The kinds of “thoughts” that a global brain has are different from those of an individual, or of a less connected society. At their best, these thoughts allow for coordinated memory on a scale never seen before, and sometimes even for unforeseen ingenuity and new forms of cooperation; at their worst, they allow for the adoption of misinformation as truth, for corrosive attacks on the fabric of society as one portion of the network seeks advantage at the expense of others (think of spam and fraud, or of the behavior of financial markets in recent decades, or of the rash of fake news sites
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