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Communicable Disease: Towards a Political Ontology of the Computer Virus

Jason Lipshin, Author
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1-6: swarm ontology, continued

And yet, although the swarm has historically been imagined as a sublime, chaotic, or radical threat to both the centralized agency of the individual body and more hierarchical formations of the body politic, as a diagrammatic mode of organization, it is by no means simply "out of control" as Kevin Kelly might suggest.[15] While the dynamic, "leaderless" quality of the swarm seems to resist both synchronic reification and any form of centralized or heirarchical power, it also still somehow appears as a coherent body, complete with directionalities of force and a sense of distributed control. This can be seen quite clearly in Craig Reynolds' infamous 1986 "Boids" algorithm for simulating the flocking behavior of birds, written here in the natural language, English,[16] but also implemented as a simulation in the programming language, Processing[17]:

 


  • Separation - avoid crowding neighbors (short range repulsion)
  • Alignment - steer towards average heading of neighbors.
  • Cohesion - steer towards average position of neighbors (long range attraction)
By assigning these three simple rules as methods for each individual bird object, the Boids algorithm is able to generate the global complexity of the swarm over time from the multiple, simultaneous interactions between local agents. Drawing on principles of recursive emergence, the algorithm simulates the complex, unpredictable, yet still controlled behavior of natural phenomena by positing each individual agent as "dumb" on its own, but "intelligent" on the more holistic level of the entire swarm.[18] Gesturing towards a conception of the "body" that is totally anathema to modern Western ideals of both the homogenous body of the liberal subject and the hierarchical body politic, the swarm instead mediates between the unique dynamics, rhythmics, and directionalities of its individual agents and the dynamic unity of the whole without effacing any of its internal difference. By instead aggregating and incorporating these differences, the swarm becomes more flexible and robust, becoming a body that is not just a reified thing, but an assemblage or event, always in a state of perpetual shifting relations and individuation internal to itself.
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Swarm    Kevin Kelly    Boids Algorithm    Body    Flexibility/Robustness    Jussi Parikka

Related:  1-7: swarm ontology, continued,  1-9: automata and labor, continued,  1-5: swarm ontology,  2-5: [CTRL] + C,  1-3: authors and scapegoats,  1-1: the subject and the swarm - on complexity and control in digital networks,  Introduction - Part 1,  1-4: authors and scapegoats, continued,  1-2: intro continued,  2-6: [CTRL] + C, continued,  1-8: automata and labor,  2-7: breakdown, exposure, (sk)interface