would i want to live a life knowing it'll never end? Why would i want persistence over existence? Stagnation over motion? Safety over progress?

The anti spirals were wrong, humanity will do better. Tis better to love and have it lost, than never to love at all. Etc.

My drill will pierce the heavens.

You're a fucking psycho if you can't see why burning out is a bad fucking option. Worse yet your attitude would bring the universe down with you. That's fucking horrible.

Wait...you haven't heard about the hive mind made of cranium rats?
Your legitimately afraid how smarter they get when their numbers increase. Beady eyes in the dark. Chanting high level spells. Coming from all sides. Starting to hear telepathic voices telling you how they'll relish on gnawing on your innards.

>each with it's own mindish, but working together by design of process

Unity from Rick and Morty.

I don't think I'm /pol/ enough to understand this meme

Simple. A hivemind should be something like...communism taken to eldritch levels. Your individuality will serve the hive. Your skills will serve the hive and whether or not, YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED INTO THE HIVE. You are still yourself, but you cannot go against the hive and/or leave it.

All you can do is simply do what the hive wants, put your skills into good use for it and so on. You are still an individual, yet you cannot do certain things anymore. You are simply a glorified slave with more freedom than an actual slave. You simply cannot go against the hivemind and hive, nor leave the hivemind and hive.

>meme

There's no meme here to understand.

It's merely an illustration for a study that points out that ants aren't as simple/''hive-minded'' as originally thought, but cabable of seemingly selfish action, or in this case, inaction.

It is every citizen's final duty to go into the tanks and become one with all the people.

Well at least there are some pluses with being assimilated into a hivemind.

You are never alone.

>There is not proof that the universe will end because of a spiral going out of control, only the anit-spiral conjecture
"Conjecture" that every spiral being in the universe instinctively intuits and accepts as unerring truth, even Lordgenome and Simon
Simon's philosophy wasn't "Spiral Nemesis can't happen" but instead "I'll try to make Spiral Nemesis not happen" and the Anti-Spiral doesn't want to make such a stupid gamble

That's not a plus.
Desolation is comfy, people aren't.

How can it terrify you with your wrongness? In a democracy the most popular idea wins and if the hive is always right then the majority (which most of the time you are part of) is always perfectly correct.

Now, if this democratic hive wasn't made of near omniscient beings who are almost always right and instead was made of mere mortals who are nearly always wrong but think they are right, THEN that could be terrifying. A horde of creatures who do stupid, terrible things but are convinced of their own infallibility by the chorus of un/misinformed voices in their head. Those few with the expertise or experience that could prove helpful being drowned out by ignorant and complacent, their body forced to do what they know is wrong to appease the solipsistic hive.

Seele go home.

Nobody who is part of the hivemind realizes they're part of the hivemind. It's like a parasitic infection where the host's body is modified to believe everything happening is natural and right.

If an individual doesn't know, how can the narrator know he's not also part of the hivemind, subtly controlled at all times?

You can play on a person's fear of a lose of agency by creating a sinister undercurrent of doubt that they ever had agency at all.

Alex Jones' paranoid delusion about magic people computers?

Might come off that way, but it does show that the idea is a real fear in people.

Imagine speaking to a member of the hivemind, and having them try to explain it. First, they would have to consider what being a hivemind is, and how that's at all different from a mind they can't understand. It's completely alien.

Most works of fiction depict it as being surrounded by voices, but that's just to make it easier for us to comprehend. It could just be that the individual feels as if they're responsbile for their own thoughts. You might demonstrate they act in unison, but they would deny it. They're not just a disposable drone. They have dreams and wants and likes all their own, even if those things just might be planted for the convience of the greater collective.

You go to a town of hiveminds and it looks like something out of a 50's sitcom where everyone is happy doing what they do because they're made to think that, and can't conceive it any other way because their mind is compromised.

It would place the hivemind outside human understanding, which is an important element in horror. Maybe not enough to make the players shit their pants, but it can make them feel uneasy.

Malkavians in the Old World of Darkness.

When humans form hives in his Echopraxia it's also pretty scary. Our psychology might adapt in weird ways, for instance it is implied that one hive has voluntarily made itself incapable of imagining its own death as the cozy biases that protect the human mind no longer applied.

Actual consciousness is just a shared hallucination of communal organisms that happen to function together as a mind.

The Zerg swarm after kerrigan took over did the hivemind idea pretty interestingly, in that all the brood controlers allow kerrigan to rule them as long as she was an effective controller.

Scrambles weren't hive mind, but with their level of intelligence it hardly matters.

I like the idea of a part time hive, which will disintegrate into its component individuals if there is enough cognitive dissonance. This means that in order to get a true Godmind up and running it must either be very in tune with reality (unlikely) or willing to warp it to preserve itself/its view of the world. Even those who opt to form hives if and when they are needed could be in trouble as if every brain has a right to secede from the hive surely every neuron has a right to leave the brain?

Individuality is a meme. Imagine every single person, from the lowliest drone digging trenches to the highest hive mother, all happy and sure of their shared goal and worthiness. Not "happy" because if they don't show the required amount of patriotism and happiness, the secret police will get them - but truly happy to be doing whatever they're born to do. Imagine being 100% fulfilled doing whatever you're doing, even digging shit 12 hours every day, and being happy for it.

>It came from the desert
Holy shit, my childhood just hit me hard.

>sacrifice
From your point of view, user, you didn't lose anything, you gained the dreams and hopes of ten thousand people, and ten thousand pair of hands to see them realised. You also gained the promise that they and you won't die until the entire Hive does. And perhaps you also gained some perspective about yours.

Hive minds are scary because they challenge notions about identity. To enhance the effect play up that angle; for example, have the Hive regularly "manifest" the people it has assimilated, perhaps with some apparently experimental variations or recombinations.

Or you could just make the Hive a complete asshole, an evil empire/cult/whatever who also happens to be a single mind spread over many bodies, making it inhumanly effective. You could use themes of possession, and have the Hive haunt even inorganic structures (this works especially well in a science fiction settings, because remote control).

Or you could make the Hive simply superior. The Hive is going to incorporate the entire Universe, perhaps even the Great Wheel. This might even be a good thing. Either way, your resistance is not only doomed but only exists because the Hive tolerates it, trying to take you without too much damage. But no matter what, resistance is futile.

The hive mind does not consider you to be alive. How could you possibly think and know things with only one set of senses? Obviously you are on the same level as cows or, at worse, bugs, maybe interesting to observe and look at, but when the new super-highway needs to be built, your desires are simply irrelevant. If the Hive is empathetic, it'll relocate you to somewhere it considers "suitable". If not, it'll just kill you, if it even considers you at all and doesn't just roll right over you.
It's not that attempts to communication will fail, they'll just be consider noises with no real meaning.
Hope that they're environmentalists. Hope they don't try and domesticate you. Hope they don't consider you delicious when cooked.
Though that makes me wonder, what would be the human equivalent of catnip?

unironically check edge of tomorrow

>town of hiveminds
But why would they be made to act out a 50's sitcom, user? They can be made to be happy doing any activity. Any body can manifest any personality and any skillset. Why not make it a town of industry or academia?

Make it look like such an iron dictatorship that not even propaganda is needed anymore. Everyone is defined mainly (for semi-individuals) or only (for mere drones) by their relationship with the Hive, and that is entirely up to the Hive to determine. If you want more complexity, you could still leave Hivelings limited individual agency and have their opinions influence the Hive.

>we should live life and not fear the end of it
Then you possibly deprive the joy of life to generations yet to come. Don't be selfish.

I had a fungal hive mind which due to its isolated existence didn't understand the basic idea of "otherness". The actual being was a mass of tendrils growing in a cave but it could spawn separate limbs which were individual myconids, but since they shared a conciousness it still saw them as itself.

It was discovered by an adventuring priest, but the hive mind didn't realize this thing was a distinct being separate from itself. The hive mind "collected" the priest like it would it's myconid limbs and began the digestion process to reuse the biomass. In doing so it began learning the priest's memories but since it was experiencing them in first person believed it had merely forgotten about the events.

It then started making myconids to capture and bring back the missing pieces of itself it saw in the priest's memories, causing mayhem in the neighboring area.

But those ideas are false, implanted in your mind to try and make you more willing and subservient to whatever hive mind it is.

The Many asks you why you don't trust the feelings of the flesh, but so many of their grunts beg for death the moment you see them or try to urge you to run.

All of it, you fucking communist.

There was the Battery. Of course inspired by one of the few good metallica songs, it was a fungus related creature that concentrate amass and all share the same senses. The catch to them is one only of each have a single sense. One sees, one hears, one feels, one smells, one tastes, and one that has contemplation between all of them, the Processor. They all work without the Processor, but it takes longer.

Effectively, they group up, but heavily rely on each other.

They are amazingly coordinated, but with intelligence, a PC party can pick them apart. My PC's hated the fuckers.

This

Why do you hate our unity? We just want freedom.

NEETs.

>democracy
>not inherently communistic and anti-individualist
Autocracy is the only acceptable style of government.

That just sounds like how it works now.

orionsarm.com/eg-article/486028564241d

All citizens have interchangeable parts, making it possible to not just link together individuals into temporary or permanent group organisms but also to reconstruct oneself within a wide range.

Joining together all individuals into a collective social mind has time and again proven to be a mistake, as demonstrated by the Gorca Pleroma around the time of the birth of Emple-Dokceticism. On the other hand unbridled individualism is not desirable for highly social beings. The modular equality solution to the dilemma is to make the individual and the self modular and interchangeable. This lowers or removes the barriers between individuals and enables enhanced altruism and understanding. When needed collective minds can be constructed, but they are viewed merely as temporary tools, and dismantle themselves after their purpose has been achieved. Pure individuality can also be reached, but is also regarded as merely a tool for the will to express itself. The typical state of an Emple-Dokcetic is being an assemblage of parts and subselves of different origins, a tool for the expression of the current transient (local) collective will. In the flow of Emple-Dokcetic society ideas, knowledge and goals flow fairly freely between the different temporary bodies and selves. Instead of having a self as an individual, Emple-Dokcetics view themselves as the current self, a transient tool that exists to fulfil its destiny.

The principles of Emple-Dokceticism do not exist in any clear-cut form, but rather as a large corpus of myths and small essays by various entities that developed during the formative years and have been refined by continual re-telling. The corpus is sometimes called the Dok. Together they delineate everything from the story of how the ideology developed, the practicalities of modular living, the philosophy to the ethics of modular equality. The Dok is a pervasive and subtle influence, seldom explicitly referred to but widely known and often implicitly used as a shared cultural context. As the Emple-Dokcetics come into contact with more and more non-Emple-Dokcetic societies, various compilations and collections of the Dok have been produced.

Emple-Dokcetic government is largely a consensus government. Many decisions are simply made by millions of citizen-complexes acting in similar ways due to prevalent views, with no need for any decision process. In issues where wills and views are divided larger minds are formed by interlinking, exploring and debating the pros and cons internally before dissolving into consensus. Instead of relying on central planning they employ free markets, but as the agents blur the line between seller, buyer and government the effect is partially also a planned allocation of resources.

That's because Simon doesn't give a shit.

This. Group Minds > Hive Minds

Are you a retard?

It works through inception rather than domination. Everybody knows of it, but nobody thinks that they are part of it, despite them doing things that benefit the hivemind at their own expense, eventually leading them to become self destructive in the name of the hivemind, but doing so technically against their will willingly.

...

DIE DIE BERK.

>horribly selfish thing
There's no such thing

Memetic hivemind? Subtly introducing an idea that then spreads and echoes quietly in their minds, is empowered and births and ideology and before you know it there's an entire horde perpetuating its wishes and working towards whatever its goals might be

MDMA

Would someone be so kind as to tell me what the motherloving shit is going on in this thread

a hive mind only seems strange to us because we are individual beings and the idea of multiple bodies answering to a same consciousness seems alien to us. But we could consider ourselves a "hive-mind" of cells.

Picture the cells in your body. Each one lives and dies to keep the conglomerate functioning and healthy, putting its "personal" well-being behind. Some are specialized to fulfill certain roles, some are more dispensable than others, and together they create something far more complex than they could do by themselves. It the same concept on a larger scale

Someone never read Ender's Game.

This

Individuality and freedom are self-created and self-perpetuating memes that have created nothing but misery
The only reason anyone cares about them is because they can conceptualize it to begin with and conceive that in a hivemind their current wants and dreams and whatthefuckever wouldn't matter, but that's just it
They wouldn't because you wouldn't have any, you wouldn't miss what you never had to begin with, instead you'd have the collective goal and an actually feasible happiness in your part in it

>How do you make a hivemind that feels legitimately terrifying
I think by emphasizing the lack of individualism. It's not just that, like in collectivist cultures today, the group is elevated above the self but there is no self. When in combat the "individuals" of the hivemind make no active effort to avoid harm to themselves, continue despite harm being done and fall by the dozens with utter indifference. Even when captured or threatened they do not recoil simply because they have no understanding of death: they do not understand the end of their own existence because they do not comprehend their own existence. They only understand the hivemind, which continues with or without them. I'd say that could be pretty terrifying from a psychological angle. This is already part of every fictional hivemind, but it's all about emphasizing the right parts.

And your mind isn't even a singular, defined thing. Ever doubt yourself? Ever do something completely on instinct? Ever do something that seems like a good idea that you later really, really regret?

Also, meme that spreads itself is pretty much the definition of a culture or a religion. If that's a hive mind to you, people have been doing it ever since they were people.

Or /pol/, same basic idea.

>And your mind isn't even a singular, defined thing. Ever doubt yourself? Ever do something completely on instinct? Ever do something that seems like a good idea that you later really, really regret?
this sounds juicy playing out in a hivemind. "self-doubt" to a hive mind would be a small subsection (say 1%-5%) of it's "individuals" deciding on a different goal, with the rest of the components ruthlessly hunting them down for not agreeing with the overmind.

>My gift to industry is the genetically engineered worker, or Genejack. Specially designed for labor, the Genejack's muscles and nerves are ideal for his task, and the cerebral cortex has been atrophied so that he can desire nothing except to perform his duties. Tyranny, you say? How can you tyrannize someone who cannot feel pain?

Oh, interesting discussions and a bit of lunacy. Basically what would happen if we stopped bitching at each other all the time.

One of the Star Wars expanded novel series had an insect race with a hive mind. What made it kind of freaky was that the species had a black-ops nest for doing dirty work, which by biology and the like could easily manipulate or make themselves invisible to the rest of the hive. Bit freaky having otherwise rational creatures just simply unable to see these black-ops members or realize the manipulations.

Though it does lead to scenes of "the Black Queen does not exist, you are all liars who will be executed..." "...she's right FUCKING THERE!" "Silence, liars, go away..."

As long as they are like this from birth and not forcibly augmented normal humans, there's no ethical problems with this.

The idea that there is something particularly holy about human form is silly. We are already augmenting ourselves through nutrition and culture, why not go further?

Brave New World was a utopia.

I think most people find the idea of being born for only one thing and without any choice in the matter uncomfortable - which is paradoxically opposing the fear that most people seem to have of their lives being absolutely pointless.

Humans are honestly pretty stupid.