Welcome to the Swarm

The text explores online swarms as decentralized networks of individuals and algorithms acting collectively, highlighting their coordination, lifecycle, and contrasts with other online formations like communities and organizations.

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The culture that thrives in Filterworld tends to be accessible, replicable, participatory, and ambient. It can be shared across wide audiences and retain its meaning across different groups, who tweak it slightly to their own ends. (In Filterworld, everything must be a meme, like a remixable joke or image optimized to travel across the Internet.)

But how does an individual bee gauge the need for nectar in the hive? She does not step inside the habitation to check how full the honeycombs are. Incoming transport bees sense the demand for the cargo they deliver by a simple social cue, the kind of cue that humans have their antennae out for at cocktail parties. If a burdened bee arrives at the

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The stereotypical example of a bottom-up organization is a slime mold. A number of different independent actors make individual decisions, leading to complex emergent behavior in the colony.

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There is something like a switch in us that kills the individual in favor of the collective when people engage in communal dances, mass riots, or war. Your mood is now that of the herd. You are part of what Elias Canetti calls the rhythmic and throbbing crowd.

Howard Bloom • The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History

Alex Komoroske • Coordination Headwind - How Organizations Are Like Slime Molds

Nassim Nicholas Taleb • Incerto 4-Book Bundle