The Exploit: A Theory of Networks - asounder

Nodes 69
Places where faces shouldn’t be—can this be what swarming is?
Or must one extract a “faciality” in every site of enmity? Consider
an example from popular culture. In The Matrix Revolutions, there are
two types of swarms, the first being the insectlike sentinels who attack
the human city of Zion from all directions. In a textbook case of military
swarming, they eventually defeat the humans’ defensive by amass -
ing scores of individual sentinels into one large, anthropomorphic
face—a literal facialization of enmity. What started as a swarm without
a face becomes a face built out of the substrate of the swarm.
The Matrix appears to be at once totally distributed and yet capable
of a high degree of centralization (swarm versus face). While earlier
science fiction films could only hint at the threatening phenomenon
of swarming through individual creatures (e.g., Them!), the contemporary
science fiction film, blessed with an abundant graphics technology
able to animate complex swarming behaviors down to the last
detail, still must put a “face” on the foe, for in the very instant the
swarm reaches the pinnacle of its power, its status as a defaced enemy
is reversed and the swarm is undone. (Tron does something similar:
the denouement of facialization comes precisely at the cost of all the
various networked avatars zipping through the beginning and middle
of the film.) Again the point is not that faciality—or cohesion, or
integrity, or singularity, or what have you—is the sole prerequisite
for affective control or organization, for indeed the swarm has significant
power even before it facializes, but that faciality is a particular
instance of organization, one that the swarm may or may not coalesce
around. The core ambiguity in such expressions of swarming is precisely
the tension, on the macro scale, between amorphousness and
coordination, or emergence and control. Does coordination come on
the scene to constrain amorphousness, or does it instead derive from
it? Is a minimal degree of centralized control needed to harness emergence,
or is it produced from it?
While the biological study of self - organization seems caught on
this point, the politico - military - ethical context raises issues that are
at once more concrete, more troubling, and more “abstract.” In a
sense, the swarm, swarming-as-faciality, is a reminder of the defacement
proper not only to distributed insects but also to distributed humans;