The Swarm and the Sword

The pace is accelerating. The last 24th of February I witnessed the 4th global change that happened during my lifetime. After 1989 and the fall of european communism, 2001 and the 9/11 attacks, 2020-2022 and the perma-COVID-crisis, and finally the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. Those major milestones are maybe going to be glued into a single larger point by future historians. Just like WWI and WWII can be seen as two acts of the same play, the Versailles Treaty almost mechanically bringing the second world war from the first one. There are tons of commentaries about why the russian invasion finally happened (hardly a surprise though), how it would have, or would have not, been possible to avoid etc. There are many scales to consider, and many angles about this war: historical, geographical and even cultural points have to be considered in order to have meaningful conversations. My angle here is to focus on how this war unravels. And why it can be seen as being at the forefront of a revolution in terms of geostrategical dynamics in a digital culture.

The Swarm

The way the world has reacted to the invasion of Ukraine is not without reminding the way the world reacted to the COVID-19 epidemic. It was something remarkably uniform but also distributed. Somehow it is an incarnation of what I had thought theoretically about a digital culture. There is a strange homogenenity in a swarm that flows from the fact that every entity of the swarm sees what it is done by every other entity in real time, and on a world scale. In a way very similar to the fact that the same mandates were adopted almost by every country, with relation to the COVID crisis. It is reflected in the fact that, short of a list of countries that speaks for itself (Syria, Venezuela etc.), the whole international community reacted in an uniform way (maybe India is a counter-example to both) to the Ukrainian war. The allegory of a swarm seems very appropriate to describe what is going on:

A swarm is constituted by a multitude of small elements. It reacts to external stimuli and has barely a conscience of itself as such. Each element of the swarm is conscient that it operates together with other elements but, each element doesn’t have a representation of the swarm as a whole. A swarm is also very hard to grasp as an entity because when it encounters an obstacle it can modify its shape to reform later. The multitude of initiatives, from political leaders to private companies and public demonstrations act in a non random way. Things add up and feedback loops appear within the swarm. They are hard to understand and notice as they unfold. The idea is as follows: each entity observe what the other entities of the swarm do. Then, they adjust to what they see almost immediatly without too much thought. You have this ever expanding snowball effect: if X does something, then Y looking at X adds its own initiative etc. The motivation is to not appear as doing less, or appearing less virtous, than your neighbour. Banks are looking at what other banks do. Public opinions act accordingly: if there is a large demonstration here, it motivates other places to *do their part* etc.

We have seen this mechanism, that heavily relies on social media dynamics, being perfected during the permanent COVID crisis of 2020-2022. Today the swarm is confronting an enemy armed with nukes.

War and information technology

The industrial revolution has changed how war was conducted. WWI was the first major conflict in which it became obvious. Early results were awful because tactics and strategic thinking did not evolved at the same pace: charging in line trying to enforce defensive lines protected by machineguns was not a good idea. The defense got the upper hand for years. Until the invention of the battle tank, and later the addition of air support, every offensive only resting on numbers and troops were doomed to fail against a competent opponent. It literally took millions of lives to be noticed by the general staff.

We are more or less experiencing the same shift today. Information technologies together with drones and the enhencement of destructive capacities by individuals (think javelin, Grom, Stinger, etc.) leads to a huge increase in defensive capabilities. More precisely it is less costly (both humanly and from an economic point of view) to defend (to disable) than to attack. Individuals can gather information much more easily than before, and react accordingly. Individual level systems are more powerful and intelligent than before. Add to that the difficulties of the Ukrainian theater (the infamous Rasputitsa) and you can imagine the quagmire for the invader.

On top of those tactical considerations there is a strategical consideration: the swarm is much more effective at disabling things than enabling them. In other words: it is much more easier for a swarm to react against something than to act positively for something. People and institutions forming the swarms have competing/different agendas and they only agree temporarily when they are fighting against a common enemy, be it SARS-COV-2 or the Russians. There is always an asymetry between destroying and building. The nuance of the present situation is that before it was impossible to achieve large scale successes (be it in building or in destroying) without a hierarchical structure. The ability to form swarms changes that: it is no longer a powerful hierarchical structure (typically an army) vs scattered individuals. Today, under some circumstances the individuals may gather together and form a swarm that can actually compete with those big structures in terms of operational capacities.

The unbearable lightness of twitting

It is easy to downplay the influence of social media and to only focus on the negative and superficial parts of them. The gossip, the loss of concentration, the dehumanization of social interactions, the superficiality, the echo chambers etc. are all real issues. They are not the whole story either. Social media enable the building of swarms around emotionally charged topics. The expression of support for Ukraine fits the bill perfectly. Notice how communication is not nuanced and very emotionally driven about this war. During the first hours of the war you had everything in the book: from the ghost of Kyiv, to the resistance of ordinary people (with this extraordinary story of the sunflower seeds for instance) passing by the heroic behavior of soldiers. No one really fact checked those stories, nor really cared about fact checking them. The narrative was clear. And to be honnest there is no ambiguity on the fact that Russia attacked while it was not provoked nor forced to. All geopolitical discussions on the NATO expansion etc. can be done, and Kremlin talking points discussed, it doesn’t change the fact that Ukrainians are actually defending their homeland. But beyond the specific case, the mechanism appears clearly: an easily identifiable cause is chosen and things auto-organize from there. Many corporations decided on their own to stop having contact with Russia, Apple Pay, Visa and Mastercard suspended operations etc. Those sanctions were not yet voted or enacted, yet they were implement by private sector operators following the narrative of the swarm. This is more or less a direct reaction to the social media environment. Cancel culture does not limit itself to stupid conversations about chosen gender and other trans-issues. Those issues were in facts training use-cases, not unlike the spanish civil war during which many arms and tactics were tested and tried before WWII. It is easy to downplay the strength of such reactions, and this very fact is one of its huge strength. All the comments saying that “it is just” this or that remind the reaction to censorship in social media: “after all they are private companies they can do what they want and you can just make your own platform”. Likewise SWIFT is not a human right and Russians may just develop their messaging etc. The parallel is striking: unplugging from the network is the most powerful weapon of the swarm and it is no joke. What is hard to grasp though is that part of it is indeed a joke. The cycle goes like this: a narrative is developped by *influential accounts*, then memes and activist actions are done (typically femen showing their tits somewhere or something equivalent) and the snowball forms itself by people reacting online, the MSM talking about the fact that people are reacting etc. It bubbles up until it reaches large corporations and even the political sphere is not immune to those kind of influences. It becomes almost impossible not to enhance the initial move.

The new normal is the exception

Like a real swarm adapts fluidly to circumvent hard obstacles, the virtual swarms can take many forms and shapes. Technically it takes the excuse that we are living extraordinary times so extraordinary measures are justfied. We have seen this overplayed during the COVID crisis. It happens again for the Urkaine war. Just one example that is striking: it has been proposed to categorize arms as ESGs… This is not dark humor and you read it well: arms are now environmentally friendly and can be seen as socially enhancing sustainable growth whatever that means. You saw the same thing at play during the COVID crisis where requesting to show your papers to have a drink was seen as “nothing new under the sun”, and anyway as being justifiable (*proportionate* is an often used word) due to *temporary* circumstances. But of course the temporary extraordinary circumstances are eternal in our new environment. The COVID swarm dissolved only because there was a new crisis. By its very essence the swarm cannot do anything more than just being during an existential crisis. This is the only gluing factor that has enough strength to gather the swarm together.

The very foundation of our society, the rule of law, is now becoming the exception. We have yet to measure how profound this revolution goes. How are we going to set up institutions adapted to this new culture is of outmost importance. Swarms don’t have neither self consciousness nor survival instinct.