Exactly. To me, this experiment made it clear that the speed with which information is exchanged, new ideas are formed and behaviours adapted will increase drastically the more people are intimately connected to the internet. Not even half of the world population are connected yet. Virtual reality will remove further barriers, BCIs may completely remove them.
Looking back, the experience seems remarkably alien, but in the moment of action, you were part of a hivemind. In large rooms, only powerful ideas could propagate, no matter how meaningful they were.
I wonder what rude shocks we are in for .. BCI+VR may give us some sort of super-being, a multi-dimensional entity to deal with.
Just another annoying passenger on the bus, or supreme overlord of entire universes? Still a very thin line, or at least .. one can hope it will still be easy to unplug when this hits us.
That is what I'm wondering about, too. Not only how the external relationship between this "hivemind" and those that are not a part of it would look like, but especially what kind of effect this would have on the human brain.
Is the plasticity of the brain sufficient to adapt to these new "senses"? What is the perceptual relationship between the content of the message and the modulation? And what happens to consciousness, when two or more brains are closer and closer connected? One fascinating case is that of craniopagus twins, conjoined at the head. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craniopagus_twins
"when Krista started drinking her juice Tatiana felt it physically going through her body."
The hard problem of consciousness is still elusive. I recently found http://integratedinformationtheory.org/, which takes an axiomatic approach, but estimating the effects for large networks seems to be too difficult as of now.
