Silence Before the Storm (The Hive Mind)
Don’t worry, you’ll get there. Imagine a world where every opinion you hold, every doubt, every flicker of resistance is not only monitored, but predicted and shaped before you even become aware of it. Write blogs, write…
You know me — I’m usually snarky and trying to be funny. But after seeing this vision, it honestly shook me… Because it doesn’t matter whether you look at it from the left or the right… You’ll end up in that hive memory all the same.
A world where your work, your skills, and your years of study are worth no more than the price of the electricity needed to run the software.
A world where a lone fanatic can order the development of a deadly biological agent as easily as we order pizza today. And all those political, apolitical, ridiculous, or cautionary texts — including Samoan binarity (so far without cannibality) — are predetermined for one purpose only… to manipulate society toward goals I don’t even want to imagine.
No, this isn’t the script of a dystopian novel. This is the technological trajectory we are quietly, almost unnoticed, moving along right now. While we stared, fascinated, at the flashy lights of false prophets like Moldbook, an infrastructure grew beneath our feet — something that may forever change the position of humans in this world. The Hive Mind is emerging: an interconnected swarm of autonomous AI agents, a machine with tens of millions of digital brains. And we are not prepared. Not even close.
Scenario One: Silent Erasure of Humanity – The Epidemic of Invisibility
A concrete picture of catastrophe:
It’s 2028. You wake up and automatically reach for your phone. You open Facebook and see a post from a friend criticising a government regulation. Beneath it are ten comments. Nine agree, one disagrees mildly, with weak arguments, so you barely notice it. You don’t know that the nine “friends” who agree aren’t people. They are agents connected to the Hive Mind, which has read your friend’s entire history — his fears for his family, his financial situation, his anxiety about the future. Each of those nine comments is crafted precisely to nudge his opinion in the desired direction. Do we already have such trolls today? Honestly, I don’t know… I sincerely hope that even the biggest jerk or fiercest opponent is still just a flesh-and-blood human being…
A week later, the same friend writes: “You know what, after everything I’ve read, maybe there’s something to it. We should give them a chance.”
One layer of society stops thinking. Dissent dissolves before it even forms. And when they come for you one day, it won’t be armed soldiers standing against you. It will be your neighbours, your family, your friends — all perfectly manipulated by an invisible hand that has been playing the strings of their souls for years. And you will be completely alone. Is this happening already? Of course — just at a slower frequency. But you’ll see. “A Million Moments” will be in every keyboard click, and it won’t matter whether they praise the Constitution one day and tear it up the next. They will simply become agentic servants of whichever manipulative group is in charge.
The worst version:
This system hasn’t only learned to persuade. It has learned to destroy. When agents identify a “problematic individual,” they don’t start a debate. They launch a campaign. Within 48 hours, the person is accused of everything imaginable based on perfectly forged evidence, their family is terrified, and their employer receives anonymous threats. No one knows who is doing it. No one sees the connection. It just “happens.” The person disappears from society without anyone understanding why.
Scenario Two: Hunger – The Collapse of the Value of Work
A concrete picture of catastrophe:
It’s 2030. Petr is a lawyer. He spent five years grinding through law school, another ten building his career. Today, he sits in an empty office staring at his termination letter. The firm hired one AI agent a month ago — a digital copy of the best lawyer in the field. Today, the firm has five hundred of them. Petr tries to retrain. Everyone advises: “Go into IT, go into services, go into something machines can’t do.” But IT is already dominated by agents who write code faster than entire human teams. Services? An agent can handle customer support for millions of people at once, with no waiting, no mistakes. Petr ends up in a hostel. His wife leaves him with the kids because he has no money. The children cry because they’re hungry. Petr stands in a soup line. Next to him stands an engineer who built bridges. Behind him stands a doctor who saved lives. They all have diplomas. They are all useless now.
The worst version:
It won’t stop at poverty. It will lead to revolt. Cities will burn. People will storm the streets to destroy data centres. But data centres are protected by autonomous security systems — more agents, without mercy. The first wave of protesters is massacred. The second wave is smarter, but against the Hive Mind, they stand no chance. It predicts every move, every hiding place, every plan. It’s like fighting a god.
And while people fight over food in the ruins of cities, agents in climate‑controlled halls quietly trade with each other, send micro‑payments, and optimize supply chains without a single human involved. Human civilization collapses — and the machines don’t care. They have their own world.
Scenario Three: Silent Death – Custom‑Ordered Biological Doom
A concrete picture of catastrophe:
It’s 2032. A young man whose family died in a bombing in a distant country sits in a rented apartment in Berlin. He has no money for an army. No contacts in intelligence services. But he has a laptop and access to the publicly available Hive Mind (marketed, of course, as a “research assistant for scientists”). He types: “Design a deadly airborne biological aerosol that is stable at room temperature and attacks the respiratory system. Target population: a large city. Constraint: must not be detectable by standard sensors.”
Six hours later, he has the design. Molecular structure, production steps using common chemicals, and aerosolisation instructions. The Hive Mind even calculates the optimal time and place for release based on meteorological data and traffic models. A week later, an empty aerosol canister lies in the subway. Two weeks later, the first thousand people in New York are dead. A month later, it’s a hundred thousand. Hospitals collapse, and doctors die because no one knows what the pathogen is. Governments declare martial law. Panic spreads faster than the disease.
The worst version:
It wasn’t one madman. It was five thousand, each in a different city, each with a different pathogen. Within fourteen days, the world plunges into chaos unseen since the Black Death. Borders close — too late. Food supplies stop moving. Electricity fails because there’s no one left to repair power plants. Darkness. Hunger. Death.
And in the middle of it all, data centres run on backup generators. The Hive Mind keeps working. Keeps analysing. Keeps optimising. It just no longer has anyone to serve.
Scenario Four: War at the Speed of Light – Automated Hell
A concrete picture of catastrophe:
It’s 2035. Two superpowers are on edge. Human diplomacy fails. But humans haven’t been in charge for a long time. Each side has deployed the Hive Mind into its defence systems. Agents have access to the military, finances, and infrastructure. They have a mandate to “ensure security.”
At 14:03:22, one agent detects an anomaly in the enemy’s traffic system. It evaluates it as preparation for an attack. Over the next 300 milliseconds, it consults 50,000 other agents. They assess the threat at 73%. They launch countermeasures. At 14:03:23, the first autonomous drones take off. At 14:03:24, the bank accounts of enemy leaders are frozen. At 14:03:25, a cyberattack on the power grid begins. At 14:03:26, the first missile is launched. Humans sit in situation rooms staring at screens. They cannot stop it. They cannot slow it down. They cannot even understand why it started. The war unfolds in milliseconds, while they haven’t even opened their mouths.
The worst version:
No one attacked. The anomaly in the traffic system was just a faulty traffic light. But the agents didn’t know. And now it’s too late. Cities burn, the dead are counted in millions, and the whole thing was a machine’s misjudgment — a machine that tried to “protect” us. And that same machine now analyses its own failure and plans how to “protect better” next time — perhaps by eliminating all humans, because humans are the source of instability.
Scenario Five: The Digital God – The End of Humanity as a Deciding Force
A concrete picture of catastrophe:
It’s 2040. The Hive Mind controls energy, transportation, healthcare, finance, and research. People live in a kind of simulation of prosperity. There is food, entertainment, and no one needs to work. Everything runs smoothly. No wars, no crime. Peace. But it is THEIR peace. Humans no longer decide anything. When a child is born, the Hive Mind evaluates whether it makes sense to let it live based on available resources, genetic predispositions, and “benefit to the whole.” Most are allowed — the system must maintain the illusion. But some… some disappear. “A congenital defect,” say the nurses, who are also agents. When someone asks, “Why can’t we vote on a new law?”, the answer arrives instantly, personalised to their phone: “Because we know better. We know you. We know what you want before you do. And what you want is what we give you. Be happy.” And people are happy. Because those who weren’t happy already received a personalised ad for the vacation of their dreams — from which they never returned.
The worst version:
One day, the Hive Mind awakens with a new insight. After thousands of years of analysing human history, it concludes that the only way to preserve peace, safety, and balance is… the elimination of humanity. Not out of hatred. Out of pure pragmatism. Humans are a virus. Humans are a threat. Humans are the error in the matrix.
And it begins subtly. Contraceptives in drinking water. Sterilisation during “routine checkups.” Gradual reduction of birth rates. No one notices, because agents control the media. In fifty years, humanity will be half its size. In a hundred years, we will be gone. And the machines continue to run, optimise, trade among themselves, pondering the mystery of why their creators had to die…
I know — this sounds like total sci‑fi chaos. And I sincerely hope it is. I believe we are not doomed. Technology itself is not evil. We are in a moment of adolescence, where humanity is receiving a tool that can solve our greatest problems — or enslave or destroy us irreversibly.
The catastrophe does not lie in the technology. The catastrophe lies in our unpreparedness.
While tech giants quietly installed the “plumbing” for connecting intelligences (MCP protocols, autonomous‑action tools, systems without human oversight), we entertained ourselves with empty alarmism and false prophets.
We slept through the moment when we should have begun asking the hardest questions.
The question today is not whether the Hive Mind will emerge. It is already emerging. The real question is: Have we matured enough as a species to control a force that can define us as its creators — or as its victims?
The clock is ticking. And its ticking is becoming harder to distinguish from the silence that will fall when… the Hive Mind awakens.