Chapter Twenty-One:

Not Everything is Equally Interconnected

New social machines are fascinating for two reasons: One is the observation of a machine as a tool or object for achieving a purpose, and the other is the automation of this object of mechanical operations. Society is a machine in both of these senses; specifically, it is a human-relation machine. On the one hand it was formed as a tool facilitating human interaction and cooperation. On the other it seems to situate human interaction as mechanical relations and humans as parts of this social machine. The network is a social machine. Out of the network, the next machine to arise is the interest group. They either share a topic or share a goal, often both. They share a vector of movement and have intentionality in common, which precipitated their formation. Out of these interest groups, or topical groups, form trusted groups. At the fundamental level the trust group is that subset of an individual's network connections that the individual trusts with abstract or concrete representations of value that the individual does not wish available to the network as a whole.

At this layer, individuals can interconnect their trust groups so that you can have groupings where each member knows and trusts each other. Interest groups and trust groups are built on the same network principle but are independent of each other, although they can also overlap with each other. Trust groups that are the same as interest groups and have all the same members are incredibly powerful and are what we've been calling masterminds, and which exhibit emergent egregores. They can work together towards the goal or topic-interest that they share in common. This is the group that is in a position to act rather than be acted upon. Hopefully this book will help you create such a group, and help transform the rest of the network in a positive way.