What is collective intelligence? It is a form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective mobilization of skills.
An intelligence that is frequently ridiculed, ignored, unused, and humiliated is obviously not enhanced. While we are increasingly concerned with economic and ecological waste, it seems as if we are willing to squander our most precious resource by refusing to acknowledge it, develop it, or even use it when it is found. From a school report card to a corporate job profile, from archaic management methods to social exclusion through unemployment, we are currently witnessing the deliberate organization of ignorance concerning the extent of the intelligence around us, a terrifying waste of experience, skill, and human wealth.
Far from merging individual intelligence into some indistinguishable magma, collective intelligence is a process of growth, differentiation, and the mutual revival of singularities. The shifting image that emerges from such skills and projects, and from the relations among members in the knowledge space, constitutes, for a community, a new mode of identification, one that is open, dynamic, and positive. New forms of democracy, better suited to the complexity of contemporary problems than conventional forms of representation, could then come into being.
The problem of forming a collective voice is one of the most difficult in political philosophy and practice. Under what conditions can we justifiably say “we”? And what can this “we” legitimately utter as a community, without usurping or reducing diversity? What do we lose in thus referring to ourselves?