DNA-Free Bubbles - When the Internet Begins to Look Like a Society

When we see a digital crowd, how many real organisms are actually there?

Imagine opening a social network.

There are ten thousand profiles discussing the same subject.

Thousands of photographs.

Avatars.

Comments.

Likes.

Replies.

Profiles repeating the same words.

Some appear to agree.

Others attack.

Some appear every day.

Others emerge only when a certain topic becomes relevant.

Looking at the screen, it seems like a crowd.

But how many living organisms are actually there?

Ten thousand?

Five thousand?

One hundred?

None?

A single human being may manage several profiles.

One avatar may be shared by several people.

An account may publish automatically.

A bot may talk to other bots.

An artificial intelligence agent may produce thousands of interactions.

One organism may appear through dozens of digital addresses.

And thousands of digital addresses may not correspond directly to any human organism at that moment.

This is why, in this blog, we call these structures:

DNA-Free Bubbles

Not as a new biological category.

But as a BrainLatam metaphor for systems in which collective patterns can emerge among informational entities without each visible unit corresponding to a living organism.

Before the Internet, Let Us Return to Cells

Quorum sensing was initially studied mainly in bacteria.

In simplified terms, cells produce signaling molecules.

As population density increases, the concentration of these signals may also increase.

When particular conditions are reached, the population collectively changes patterns of gene expression and behavior.

It is tempting to transform this into a universal rule:

many cells + the same signal = quorum sensing.

But it is not that simple.

Cell differentiation may involve:

genes,

morphogens,

mechanical forces,

position,

density,

paracrine signals,

cell-cell interactions,

extracellular matrix,

the cell’s previous history.

Chilean researcher Roberto Mayor and Delan Alasaadi reviewed in 2024 how mechanical forces, cellular density, pressure, tension, and properties of the physical environment can also participate in cell-fate determination during development.

Therefore:

cell differentiation is not the same thing as quorum sensing.

But in 2023, something particularly interesting appeared.

Stem Cells Can Also Perform Something Similar to Quorum Sensing

Hirad Daneshpour and colleagues studied mouse embryonic stem cells during differentiation.

These cells secreted signals such as FGF4.

What was surprising was the scale.

The molecules allowed communication across millimeters and even macroscopic distances within the culture.

And survival of the differentiating population depended on a cell-density threshold.

The authors described the phenomenon as:

macroscopic quorum sensing.

An isolated cell was not simply executing an independent program.

What happened to it also depended on information produced by the population.

This is deeply relevant to us.

But we need to establish a boundary.

The cells were not:

“feeling belonging.”

We have no evidence for attributing this kind of conscious experience to them.

What we can say is:

information distributed across a population can materially change the state of the units composing that population.

This is where BrainLatam begins its extrapolation.

Does Belonging Begin When the Signal Also Passes Through Me?

Imagine a human community.

Everyone knows that a certain event exists.

But you never participate in it.

The information circulates around you.

It does not pass through your life.

Now imagine another situation.

There is a shared event, and you know that:

it happened to me,
it happened to you,
and we both know that we participated in it.

In the BrainLatam hypothesis, perhaps there is an important distinction between:

observing a group

and

perceiving oneself as belonging to the group.

Our hypothesis is not that human beings perform a form of “social quorum sensing.”

That would be an inappropriate reduction.

The question is different:

for me to perceive that I belong, does some shared reference also need to pass through my Body-Territory?

Not necessarily the same sentence.

Nor the same belief.

But perhaps some event that can simultaneously be recognized as:

mine

and

ours.

Social Neuroscience Is Beginning to See Systems That Cross More Than One Body

Traditional neuroscience placed one person in front of a screen and studied that person’s brain.

But human interactions happen between people.

Latin American researchers have been actively participating in this shift.

A 2024/2025 review led by researchers linked to Chilean institutions examined embodied hyperscanning, in which brain and bodily signals are recorded simultaneously in several people during interaction.

The approach brings brain, body, and environment together rather than studying each component in isolation.

In 2025, Chilean researcher Ivo Leiva-Cisterna, Paulo Barraza, and colleagues experimentally showed that coordinated sensory stimulation across two people can modify cooperative behavior, offering a causal approximation to the relationship between neural coordination and social interaction.

This does not demonstrate our belonging hypothesis.

But it shows something important:

a shared event can cross more than one organism and participate in the dynamics of interaction between them.

Jiwasa reappears here.

Not as neural synchrony.

But as a question:

when something that happens in me also happens in you, at what point do we begin to perceive that there is a “we”?

Now Enter the Internet

A digital network also contains shared signals.

A hashtag.

An image.

A video.

A news story.

A sentence.

A meme.

Thousands of accounts begin repeating them.

It looks like quorum.

It looks like consensus.

It looks like belonging.

But there is a fundamental problem.

We do not know how many organisms exist behind it.

A global study published in 2025 compared bots and humans across approximately 200 million users observed during seven major events. In that specific dataset, around 20% of the analyzed conversation was attributed to bots.

The authors also found systematic differences in identity and interaction patterns between automated and human accounts.

That number should not be generalized into “20% of the entire Internet is bots.”

But it demonstrates the scale of the problem.

So:

one thousand accounts do not mean one thousand people.

Nor:

one thousand people mean one thousand accounts.

The Internet Has Lost the Correspondence Between Digital Unit and Organism

An account may represent:

one person.

But also:

several people,
a company,
a political party,
a community,
software,
a bot,
an AI agent,
or a combination of these.

This is why the question:

when we see a digital crowd, how many real organisms are actually there?

also becomes a political question.

Because digital numbers create perceptions of majority.

And perceived majority can influence:

relevance,

trust,

fear,

belonging,

decisions,

votes.

Sophisticated bots may even use instrumental identities to appear as members of human groups and intervene in ingroup/outgroup dynamics.

A DNA-Free Bubble can therefore look like a society without necessarily having a simple correspondence with a society of organisms.

Luciana Parisi: The Algorithm Does More Than Carry Information

Here we can return to Luciana Parisi.

In her recent work on computation, Parisi questions the idea that algorithmic systems are merely passive tools executing human instructions.

Computation produces inferences, probabilities, and organizations of informational space that exceed what any individual user can follow.

In Recursive Philosophy and Negative Machines, published in 2022, she discusses precisely how automation transforms forms of decision and knowledge.

In the 2022 edition of Contagious Architecture, her formulation of algorithms as constructors of digital spatialities and temporalities remains particularly relevant.

This means that in a social network, the emergent pattern does not depend only on:

what people published.

It also depends on:

what was selected,
ordered,
recommended,
repeated,
hidden,
amplified.

Bubbles Do Not Need to Begin as Bubbles

This point is especially important.

Argentine researcher Natalia Aruguete, Ernesto Calvo, and Tiago Ventura demonstrated in experiments conducted in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico that even an initially diverse network can be perceived as polarized when partisan users share certain content more intensely.

They call this process Network Activated Frames.

The result is important:

a bubble can emerge through amplification dynamics even when the original network was not completely closed.

So there is not only:

an algorithm creating a bubble.

There are interactions among:

**algorithms

• human choices

• platform architecture

• repetition

• incentives

• bots

• trust networks.**

When Algorithms Become Editors

Chilean researcher Sebastián Valenzuela drew attention in 2024 to something fundamental:

we increasingly live in environments where algorithms participate in a function once attributed mainly to editors.

They help determine which news and information gain visibility.

This concentrates a new kind of power:

the power to increase the probability that something will be perceived.

Argentine researchers Martín Becerra and Silvio Waisbord also highlighted in 2024 the fragility of Latin American debates on digital sovereignty in the face of concentrated global platforms, including questions of moderation, content circulation, data, infrastructure ownership, and economic power.

In Brazil, Fabio Malini and colleagues showed how information-disorder networks on Telegram can structure political mobilization through coordinated circulation of content and connected communities.

The question therefore ceases to be only:

what is true?

And becomes also:

who has the power to decide which differences will have the opportunity to enter the perceptual field?

An Algorithmic Bubble Is Also a Temporal Bubble

The platform does not select only what appears.

It also selects:

when,
how many times,
for how long,
and in which sequence.

This brings us back to 5D Consciousness.

In the BrainLatam hypothesis, lived time emerges from the dynamics among material representations activated or pre-activated within the 3D space of the Body-Territory.

Contemporary science does not demonstrate this mechanism.

But we do know that temporal experience depends on context.

Brazilian researcher André Cravo, from UFABC, followed 3,855 Brazilians during social isolation and showed that subjective experience of the passage of time was strongly related to factors such as loneliness, stress, and positive emotions.

In 2024, Fernanda Bueno, Anna Nobre, and André Cravo showed with EEG that the same physical interval recruits both shared temporal processes and task-dependent processes.

The clock may repeat the same second.

The Body-Territory does not need to live the same second in the same way.

Politics and Religion Already Know the Power of Repeated Events

Long before social networks, societies organized belonging through repeated events.

Calendars.

Festivals.

Rituals.

Prayers.

Bells.

Harvests.

Civic dates.

Elections.

Salaries.

Taxes.

A repeated event does not organize only a schedule.

It can help a group recognize:

“this happens to us.”

Religions understood the power of recurring ritual thousands of years ago.

States built civic calendars.

Markets structured months through salaries, interest, and payment deadlines.

Digital platforms now organize part of everyday life through:

notifications,

feeds,

trends,

streaks,

rewards.

All of them produce temporalities.

But who should have the right to organize common time?

Daily Citizen Drex: Money or a Signal of Belonging?

Here we enter explicitly into a BrainLatam proposal, not an existing policy of the Central Bank of Brazil.

Currently, Drex is a Brazilian infrastructure under development for digital-asset operations, programmability, and smart contracts.

The Drex Pilot used simulated clients and assets, and privacy, security, and data protection remain central challenges.

The Daily Citizen Drex proposed here does not currently exist as an official Drex function.

It is another idea.

Imagine that every citizen receives a small universal public transfer every day.

Not because:

they are poor.

Not because:

they are unemployed.

Not because:

they belong to the politically correct group.

But because:

they are a citizen.

The information would be economic.

But also institutional:

“you participate in this political community.”

The Same Event Crosses Every Body-Territory

At midnight, or at another publicly and democratically defined moment, the event happens.

One Citizen Drex arrives.

For the worker.

For the student.

For the business owner.

For the unemployed person.

For the Indigenous citizen.

For the farmer.

For the person who voted for the government.

For the person who voted against it.

We are not claiming that a financial transfer will automatically produce belonging.

The literature on cash transfers shows precisely that collective effects depend heavily on design.

Programs can strengthen certain forms of social capital, but targeting perceived as unfair can also create division.

A 2024 systematic review emphasizes exactly this ambivalence.

In Latin America, the Inter-American Development Bank also shows the enormous presence and importance of income-transfer systems, but their effects depend on coverage, design, and institutional capacity.

This is why our hypothesis emphasizes:

universality.

Everyone receives because everyone belongs.

A Daily Pulse; a Monthly Interval

But there is a second layer.

We do not want only the event.

We want its repetition.

day 1
day 2
day 3
...
day 30.

The individual amount could be small.

The conceptually important aspect would be:

recurrence.

At the end of a month, we would not have only one monthly transfer.

We would have:

thirty recognizable events.

In the 5D Consciousness hypothesis, repeated events could provide landmarks for the dynamics of activated and pre-activated 3D spaces involved in temporal experience.

This has not been demonstrated by neuroscience.

It is a testable BrainLatam hypothesis.

We could ask:

does a daily, predictable, universal public event change the way citizens represent the month, anticipate the future, and perceive belonging to the State?

The State Could Produce a Different Kind of Bubble

The word “bubble” needs care here.

We do not want a state bubble controlling what people are allowed to think.

That would simply reproduce the platform problem at another scale.

The bubble we propose would not be:

everyone receiving the same opinion.

It would be:

everyone participating in the same public event.

This distinction is fundamental.

Algorithmic Bubble

Selects what you are likely to see.

May be opaque.

May maximize engagement.

May amplify some voices and reduce others.

We do not know how many organisms exist within it.

BrainLatam Civic Bubble

Does not define what you should believe.

Produces a universal and auditable event.

Recognizes every citizen as a participant.

Preserves privacy.

Does not condition money on opinion or political behavior.

Does not need to prevent disagreement.

On the contrary:

the same event can pass through people who remain profoundly different.

Perhaps that is democratic belonging.

And What About the Biome?

For BrainLatam, the citizen does not end at the state registry.

The citizen exists as Body-Territory.

Breathes air.

Drinks water.

Eats what a territory produces.

Depends on energy.

Climate.

Forests.

Rivers.

Other organisms.

Therefore, a future Biome Income could add another layer:

I do not belong only to an abstraction called the State.
I also belong to the material relationships that make my Body-Territory possible.

State, citizen, and biome could then share a recurring event without needing to share an ideology.

Belonging would stop being only a word.

It would pass through a material event.

When a Digital Society Begins to Look Alive

Return to the Internet.

Millions of entities exchange information.

Some human.

Some automated.

Some hybrid.

Patterns appear.

Ideas grow.

Others disappear.

Groups reach thresholds.

Signals are amplified.

Coordinated behaviors emerge.

This may resemble:

quorum sensing,

differentiation,

self-organization,

society.

But we need to resist the local optimum.

Looking alive does not mean being alive.

Looking like a society does not tell us how many Beings exist within it.

Producing information does not demonstrate consciousness.

That is why we call these structures:

DNA-Free Bubbles.

They may possess emergence.

Computational memory.

Recurrence.

Identities.

Bots.

Agents.

Avatars.

Algorithms.

But the question remains:

where are the Body-Territories?

Perhaps the digital politics of the future will depend on recovering this distinction.

Not governing:

accounts.

But recognizing:

Beings.

Not merely counting:

IPs, profiles, followers, and views.

But asking:

how many real organisms are here, which territories make their existence possible, and who is deciding what they will have the opportunity to perceive?

Perhaps a democratic society needs precisely this.

A digital infrastructure capable of connecting millions of people without transforming millions of digital representations into substitutes for the Beings they represent.

Because we can create as many avatars as we want.

But for BrainLatam:

the State exists for Body-Territories.

Not for DNA-Free Bubbles.

Main References

DANESHPOUR, H.; VAN DEN BERSSELAAR, P.; CHAO, C.-H.; FAZZIO, T. G.; YOUK, H. (2023). Macroscopic quorum sensing sustains differentiating embryonic stem cells. Nature Chemical Biology, 19, 596–606. DOI: 10.1038/s41589-022-01225-x.
Experimentally demonstrates that differentiating embryonic stem cells can use long-range chemical communication and population-density thresholds in a mechanism described as macroscopic quorum sensing.

ALASAADI, D. N.; MAYOR, R. (2024). Mechanically guided cell fate determination in early development. Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences, 81, 242.
With Chilean researcher Roberto Mayor, shows that cell differentiation also depends on mechanical forces, density, pressure, and environmental properties, preventing differentiation from being reduced to quorum sensing.

NAOUN, A. A.; RAPHAEL, I.; FORSTHUBER, T. G. (2022). Immunoregulation via Cell Density and Quorum Sensing-like Mechanisms. Cells, 11, 2442.
Reviews evidence of quorum-sensing-like mechanisms in the mammalian immune system, showing that population-dependent coordination is not exclusive to bacteria.

GRASSO-CLADERA, A. et al. (2025). Embodied hyperscanning for studying social interaction: A scoping review of simultaneous brain and body measurements. Social Neuroscience, 20(3), 163–179.
With strong participation from researchers linked to Chilean institutions, argues for integrating simultaneous brain, body, and environmental measurements in the study of social interaction.

LEIVA-CISTERNA, I.; BARRAZA, P.; RODRÍGUEZ, E.; DUMAS, G. (2025). Sensory multi-brain stimulation enhances dyadic cooperative behavior. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 20(1), nsaf104.
Chilean research provides experimental evidence that coordinated sensory stimulation across two people can modify cooperative behavior without turning neural synchrony into a synonym for belonging.

NG, L. H. X.; CARLEY, K. M. (2025). A global comparison of social media bot and human characteristics. Scientific Reports, 15, 10973.
Analyzes around 200 million users across seven events and shows that digital populations include substantial numbers of automated accounts with interaction and identity patterns distinct from humans, making it inappropriate to equate accounts with organisms.

LETOURNEAU, A. M. (2025). Instrumental Bot Identities and the Politics of Online Discourse. Social Media + Society.
Develops the concept of instrumental bot identities, showing how automated agents can present themselves as members of human groups and exploit social-identity dynamics.

PARISI, L. (2022). Recursive Philosophy and Negative Machines. Critical Inquiry, 48(2), 313–333. DOI: 10.1086/717323.
Discusses how automation, algorithmic inference, and probabilistic systems transform knowledge and decision-making, providing a basis for thinking about emergence and power in DNA-Free Bubbles.

PARISI, L. (2022 edition). Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, and Space. MIT Press.
Proposes thinking of algorithms as participants in the construction of digital spatialities and temporalities, important for understanding that platforms do not merely transport information but organize the spaces where information can emerge. The work was originally published before 2021; the 2022 edition is used here as a continuation of the concept.

ARUGUETE, N.; CALVO, E.; VENTURA, T. (2023). Network Activated Frames: Content Sharing and Perceived Polarization in Social Media. Journal of Communication, 73, 14–24.
Using experiments in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, shows how differences in content amplification can produce perceived bubbles and polarization even in initially diverse networks.

ARUGUETE, N.; CALVO, E. (2024). Sharing fact checking corrections in polarized political environments. Revista Internacional de Sociología, 82(4), e264.
Shows in the Argentine context how polarization and social context interfere with the circulation of information and corrections, reinforcing that what reaches perception depends on the social architecture of circulation.

VALENZUELA, S. (2024). Cuando los algoritmos son editores: Cómo las redes sociales, la IA y la desinformación alteran el consumo de noticias. Comunicación y Medios, 33(49).
The Chilean researcher discusses how algorithms increasingly exercise editorial functions and how their power of selection shapes the information available to society.

BECERRA, M.; WAISBORD, S. (2024). Soberanía y nacionalismo en entornos digitales: la llamativa ausencia de América Latina en el debate mundial. Signo y Pensamiento, 43.
Analyzes the concentration of platform power and Latin America’s limited digital sovereignty in matters of data, moderation, infrastructure, and content circulation.

CAVALINI, A.; MALINI, F.; GOUVEIA, F.; COMARELA, G. (2023). Politics and disinformation: Analyzing the use of Telegram's information disorder network in Brazil for political mobilization. First Monday, 28(5).
Brazilian research shows how digital information-circulation networks can structure communities and political mobilization.

CRAVO, A. M. et al. (2022). Time experience during social distancing: A longitudinal study during the first months of COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil. Science Advances, 8, eabj7205.
Following 3,855 Brazilians over several weeks, shows that the experience of time is strongly related to affective states and lived conditions.

BUENO, F. D.; NOBRE, A. C.; CRAVO, A. M. (2024). Time for What? Dissociating Explicit Timing Tasks through Electrophysiological Signatures. eNeuro, 11(2).
Demonstrates with EEG that identical physical intervals can involve both shared timing mechanisms and task-dependent processes, supporting a distinction between physical time and temporal experience without proving the 5D mechanism proposed by BrainLatam.

GRISOLIA, F.; DEWACHTER, S.; HOLVOET, N. (2024). Shifting the focus? From individual to collective-level effects of cash transfers: A systematic review of the impacts on social capital. Journal of International Development.
Shows that cash transfers can affect participation and social capital but may also generate exclusion or tension depending on program design, supporting the need to empirically test any economic-belonging proposal.

STAMPINI, M.; MEDELLÍN, N.; IBARRARÁN, P. (2023). Cash Transfers, Poverty, and Inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean. Inter-American Development Bank.
Analyzes income-transfer systems across 17 Latin American countries and provides regional context for discussing coverage, universality, and policy design.

CENTRAL BANK OF BRAZIL (2025–2026). Drex Pilot / Drex.
Documents that the current Drex is an infrastructure under development for digital assets, programmability, and smart contracts, with simulated end users in the pilot; the Daily Citizen Drex described here is a BrainLatam proposal, not an official Central Bank policy.

BrainLatam (2026). Daily Citizen Drex.
Proposes experimentally a universal recurring public transfer not as a poverty marker, but as a material event of citizenship through which relationships among universality, belonging, and shared temporality could be investigated.

BrainLatam (2026). 5D Consciousness / Body-Territory.
Defines Body-Territory as the unit of Being and proposes, as a testable hypothesis, that temporal experience emerges from the dynamics among material movements and representations activated or pre-activated within the real 3D space of the situated organism.

BrainLatam (2026). DNA-Free Bubbles.
A conceptual metaphor for informational populations composed of accounts, IPs, avatars, bots, AI agents, and human representations that may display emergent patterns without allowing us to directly infer how many living organisms exist within the digital structure.