Supposing you've got a bird table in your garden and you put out some crumbs for the local robins, you might get a flock of starlings decending on you and scoffing the lot in a few minutes. But supposing every flock of starlings in a ten mile radius knows about it, it'd be like The Birds.
What I like about this comparison (from Gilbert) is that it shows that there isn't any sense of intention in the potential effects of us all being locationally-aware-connected - each individual starling is just doing what starlings do - and it's not necessarily a good thing.
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