A random thought that has been wandering through my head for years knocked on the doorway of my consciousness a few days ago. There has been something about 'Collective Intelligence' and the derivative 'Smart Mobs' that has always bothered me. Factor in issues of communication, democracy and the ever buzzworthy term 'Social Networking' (which is nothing new), and things get pretty complicated because they are all written of separately. Oddly, that reflects exactly what I am writing about now.

We can concede that things that are worked on collaboratively have a chance of being better than things that are worked on by an exclusive subset of people. Open Source projects such as Linux and Apache Web Server demonstrate this. Despite itself, Wikipedia does the same to, in my opinion, a decreasing extent (perhaps following the rule of diminishing returns). Yet there are literally thousands of collaborative software and content projects that fail all the time. It is troublesome to consider how elite the successful collaborative works really are. The DotCom boom demonstrates the contrast quite well - for every successful web project during that period, such as Amazon.com, there were about 300 failures. Those are not good odds. Granted, they were not all collaborative projects - it is quite likely most weren't - but it demonstrates a disparity in statistical representation when we talk about success in conjunction with technology.

Web 2.0, another buzzword that simply refuses to die, has enabled quite a few successful projects. Yet it is fair to say that Web 2.0 has enabled quite a few more failures than successes. We can dive into how we define success, of course, and get lost in the crossfire of pedanticism that often results in more emotion than thought - but at a very high level, we should know that for every success there are more failures. And no one stands around counting the failures. Indeed, recently I wrote about how Linux's success is now being considered in how much money is spent on it instead of how much money the project conserves.

Is Linux successful? It depends on who you ask. Why is Linux successful? It depends on who you ask. Why is Linux not successful? It depends on who you ask.

What about other projects mankind has been working on for, quite literally, millenia? Governance is hardly perfect, even instantiations of democracy. There is no perfect government, no perfect democracy. Why? If we follow the theory that mobs are smarter than individuals, we reinforce democracy - and yet dictators, monarchs and other forms of non-democracy have had their days in the sun as well - and at times, performed fairly well. Why is it that democracy is seen as better when technology that allows broader communication has enabled more criticism and even outright protest, even when it comes to countries cloaked heavily in the what we call democracy?

The implicit assumption of democracy is that the majority will always make the right decision. One question to ask would be how large a mob would have to be to rival Einstein? 10 people? 100 people? 1,000? 10,000? How many? And lest we forget, it was Einstein that turned physics on it's head with the Theory of Relativity. A majority of 1? And what about Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi? Had Gandhi not been around, would the masses of India have belched out their oppressors? Name someone recognized as a leader, and I will show you someone who made decisions and affected others through something more than intelligence alone. There are many failed smart people all over the world, scattered through history and left nameless with time. What made some people more special than others? And where, then, was the smart mob? The people who followed them around shouting support?

Forgive me, what about the people who supported that guy with the funny moustache and the German accent? Better, what about the people who did nothing to stop him? Were those people part of a smart mob as well?

You see, the trouble with intelligence is that it is a lonely trait. Alone, unguided, it can be a dangerous thing. Does this mean, then, that intelligence is a failure? No, but it also means it is not a success. It means that the key of intelligence can open the gates to both Heaven and Hell.

And right about there is where Wisdom comes in. It comes in many guises. Pierre Levy, in his book Collective Intelligence, alluded to it but never did so outright. He wrote of how the atomization of the world - which echoes in Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat within an economic context - would allow us more intelligence, then jumped into some religious commentary. Religion is a path to Wisdom, of course, and before the atheists get their blank religious texts in a bind let me add that atheism itself could be considered a religion by virtue of not being one.

What other things bring wisdom? Some say experience - and it is funny, because the more experience one has the more likely one is to say that. It is self-serving in that regard, defying our scientific analysis by being self-supporting, but there it is.

And what else?

The point here is that while we have the capacity to have a collective intelligence, or to be a smart mob, that only means that we have an increased capacity - an unproven increased capacity. Yet if we believe in democracy, we are doomed - our failures outnumber our successes.

This is why the true goal should not be smart mobs or collective intelligence. It should be collective wisdom. Suddenly, it all looks very familiar - or should. There is nothing implicitly intelligent in a crowd of people other than the individuals. While there may be latent intelligence, there has to be something that guides that intelligence. And across a network or crowd or whatever else it is called, this means a common guide - a set of principles and heuristics that can guide.

Spare me the intelligence. Show me the wisdom.