All good geeks are familiar with Star Trek’s Borg, a species of cybernetic organisms who lack all sense of individuality, linked in a collective hive mind. While I think some of the various Trek novels have offered origin stories (not considered “canonical”), none of the TV shows or movies have offered an explanation of where the Borg come from. And when you think about it, there seems to be a sort of chicken-and-egg problem: You can’t really have a first member of a hive mind. You could imagine the species starting with a small group, but it seems hard to imagine a society technologically advanced enough to create them in the first place not being able to resist and destroy the first assimilation-happy group. You could, of course, imagine a society with a sufficiently perfectionist ideology voluntarily going Borg wholesale (or near enough to take the reluctant members by force). But as I was IMing with a few people the other day, I thought of a more interesting, “invisible hand” sort of route to hive-mindhood.

Communication technologies in the past tended to promote interaction that was immersive and compartmentalized: You set aside a couple hours go get a drink with a friend (or a few) and you sit around and talk for a while, or you catch up over the phone, or you write a long letter. Current technology tends to promote a less immersive, but more ubiquitous sort of interaction in the interstices of other activities. You’ll primarily be doing one activity (whether it’s working or out at a concert) and sporadically IMing or texting someone on a cell phone or Blackberry, who then responds whenever they want to take a minute away from what they’re doing. And it’s also much easier to communicate with many people at once, when that’s appropriate: “Is anyone going to the concert tomorrow, and if so, can I get a ride?” or “I’m at Bar X, anybody want to pop by? Or doing something else interesting?” The understanding is that the majority of recipients of that sort of communication will probably not respond—the people with relevant information (in these cases, an affirmative answer) will self-select to respond. This kind of ubiquitous connectivity is already pretty common; it’s hardly a stretch to think that in a decade or two, it’ll be still more so, and less obtrusive and more integrated into our attire, if not bodies—maybe tiny earbuds and glasses, responsive to spoken commands or gestures, that overlay information on our surroundings.

Now, combine that with a phenomenon I’ve always thought of as “cognitive outsourcing,” which will be familiar to anyone who’s had a close friend they spent a lot of time with. People with different but complimentary dispositions and talents will often adopt a kind of informal division of labor: The gregarious one initiates conversations with new folk at bars; the peacemaker mediates conflicts between friends; the punctilious planner organizes outings. I expect many of us have had the experience of either moving or having a close friend move, and realizing once you’re out of daily contact that certain of your capacities had atrophied, because the other person had so naturally taken over certain roles.

And there are your starting ingredients for the emergence of a hive mind—maybe one that doesn’t even require wacky implants. You have people ubiquitously connected to selected groups of friends (i.e. buddy lists), and reach the point where it’s hassle free (e.g. no spelling stuff out on a phone keypad) to send brief communiques to large numbers of people. If you have a question none of them can answer, maybe it starts a kind of social packet-switching, where they in turn pass it on to some of their friends. At the outset, people use it sparingly, and often mark themselves “away.” But as cell phones changed norms about personal availability, and social neworking software and blogs are eroding norms of reticence, maybe that starts to fade. People get accustomed to a perpetual buzz of voices (or text messages?) that, for practical purposes, are “in their heads.” If cognitive outsourcing turns out to be efficient, maybe the highly connected tend to be more successful in various ways. Eventually, maybe it starts becoming hard to distinguish your thoughts from the network’s… Voila, we are Borg.