Collective Stupidity
Published: June 1, 2026
Description
It is a book about what happens when you put perfectly reasonable people in the same place at the same
time.
One person on a freeway: freedom. Twenty-five thousand people on a freeway at 5pm Friday: a rolling
detention facility. One Einstein in a room: transformative. Ten Einsteins in a room: three arguments
about quantum mechanics, one argument about lunch.
The difference is never the quality of the individuals. It is always the quantity.
In Collective Stupidity, Mike Gambell presents a systems analysis of modern life — the freeway, the
checkout line, the open-plan office, the airport, the HOA, the family gathering, the healthcare waiting
room, the internet — and arrives at a single, unified conclusion: the problem is never the person. The
problem is the configuration of people.
Part personal memoir, part social science, part extended act of dignified fury, Collective Stupidity is
for anyone who has ever stood in a queue, sat in traffic, or attended a meeting that could have been
an email and thought: it doesn't have to be this way.
It doesn't.
But it is.
And this book explains exactly why.
time.
One person on a freeway: freedom. Twenty-five thousand people on a freeway at 5pm Friday: a rolling
detention facility. One Einstein in a room: transformative. Ten Einsteins in a room: three arguments
about quantum mechanics, one argument about lunch.
The difference is never the quality of the individuals. It is always the quantity.
In Collective Stupidity, Mike Gambell presents a systems analysis of modern life — the freeway, the
checkout line, the open-plan office, the airport, the HOA, the family gathering, the healthcare waiting
room, the internet — and arrives at a single, unified conclusion: the problem is never the person. The
problem is the configuration of people.
Part personal memoir, part social science, part extended act of dignified fury, Collective Stupidity is
for anyone who has ever stood in a queue, sat in traffic, or attended a meeting that could have been
an email and thought: it doesn't have to be this way.
It doesn't.
But it is.
And this book explains exactly why.
Back Cover
Why does one person make sense, but a crowd makes you want to move to a cabin?
It's not them. It's all of them.
Collective Stupidity is the systems analysis of everyday misery — a rigorous, funny, and occasionally
furious examination of what happens when individually reasonable human beings are placed in proximity
to other individually reasonable human beings, and everything quietly falls apart.
Mike Gambell covers the freeway at 5pm, the checkout line with sixteen items, the open-plan office, the
HOA meeting, the airport boarding process, the family gathering on day three, and the internet in full
mob formation. He traces the problem to its root cause (someone's parents had sex at an inconvenient
time, approximately seventy million years ago) and proposes solutions — real ones, involving timing,
distribution, and the radical act of going to the grocery store at 6am.
There is also a final solution. It is clearly labeled satire.
"The difference is never the quality of the individuals. It is always the quantity."
The queue is not going anywhere. Neither are you. This book will help.
---"Humans. Can't live with 'em." — Mike Gambell
It's not them. It's all of them.
Collective Stupidity is the systems analysis of everyday misery — a rigorous, funny, and occasionally
furious examination of what happens when individually reasonable human beings are placed in proximity
to other individually reasonable human beings, and everything quietly falls apart.
Mike Gambell covers the freeway at 5pm, the checkout line with sixteen items, the open-plan office, the
HOA meeting, the airport boarding process, the family gathering on day three, and the internet in full
mob formation. He traces the problem to its root cause (someone's parents had sex at an inconvenient
time, approximately seventy million years ago) and proposes solutions — real ones, involving timing,
distribution, and the radical act of going to the grocery store at 6am.
There is also a final solution. It is clearly labeled satire.
"The difference is never the quality of the individuals. It is always the quantity."
The queue is not going anywhere. Neither are you. This book will help.
---"Humans. Can't live with 'em." — Mike Gambell