In the Swarm

In the Swarm (Im Schwarm, 2013, English translation 2017) is Han's analysis of the political form produced by digital media. Neither the mass of twentieth-century mass society nor the public of Enlightenment political theory, the swarm is a new aggregate: many voices without a common voice, many actions without common action, many visible individuals without any coherent political subject. The swarm is loud. It is fast. It reacts instantly to stimulus and dissipates as quickly as it gathers. What it cannot do is sustain the slow, patient, deliberative work of political construction. Han's argument is that the digital environment produces swarms reliably and produces publics with increasing difficulty. The political consequence is that civilizational challenges requiring sustained collective response — climate, inequality, AI governance — arrive in a media environment that is structurally incapable of producing the coherent political subject such responses require. The diagnosis is not that digital media are politically neutral. They are