I agree being networked makes us the hive, but the biggest threat to that right now is censorship. I liked RT, which was on UK freeview until yesterday, because it gave us a counterbalance to our own nationalist news, always the other side of most stories, and a lot of subjects covered that our own news sources dare not touch, like the truth of Assange for example. But now RT is banned, we should beware of watching only our own countries news sources in absence of that, they are covering up that there was actual slow motion civil war in Ukraine before official Russian intervention.
Metcalfes law always applies, the value of any network to humanity is a function of the square of the number of users. Chop it up, and that value reduced by a factor of four with every chop.