In the Swarm: Digital Prospects (2013) by Byung-Chul Han

​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. 

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