​In the Swarm: Digital Prospects marks one of Han’s earlier attempts to grapple with the implications of digital technology and social media. Han tends to re-examine some of the same topics in multiple iterations using different theoretical lens in his books. What is most novel in In the Swarm is the investigation of social media and digital technology on politics.
 
Han disagrees with some of the other writings discussing the effects of social media on politics (e.g., studies on the Arab Spring). (Admittedly, Han’s treatment on the topic, when compared with writings on the topic coming from the social sciences, almost lack a common language and framework.) For Han, the public space is constituted by distance, a gap, and respect, whereas digital communication is gapless, anonymous, indiscreet, and power relations are flattened to a horizontal symmetricity (Han later talks about this as the expulsion of “negativity”—he seems not to have articulated it in such terms yet). In these horizontal spaces without hierarchy to control communication, everyone is simultaneously a sender and a recipient of communication. The result is the “shitstorm,” which, for Han, “represents an authentic phenomenon of digital communication” (p. 3). Our society is now an “outrage society” (p. 7), composed of acephalous, amorphous “smart mobs,” unable to engage in proper civil discourse.
 
At this point, Han seems to be conservative and nostalgic for a pre-digital era and uncomfortable with the democratized and horizontal forces of digital media, which has empowered the rabble—through Carl Schmitt he redefines sovereignty as “being able to produce absolute quiet.” However, Han’s real contention is the implication for democracy and politics. In his comparison between the crowd and the digital swarm, he writes of the former that “it takes a soul, a common spirit, to fuse people into a crowd,” but “the digital swarm lacks the soul or spirit of the masses” (p. 10); the latter fails to develop a common consciousness and form into a solidaristic “we.” Instead of an intelligible voice, the digital swarm “is perceived as noise” (p. 10) (a shitstorm) made by “isolated, scattered hikikomori sitting alone in front of a screen” (p. 11).
 
Han takes the political implications further. Digital communication, as a de-mediatized, horizontal platform existing in the temporality of the present, marks the change from re-presentation to presence or co-presentation. Representation in the political sphere is now seen as a barrier to transparency, which he later develops in The Transparency Society.
 
The digital realm also has implications for the practice of politics. The digital is a flight from the earth, and lacking this intimate connection with the terrestrial, Han writes that there can be no generative action in the sense of creating something novel and unprecedented. We move from the generative hand (“the verb for history is to act [handeln]” (p. 31)) to the digital finger (“the word digital points to the finger [digitus]” (p. 35), and from “spirit, action, thinking, and truth” to “operation, [which] takes place without any decision” (p. 52). In the place of politics is the impotent “like” (p. 69), which for Han, is a sign that citizens have devolved into passive consumers, and politics into consumption. 

Romain Gary’s slightly exaggerated (according to some news articles I read about him, anyways) autobiography.
 
The autobiography begins with Romain Gary in a postlapsarian state (note: Romain does not want to make a universal statement through his story), lying down on the beach at the Big Sur surrounded kindred creatures. He then starts his story, moving backwards in time to recount his childhood, his adolescence, his time in the military… all of the stages that have led him to his fall.
 
Episodic stories often lack a connective tissue that keep the story whole. In the case of La Promesse de l’aube, the story is united by Romain Gary’s relationship with his single mother. His mother—eccentric, loud and brazen, entrepreneurial, inexplicably Francophile, endowed with an inhuman resilience, motivated by a fierce love of her son, never without a cigarette between her lips—has an unquestioning faith that the young Romain is destined for greatness, and to please her, the young Romain strives to become someone. Despite her tireless efforts to keep her and Romain afloat, she is never too spent to share with Romain her bottomless maternal love. From her and his experiences, Romain Gary develops his strong sense of justice, his solidarity with the downtrodden and powerless.
 
“Ce fut seulement aux abords de la quarantaine que je commençai à comprendre. Il n’est pas bon d’être tellement aimé, si jeune, si tôt. Ça vous donne de mauvaises habitudes. On crois que c’est arrivé. On crois que ça existe ailleurs, que ça peut se retrouver. On compte là-dessus. On regarde, on espère, on attend. Avec l’amour maternel, la vie vous fait à l’aube une promesse qu’elle ne tient jamais. On est oblige ensuite de manger froid jusqu’à la fin de ses jours. Après cela, chaque fois qu’une femme vous prend dans ses bras et vous serre sur son cœur, ce ne sont plus que des condoléances. On revient toujours gueuler sur la tombe de sa mère comme un chien abandonné…” (p. 43).
 
Romain Gary achieves all that he has promised to achieve and more: he is designated a Companion of the Liberation for his accomplishments in WWII, becomes a recognized and successful writer, is posted in Los Angeles as France’s consul general… but without his mother to share in any of his accomplishments. Romain Gary ends his story back on the beach at the Big Sur, surrounded by kindred creatures… his fall is complete.
 

A short manifest that presents an alternative vision for society centred on “universal care,” which is “the ideal of a society in which care is front and centre at every scale of life” (p. 26) and in which we are all responsible for care. The definition of care, in this context, is not only hands-on physical and emotional care, but also “a social capacity and activity involving the nurturing of all that is necessary for the welfare and flourishing of life” (p. 5). By putting care at the centre, the Care Collective puts themselves diametrically opposite of our current neo-liberal political-economic system, which focuses on the care-less pursuit of maximizing economic growth. The manifesto demonstrates how care could be at the centre of multiple levels of our society.
 
On the level of the family, the dominant model of the family is the patriarchal nuclear family form, where care providers are gendered and care recipients are confined to family members. Drawing on alternative models of kinship—African American communities, LGBT movements—and the ethics of care of groups like military medics, the Care Collective advances the concept of “promiscuous care” (p. 33). In their words, promiscuous care “is an ethics that proliferates outwards to redefine caring relations from the most intimate to the most distant” that is “extensive and experimental” and “indiscriminate” (p. 41). It recognizes that care can be provided by and for people of varying kinship relations, and, speaking to the climate crisis, recognizes that non-human entities are also deserving subjects of care.
 
On the wider level of the community, the Care Collective suggests that there are four core characteristics of caring communities. The first characteristic is mutual support, which refers to the localized and neighbourly forms of mutual care. The second characteristic calls for reclaiming public spaces and combatting neo-liberal privatization. The third characteristic is resource-sharing and offers the idea of a “library of things.” The last characteristic states that caring communities are democratic communities; specifically, the Care Community calls for support for local co-operatives, municipalism, and in-sourcing (as opposed to out-sourcing) of critical functions.
 
Care needs to be supported by the state. The Care Collective defines the caring state as “one in which notions of belonging are based on a recognition of our mutual interdependencies, rather than on ethno-cultural identity and racialized borders,” where “their first and ultimate responsibility should be to build and maintain their own sustainable infrastructures of care” (p. 59), which directly critiques current state formations based on identity-based forms of belonging and liberal capitalist ideology. Importantly, the caring state is also a reimaging (and not a mere return to) the Keynesian welfare state. Instead of a paternalistic state that deepens dependencies, the caring state “enables everyone to cultivate… ‘strategic autonomy and independence’” (p. 64) and create conditions for democratic participation. The caring state will also help to advance some of the other aspects of caring communities; for example, it could create the conditions of a shorter work week to further the capacity of individuals to care.
 
In terms of the economy, the Care Collective makes a clear distinction between the market logics and care logics. They argue that the two are incommensurable; commoditized care through the market distribute care unequally and the values of individual self-interest do not align with the mutuality and patience associated with the values of care. To restore care logics, the Collective calls for demarketising care infrastructures and re-regulating markets and defetishization of commodities through more localized, democratic forms of production.
 
Finally, the Care Manifesto ends with a call to care on a global scale for the non-human world through an ethics of everyday cosmopolitanism, which is “promiscuous care on a global scale” that “moves our caring imaginaries… to the furthest reaches of the ‘strangest’ parts of the planet” (p. 95) and recognizes our condition of interdependence with other human and non-human beings.  

Second reading; an odd combination of biography, personal memoir, and detective story. (Modiano works often in a similar mode and writes a lot of detective stories that investigate the past—one of his best novels is Missing Person.)
 
Modiano, writing in first person, one day reads the following in a Paris Soir that dates to December 31, 1941:
 
“Paris: We are searching for a young girl, Dora Bruder, 15 years old, 1m 55 in height, oval face, grey-brown eyes… Please report all signs to Mr. and Mrs. Bruder, on 41 Ornano boulevard, Paris.”
 
From there Modiano begins his search for the traces of Dora Bruder’s life. His search brings him into confrontation with his own past, that of his father, and into confrontation with that of France under the Vichy regime. Modiano, in his excavation of the past, reveals Paris’ shameful secret, hidden by the passing of time in its grey buildings and its unassuming streets. (Reminded me of Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog.)
 
Some other notes:
 
Does Modiano, in his patient pursuit of Dora Bruder, redeem Dora Bruder from the obscurities of history, from the excesses of tragedy? Before Modiano encountered Dora, her stories, along with the stories of millions of other victims, were swallowed up into macro-historical narratives as a data point. Through Modiano’s pen, Dora Bruder recovers herself as an individual. However, Modiano is a careful and respectful and does not strip Dora bare in front of the reading public (i.e., the last paragraph in the novel).
 
In The Utopia of Rules, David Graeber observes that “almost all great literature on the subject [of bureaucracy] takes the form of horror-comedy” due to its “mazelike, senseless form.” In Dora Bruder, there is the feeling of horror without the comedy. Modiano encounters bureaucracy everywhere throughout the novel, as he peruses state documents to recreate Dora’s life. It becomes clear to the reader that the same state apparatus that created this evidence was used for the purposes of senseless violence. Through bureaucracy, states name subjects under various categories, imparting the mark of death (i.e., Jewish badge).
 
While investigating Dora Bruder’s flight, Modiano demonstrates empathy and a constant striving to try to understand Dora, relating the circumstances of her departure to his own past, walking in empty Parisian streets to catch the echoes of Dora Bruder’s footsteps, visiting the remnants of her Paris—is this a novelist’s compassion toward people, toward their characters?