1-7: swarm ontology, continued
But even if the swarm inhabits a hybrid, third space that continually modulates between the one and the many, the global and the local, how is it that the swarm still appears as "controlled, but without a controller";[19] a unified body, if only a tenuous and contingent one? The answer lies in the imminent relations of control that Alexander Galloway has called protocol. For, much like John von Neumann's famous post-war experiments in simulating cellular automata, it is precisely by situating the rules of control in the local interactions of immediate neighbors instead of in the centralized hubs of power more common to human forms of organization in modernity that there emerges in the swarm a more intelligent and adaptable form of organization. There may be no single deity, author, or sovereign controlling the swarm from the outside (although, as Brandstetter notes, a swarm can only be named a swarm when seen from an outsider or God's eye point-of-view),[20] but it is through these basic rules for communication between local, semi-autonomous agents that organization can be dynamic, distributed, and flexible while still maintaining at least some sense of imminent control. However, it bears mentioning again that while these original protocols can be written at least in the case of programmed software agents, it remains nearly impossible to control them totally after they have been released into "the wild": for a viral swarm is not merely a weapon that can be used instrumentally, but an assemblage of self-mutating entities in a network, and it is "as networks that they function and as networks that they are controlled."[21]
![[19]](media/swarm-footnote-19.jpg){kind=link}
![[20]](media/swarm-footnote-20.jpg){kind=link}
![[21]](media/swarm-footnote-21.jpg){kind=link}
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