1-1: the subject and the swarm - on complexity and control in digital networks
"For the first time in the history of technology, mankind has created an artificial device that is capable or reproducing itself, and, without further human intervention, pursue a course of action that can cause harm, even if the original programmer had no such intention."
- John McAfee and Colin Haynes[1]
"With viruses, you could get your name around the world."
- Hellraiser[2]
At least since the rise of the World Wide Web in the late 1980s, but arguably since the end of World War II, there has been both consistent excitement and anxiety around the possibility to generate swarm formations from the connective affordances of fiber optic networks. On one level, the first phenomena is more familiar to us: with all the hype surrounding "user-generated content" in Web 2.0 discourse, not to mention Howard Rheingold's concept of "smart mobs" and Pierre Levy's "collective intelligence," the utopian idea of "spontaneous majorities of citizens who co-ordinate through media in real time" has permeated the public's perception of swarms, by now reaching the status of marketing ploy.[3] In perhaps the most well-known example, John Perry Barlow's "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" argues that swarm formations afforded by distributed networks decenter the sovereignty of both powerful individual subjects and hierarchically organized institutions, thereby reinvigorating a sense of collective, public participation through the aggregate agencies of an ad hoc, direct democracy.[4] In other words, with modes of organization that are horizontal and peer-to-peer, self-organizing and tactical, dynamic and contingent, the swarms of digital networks are often said to display a kind of ecological and emergent relation between equally endowed agents, and therefore, bear an oppositional relationship to the power structures of Foucault's modern, disciplinary society.
- John McAfee and Colin Haynes[1]
![[1]](media/swarm-footnote-1.jpg){kind=link}
"With viruses, you could get your name around the world."
- Hellraiser[2]
![[2]](media/swarm-footnote-2.jpg){kind=link}
At least since the rise of the World Wide Web in the late 1980s, but arguably since the end of World War II, there has been both consistent excitement and anxiety around the possibility to generate swarm formations from the connective affordances of fiber optic networks. On one level, the first phenomena is more familiar to us: with all the hype surrounding "user-generated content" in Web 2.0 discourse, not to mention Howard Rheingold's concept of "smart mobs" and Pierre Levy's "collective intelligence," the utopian idea of "spontaneous majorities of citizens who co-ordinate through media in real time" has permeated the public's perception of swarms, by now reaching the status of marketing ploy.[3] In perhaps the most well-known example, John Perry Barlow's "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" argues that swarm formations afforded by distributed networks decenter the sovereignty of both powerful individual subjects and hierarchically organized institutions, thereby reinvigorating a sense of collective, public participation through the aggregate agencies of an ad hoc, direct democracy.[4] In other words, with modes of organization that are horizontal and peer-to-peer, self-organizing and tactical, dynamic and contingent, the swarms of digital networks are often said to display a kind of ecological and emergent relation between equally endowed agents, and therefore, bear an oppositional relationship to the power structures of Foucault's modern, disciplinary society.
![[3]](media/swarm-footnote-3.jpg){kind=link}
![[4]](media/swarm-footnote-4.jpg){kind=link}
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