The idea of the ‘hive mind,’ the latest iteration of what used to be called groupthink, has become newly salient over the past decade. It has generated countless memes, along with new epithets for people who don’t seem to think for themselves: the rise of people being called ‘NPCs,’ for instance, non-player characters in video games who control none of the action and show up on the screen in programmed patterns.
The cocktail of media and technology has made the world far more mimetic. We are now so saturated in mimesis that the saturation itself has become the joke — like the 1984 Pepsi commercial that ushered in the age of mimetic irony.
