In the Swarm
"Digital communication and social media have taken over our lives. In this contrarian reflection on digitized life, Byung-Chul Han counters the cheerleaders for Twitter revolutions and Facebook activism by arguing that digital communication is in fact responsible for the disintegration of community and public space and is slowly eroding any possibility for real political action and meaningful political discourse. In the predigital, analog era, by the time an angry letter to the editor had been composed, mailed, and received, the immediate agitation had passed. Today, digital communication enables instantaneous, impulsive reaction, meant to express and stir up outrage on the spot. Meanwhile, the public, the senders and receivers of these communications have become a digital swarm -- not a mass, or a crowd, or Negri and Hardt's antiquated notion of a "multitude," but a set of isolated individuals incapable of forming a "we," incapable of calling dominant power relations into question, incapable of formulating a future because of an obsession with the present. The digital swarm is a fragmented entity that can focus on individual persons only in order to make them an object of scandal. Han, one of the most widely read philosophers in Europe today, describes a society in which information has overrun thought, in which the same algorithms are employed by Facebook, the stock market, and the intelligence services.
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- I disagree completely. I recommend you to read "In the Swarm" by Byung-Chul Han as a primer.
People on the internet are tiring because how they interact is shaped to turn everything into a binary, the platforms where people spout their opinions don't foster any kind of actual human communication, it's just a farce of it with a never-ending shit-flinging-fest. If that's what you incentivise for you will only get the worst of people's outbursts.
If your brain hasn't been completely rotted by internet discourse then you will find that having hard conversations in the real world is still possible, that disagreeing while being curious and courteous about someone else's worldview is possible. It doesn't happen when people are so far down the internet rabbit hole that their real life persona is just a shadow of what their internet persona is, otherwise you will find that people offline can be much more reasonable, that you can have a discussion without resorting to shit-flinging from the binary "you are transgressive vs we are in-agreement".
You should try, it's very refreshing to realise that the real world is still not the internet, as much as social media companies are trying to make it.
- I recommend reading "In the Swarm" by Byung-Chul Han, and also his "The Crisis of Narration"; in those he tries to tackle exactly these issues in contemporary society.
His "Psychopolitics" talks about the manipulation of masses for political purposes using the digital environment, when written the LLM hype wasn't ongoing yet but it can definitely apply to this technology as well.
- Off-topic: have you enjoyed "The Disappearance of Rituals"?
I went on a binge of Byung-Chul Han last year, reading "The Crisis of Narration", "In The Swarm", "Psychopolitics", and "The Burnout Society". Really enjoyed all of them, and given how dense it can be I set myself to read them at least twice which I'm just finishing, was on the lookout for what else to read from him and was thinking about "The Disappearance of Rituals" as the next one.
- I share your view, it's a discussion I commonly have with friends who are too blinded by individuals' actions instead of the systems that these individuals are part of, and from which those actions come from a series of rational but misplaced intermediary steps.
No single individual is controlling what their peer group does but by being a part of it those actions compound. Like you said, not even the most brutal dictatorships take actions single-handedly decided by someone, it's all part and parcel of the system they decided to (or ended up at) participate.
I think Byung-Chul Han hit the right spot when talking about "shitstorms" on "In The Swarm". Societies after the digital age got too narrowly focused on explosive bursts of outrage against individuals, instead of discussing more in-depth the issues that create systems these individuals live and navigate, and eventually take actions that are immoral, unjust, evil, etc. from the incentives of their environment, we only discuss things in binary terms (acceptable/transgressive), focused on the performative act of a monologue of outrage, without solidarity but with solitude, in our screens.
I've had this feeling for more than a decade, reading Byung-Chul Han so eloquently describe many observations and feelings I've had was refreshing for my own psyche. It's just extremely hard to try to instill some of these concepts unto others...
- Let's create creatures more complicated than ourselves and then give them domain over us. What could possibly go wrong?
The AI crisis is here, and it arrived when computation was added to our market system.
I think the solution is lots of smaller AIs -- distributed social media and financial services that will prevent the big shocks these black boxes of computation seem to generate. We already have the technology -- TensorFlow is open source, the chips are available. We just have to use them in a way that expands human freedom.
Is anyone writing about the political economy of AI? I can think of Byung-Chul Han's In the Swarm, but that's more about social media sans algorithmic moderation.
