What Vinge is talking about is way closer to the weirdness of AI than the mundaneness of e.g. a societal grouping of ordinary humans.

Even for that option, Vinge's comments in the conclusion of the article make it clear he's thinking primarily of very weird superintelligence and the group intellect is some sort of physical mind meld/hivemind that essentially just is a biological substrate for AI.

> The post-Singularity world will involve extremely high-bandwidth networking. A central feature of strongly superhuman entities will likely be their ability to communicate at variable bandwidths, including ones far higher than speech or written messages. What happens when pieces of ego can be copied and merged, when self-awareness can grow or shrink to fit the nature of the problems under consideration? These are essential features of strong superhumanity and the Singularity. Thinking about them, one begins to feel how essentially strange and different the Posthuman era will be -- no matter how cleverly and benignly it is brought to be.

From the very beginning with Vinge, the Singularity has been primarily about the craziness of super intelligence rather than a more mundane technological explosion.