Culture war is not new.
Interesting point about rulership and autonomy of systems naturally falling to a regulatory mind-caste. There is an invisible hand? I am but one malfunctioning brain cell in a great malfunctioning brain. I think it is interesting to think about memetic distributed neural spirit/thought organisms. Apparently some of them are self aware. But what remains? I wonder if there is some way to quantify pleasure/reward/pain the way you can dollars and cents, or power like you measure the iota of work or weight. Well. Here's to interesting times.
You made a really good point about proximity to others in thought. We are not inseperable from the people we surround ourselves with, but there is a lot of really really interesting exchanges that occur.