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 politically formative. They form swarms, and swarms cannot govern.
Han distinguishes the swarm from the crowd of twentieth-century mass psychology (Le Bon, Canetti). The crowd had a body — people gathered physically, shared a single spatial and temporal context, could be seen and measured. The swarm has no body. It exists as the aggregate of individual digital actions — posts, shares, comments, views — that are statistically visible but do not constitute any shared presence. The individuals in the swarm are each alone with their devices, their engagement registered as data rather than as participation in a common space.
The consequence for public discourse is that the swarm does not produce the public sphere in the Habermasian sense — the space of rational-critical debate through which a democratic society forms its collective will. The swarm produces trending topics. It produces viral moments. It produces outrage cycles that dissipate as quickly as they crest. It does not produce the slow, patient, uncomfortable deliberation that democratic governance requires.
The argument extends Han's broader diagnosis of acceleration. The swarm is what happens when communication is optimized for speed. The slower rhythms of genuine deliberation — the time required to read, to reflect, to formulate a considered response — are structurally incompatible with the feed's demand for immediate engagement. The swarm is not a failure of users. It is the political form that the medium produces by design.
The relevance to AI governance is sharp. The decisions about how AI will be developed, deployed, and regulated are being made in a media environment that produces swarms rather than publics. The algorithmic acceleration of public discourse renders sustained political deliberation about algorithmic systems nearly impossible, which is a structural feature rather than an accident. The systems that require governance are structurally resistant to the form of governance appropriate to them.
Im Schwarm: Ansichten des Digitalen was published in German in 2013, at the peak of the first wave of social media optimism when platforms like Twitter and Facebook were still widely celebrated as democratizing forces. The English translation by Erik Butler appeared in 2017, after the political events of 2016 had made the book's diagnosis suddenly unavoidable.
The timing was diagnostic: Han identified the structural features of swarm politics years before the mainstream press began noting that something was wrong with how digital media shaped public discourse. The book is among Han's most politically direct works, extending his philosophical framework into explicit analysis of the institutional conditions of democratic governance.
Swarm, not public. The digital aggregate is a new political form, distinct from both the Enlightenment public and the mass of twentieth-century mass society.
Fast but not coherent. The swarm reacts instantly but cannot sustain the slow work of political construction.
Noise without signal. The swarm produces constant communication without producing the shared context that communication requires.
No political subject. The swarm has no body, no spokesperson, no coherent will — it cannot be addressed as a political agent because it is not one.
Structural, not contingent. Digital media produce swarms by design; this is not a user failure or a platform failure but a feature of the form.