The Electric Swarm

“We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out.” - Karl Rove

The empire is not alone anymore: now its a swarm. The internet-first media environment we find ourselves in I refer to as the “electric swarm."

It's an extension of the nature of experience and reality to the new technology environment: everyone is always running at least slightly different realities, holding different information and beliefs, and living fully in different worlds

Communication itself is the meta-mechanism by which these realities are synced up, explored, compared.

But non-digital environments enjoy the support of the great synchronizers: physics, emotion, and dense local shared context both cultural and social.

These are not present in the electric swarm, not to the degree necessary to dampen the erratic reality divergences that characterize the online world.

It's a sort of dynamical reality, where all slightly or greatly divergent sets of belief about the world are operating simultaneously and tugging and pushing on each other via social media and the internet, exerting imaginal forces on everyone getting swept and spun along.

There are still the big fish of reality formation, broadcast media like television and radio news, but these are increasingly responsive to the social swarm, often literally displaying tweets or TikToks on a screen and commenting

In the swarm, every interpretation of any information happens simultaneously, because every reality is operating simultaneously and the response is filtered through them all at once.

This is why it seems like people are saying basically any given thing all the time, but also why, in some sense, these people don't really exist.

This is why every response to outrage generates additional outrage: by nature of linear thought any thing put out there addresses only a subset of the whole set of realities.