1-2: intro continued
However, while celebrations of the decentered subjectivity afforded by networks have by now become a truism, this decentering has its limits and, thus, its ideology. For while the concept of the swarm in more utopian strands of digital network discourse has continually been touted as an organizational diagram beyond centralized control,[5] at the same time, popular representations of swarms in a number of other networked contexts just as often represent an anxiety about the loss of that agential center - for instance, in the face of swarm events like mobs, emerging infectious diseases, and computer virus propagation, popular media often collapse and disavow the aggregate multiplicity of the swarm by imagining it as the intentional action of a single human subject. On the other side of the spectrum, but in an entirely related function, swarms are often celebrated as beyond not just centralized control, but control in general. And yet, while the dynamic, distributed, and self-organizing nature of networked swarms certainly do represent a diagrammatic asymmetry to the power structures of modernity, to conflate this asymmetry with democracy or to posit it as wholly oppositional would be a mistake: swarms, incorporating the participation of both human and non-human agents, are continually instrumentalized and captured in the everyday operations of capitalist network protocol.
Thus, by mediating between the uncritical celebration of decentered liberal subjectivity afforded by the swarm and the constant urge to paper over this difference through attribution to an individual human subject, the schizophrenic discourse of the swarm appears as a structuring contradiction for many popular discussions of the relationship between viruses and virus writers, human beings and networked machines. Appearing as what Jacques Derrida (following Plato) has called a pharmakon[6] - that which is both cure and disease - the swarm underlines a key contradiction of network culture between the potential liberation of a decentered and dynamic, ecological organization and the urge to disavow this multiplicity or instrumentalize it for the old purposes of hegemony.
![[5]](media/swarm-footnote-5.jpg){kind=link}
Thus, by mediating between the uncritical celebration of decentered liberal subjectivity afforded by the swarm and the constant urge to paper over this difference through attribution to an individual human subject, the schizophrenic discourse of the swarm appears as a structuring contradiction for many popular discussions of the relationship between viruses and virus writers, human beings and networked machines. Appearing as what Jacques Derrida (following Plato) has called a pharmakon[6] - that which is both cure and disease - the swarm underlines a key contradiction of network culture between the potential liberation of a decentered and dynamic, ecological organization and the urge to disavow this multiplicity or instrumentalize it for the old purposes of hegemony.
![[6]](media/swarm-footnote-6.jpg){kind=link}
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