The swarm

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Think of a beehive or an anthill. Bees and ants function as one organism. The brain of this organism – the queen – controls each ant, each bee. None survive alone. There is no individual identity. This is what happens in “Pluribus”. Humanity begins to behave as a single entity, driven by a single goal and with an apparent ethical and moral conscience.

Worldwide, only 13 people are resistant to the virus. One of them, the main character, is an unsympathetic novelist: Carol Sturka, played by the excellent Rhea Seehorn. The swarm treats the resisters with extreme kindness, satisfies their every desire, and honestly responds to their doubts and concerns. Most eventually surrender. Carole, no. She refuses to give up her own identity.

Carol seems to believe that individual identity has always imposed itself on the collective – and that it should be that way. I’m not so sure.

What if the “I” had always been a provisional fiction?

Individuality seems to me to be a recent invention. For millennia, human beings did not consider themselves as autonomous subjects, but as part of larger organisms: the tribe, the clan, the village, the lineage, the religion. The name of the individual was often that of the trade: Ferreira and Ferraz come from the blacksmith; Teles, from weaver; Axe, from the lumberjack. So-and-so was the shepherd, the warrior, the farmer. In other cases, the name of the community itself was adopted. This is still the case in many traditional societies.

Individual decisions were the exception – and viewed with suspicion. Survival depends on a certain unanimity.

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The industrial revolution placed the individual at the center. Individual rights, the idea of ​​freedom and personal responsibility were born. But perhaps it was only a brief parenthesis.

Today, thanks to the permanent connection, the swarm has returned in a new form. We are connected all the time. Synchronized. Emotions travel in waves. The indignations burst out in succession. Fear, grief, enthusiasm have become collective phenomena.

We fear, like writer Carol Sturka, that our uniqueness is being diluted. We do not want to give up our critical consciousness. Others abandon themselves like someone letting go of an old weight – and abandon themselves to the swarm. The swarm offers a sense of belonging, security, relief from responsibility and some symbolic immunity.

The problem is not collective identity, but its new infrastructure. The contemporary swarm is not born from coexistence or shared memory, but from invisible architectures – algorithms, platforms, attention economies.