ABSTRACT
The self-organization of swarms – their opaque and nonlinear global effects, which are created by the local interactions of numerous agents – has both zoopolitical and zootechnological implications. Would it not be nice if human social processes and political decisions could take place as simply and quickly as the decisions of swarming collectives to change direction? And what would be more appealing than no longer having to rely on old analogies with colonies of ants and hives of bees as positive or negative examples of collective organization, but instead being able to describe the dynamics of ‘human swarms’ with reference to technical interfaces for communicating and making connections? Since the 1990s, swarms have been reformed into technologized, rationally implementable, and effectively visualizable zootechnologies, and thus it is easy to see why they have been applied as a powerful metaphor to describe various processes of “social swarming.” 1 The condition of possibility for such metaphorical transferences, which differ from previous zoopolitical or anthropomorphic comparisons, was the reevaluation of swarms as figures of knowledge. Reference is no longer made to the biological ‘life form’ of various swarms but rather to their media-technological control logic and their available technical applications.
