Crowd intelligence trumps that of a given individual or subset of society every time. The advent of the car, after the horse, shaped society in determining the size of streets, what walkable cities are, public transport, and has had global impact, unanticipated at its inception.
If you do a bit of research on the history, history of cities, cities of power, etc, they don't fit in a single timeline. They are multiple. Every human society and city has its own history. Each city is its history (no matter what it might be).
The histories in each city are a part of its uniqueness. When you travel through an entire city, where do you see and what do they look like? If it were that easy, there would be no need for travel. Instead, travel around a city or travel from one city to another,
see the different features and take a look at them. Remember, all the information you need is at your finger tips. It's there. You can also use a collective intelligence network to look up specific information in the city you are in, the list of businesses,
find out what is a great restaurant, or what a tourist attraction is like. All of these were shaped, by collective intelligence. Some individuals provide the tools and anchors for creating these building blocks from which collective intelligence can emerge.
Simple rules from which complex interactions can spawn. Thinking in graphs versus collating lists and tallying like a mere anarchist.
There are the visionaries, R. Buckminster Fullers of this world, the engineers, printers, Ohio Rubber Company workers, the Wilsons of technology,
the McKennas of vision quests, and the RA Wilsons of maybelogic and paradigm expansion - these are the individuals living beyond their time, already living and breathing in our collective futures. Visionaries building, visionaries not selling promises,
visionaries delivering and seeing what the world does with the pivotal lego blocks of engineering, commerce, and culture they provide as visions plucked from dreams, not prematurely shared.
Collective intelligence comes from collective vision, avoiding the saccades of the
individual eye as focus can be kept and held without losing our directional appeal to a shared humanity.