such as James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis and Rupert
Sheldrakes theory of morphogenesis, to explain and confirm their
growing sense of non-local community. By the mid 1990s many internet
users began to see the entire planet as a single organism, with human
beings as the neurons in a global brain. The internet, according to
this scheme, was the neural network being used to wire up this brain
so that it could function in a coordinated fashion. In another model
for group mind, this time celebrated among the rave counterculture,
this connectivity was itself a pre-existing state. The internet was
merely a metaphor, or outward manifestation, of a psychic connection
between human beings that was only then being realised: the
holographic reality.

As functioning models for cooperative activity, these notions are not
totally unsupported by nature. Biologists studying complex systems
have observed coordinated behaviours between creatures that have no
hierarchical communication scheme, or even any apparent communication
scheme whatsoever. The coral reef, for example, exhibits remarkable
levels of coordination even though it is made up of millions of tiny
individual creatures. Surprisingly, perhaps, the strikingly harmonious
behaviour of the collective does not repress the behaviour of the
individual. In fact the vast series of interconnections between the
creatures allows any single one of them to serve as a 'remote high
leverage point' influencing the whole. When one tiny organism decides
it is time for the reproductive cycle to begin, it triggers a
mechanism through which hundreds of miles of coral reef can change
colour within hours.

Another more immediately observable example is the way women living
together will very often synchronise in their menstrual cycles. This
is not a fascistic scheme of nature, supplanting the individual
rhythms of each member, but a way for each member of the social
grouping to become more attuned and responsive to the subtle shifts in
one another's physical and emotional states. Each member has more, not
less, influence over the whole.

These models of phase-locking and self-similarity, first studied by
the chaos mathematicians but eventually adopted by the culture of the
internet, also seemed to be reflected in the ever-expanding
mediaspace. The notion of remote high leverage points (a butterfly
flapping its wings in Brazil leading to a hurricane in New York) was
now proven every day by a datas