This shit is just such a facile understanding of how emergence and consciousness both work, too. Facilitating low-latency and high-bandwidth communication between people certainly might eventually give rise to an emergent set of patterns at a higher level of organization, but we have absolutely no reason to think those emergent patterns will look anything like consciousness. In fact, we have lots of reasons to think they won’t look anything like any of the interesting aspects of their constituent parts. In the same way that brains aren’t just “neurons, but on a bigger scale,” we should expect an emergent organism built out of humans and brains to be anything like brains writ large. It’s almost impossible to imagine a scenario where anything like what we recognize as consciousness is preserved in the higher-level organism.

Of course even setting all that aside, the idea that this dumpster fire of a website (or any website for that matter) is going to give rise to novel emergent behavior like this is just pure