First, let's consider what the symbol itself can represent. As of right now, there are only two things that we know of that can be associated with a honeycomb symbol - hive mind and ascention perks.
If you don't see how "hive"mind should use a honeycomb symbol, then apparently you come from a society that lives in a part of the world mostly or completely devoid of bees and therefore don't know what the most common symbol for a hive is - I suspect one of the Arctic Circles, so hello the first Eskimo I met.
As for ascention perks - we need to ask ourselves: what would be the purpose of an ascention faction. What could they want from you that could make them provide influenc. Nothing. You see, choosing an ascention perk is an act, while every one of the things that factions want are stuff that needs to be maintained. They don't want you to build defensive structures, they want you to have defensive structures. As a result ascention faction could not reasonably want anything that you could maintain (as ascention perks are not something that needs to be maintained - pick one and it stays).
So, we have removed the impossible and what remains must be true, but let's go further.
It has been said that Hivemind will let you eschew political strife. Political strife in game represents factions that can be unhappy. Simply giving all hivemind pops attraction towards your ethos is not enough, as having pops in faction that fits your ethos is not a guarantee of them not causing problems. If you are pacifist, but keep waging wars, your pacifist pops will be unhappy and cause political strife even if you are nominally fanatical pacifist. So a hivemind needs a way to avoid having factions that could disagree with what you do regardless of what it is you do.
Ok, so maybe no factions for hiveminds. Then we run into the influence problem. You see, in Banks a major source of your influence is going to be factions. Sure, this could be circumvented by giving the hivemind government a flat influence bonus, but that wouls incentivize the players to actually keep factions going as a hivemind in order to get influence from both the government and the factions. Solution - one big happy hivemind faction.
Finally, on te topic of "authorities". As we know nothing about any such thing it may very well not even be a separate mechanics but a variation on existing ones (e.g. special type of politics) or maybe even nothing at all but a buzzwords for all special mechanics that governments can have. And on that subject, even if it is a new mechanics for advanced governments, it would make no sense for it to be the only unique mechanics those governments have. They want more distinct governments, which means ussing different mechanics for different ones, not a single mechanics with different effects for each, so whatever authorities are they are almost certainly just one piece of a puzzle, not all of it.
And finally, the fact that Wiz said that the Hivemind would not fit into the current ethos system - the simple solution - give it a separate ethos with its own effects or give it no ethos whatsoever. The second would mean less gameplay for hiveminds and who would want to play them then. Once again we remove the impossible to arrive at our destination - the certain.
Um, slaves have that mechanic currently and don't require anything special for ethos. And again, you have to consider how that would work with ethics flow and the fact that your pops can only have one ethic at a time.
And your argument is? Once you become hivemind the pops lose other ethoses. They don't need them anymore, as ethoses no longer give bonuses to pops themselves - all they do is affect their happines via factions and that they will get from the hivemind faction.
