I think 'good' here is tricky and easily biased by our perspective. Being subsumed by the collective is a common dystopian trope, but imagine the analogy of your human body vs the cells making it up. The cells are expected to work for the good of the overall body (from an evolutionary sense, to help it reproduce successfully.) Individual cells are even expected to promptly commit suicide if asked to do so by the body's chemical signals. The word we use for cells that rebel and refuse the order to die is cancer.

I strongly suspect that formal rules will eventually arise once the current generation having grown up immersed in emoji is elderly, which their kids will think quaint as they communicate using newfangled dynamic hypermemes that the older generations just don't understand at all.

@hszmv, I think this depends a lot on setting; in most parts of the Western world at least, it's generally no longer socially acceptable to be openly homophobic and the general progression is one of acceptance. Transphobia is a bit more in vogue still amongst the population that was previously overtly homophobic, but that's also improving slowly. So, in a modern Western setting not set in a particularly toxic area, you're right, being overtly shunned is much less likely. What you might see, especially if the characters are a bit older, are the scars of past experience with it.

Especially given that it's the OP's friends who have proposed this challenge, I think it's quite likely they're even expecting some biases to come out in the story and are looking to engage with the OP through the process or at least offer some insight in a retrospective after it's complete. Everybody has biases (it's an inevitable consequence of our minds cooking in our own individual subcultural soups) and while it can be embarrassing to have them highlighted, there's a lot of value in understanding our own blind spots.

While I agree that the fundamental relationship dynamics aren't all that different, there are both subcultural and contextual differences that definitely shape how these relationships play out. It's difficult to write for the nuances of a particular subculture if you're not deeply familiar with it. I also think treating same-sex relationships as exactly equivalent to opposite-sex relationships, while laudable, may feel somewhat shallow if the world of the story has any homophobia, even if it's just in the background and not directly seen.

@DPT, Worth noting that, in a case like "stormtroopers", the de-personalization is quite deliberate, since gunning down anonymous bad guys can read as heroic, in the right context, whereas killing a particular human being, especially one known by the pov character, evokes very different feelings. This particular use of beings as props is ubiquitous in heroic action narratives, as the nameless (and often faceless) bad guys are just a generic 'danger' foil for use in demonstrating feats of badassery. Giving these prop characters names would be counterproductive in that genre.

That personalization possibly tells me something about the character perspective, too. In the context of first person or third person limited (so tied pretty closely to the 'active' character), it suggests that the character is socially perceptive. Though, perhaps this is a reasonable assumed baseilne for most people, at least at a subliminal level. More telling might be its absence, like if a character is a touch autistic and perceives the unique geometry of the shadow cast by a person, but fails to notice that the waitress is flirting with another customer.

This touches on a key point, imo: whether you name the character or not tells you something about the perspective of the major character who's currently in focus. I'd venture to guess that, outside very small town settings, we don't know the names of the vast majority of the people we briefly interact with on any given day. To the extent that they enter our awareness at all, it's in the context of our interactions, whether that be a body we're walking past on the sidewalk, an unknown cashier ringing up our order or somebody talking to himself on the subway that we briefly label 'crazy guy'.

As social animals, human beings already take part in larger organizing structures, such as communities, corporations and governments, which shape and direct their motivations toward goals not wholly individual in scope. If consciousness arises by virtue of structured perception/behavior, perhaps there are already hive mind entities which we are simply in the wrong scope to directly perceive. Hi Google.

Not sure if it sounds the same way in French, but in English, using "we" in the context of a singular entity can come across as the old-school Royal We, which does have a somewhat obnoxious tone to it. I suspect that a hive mind with a sense of self-identity would refer to itself as 'I', since it believes itself to be a singular entity. After all, I don't go around saying "we are here writing a response" on behalf of the many individual cells and symbiotic microorganisms making up my body.