224 definitions
The book's index
In the Swarm: Digital Prospects
169 concepts · 224 definitions
- achievement society1
- action2
- actome1
- addition1
- algorithm1
- analysis1
- anonymity2
- authority1
- bare life1
- big data1
- biopolitics1
- biopower1
- calculation1
- character1
- charisma1
- class1
- clever hans1
- communication2
- consumer1
- contagion1
- control society1
- correlation1
- countenance1
- counterpart1
- counting1
- credit bureau1
- crowd3
- dark pool1
- data broker1
- deceleration1
- demediatization1
- depression1
- desire1
- digital1
- digital agora1
- digital arthritis1
- digital communication1
- digital democracy1
- digital ghost1
- digital image1
- digital media3
- digital medium2
- digital panopticon1
- digital photography1
- digital swarm3
- digital unconscious1
- digitality1
- distance1
- earth3
- electric technology1
- environment1
- eros1
- existential decision1
- experience2
- exploitation1
Transparency (n.) makes things see-through without illuminating them; it is lightless radiation, while light shows a way.
Transparency (n.) means the end of desire, which is always the desire of an opaque other.
Transparency (n.) lives only in the present tense; nothing can ripen under it, so the future is not its time.
Transparency (n.) is the hunter's panoramic view of the digital game preserve: impatient, lurking rather than waiting, removing whatever blocks the view.
Outrage (n.) online cannot be sung; unlike Achilles' rage it carries no deed and no story, only a mood without the power to act.
Outrage (n.) lacks the gravity needed for action; scattered and fleeting, it produces no future.
Outrage (n.) gathers attention brilliantly and builds nothing: it wells up overnight and drains away as fast.
Outrage (n.) cares for the self rather than the social body, which is why the enraged citizen's fury dissipates so quickly.
Truth (n.) does not pile up like snow; there are masses of information but no such thing as a mass of truth.
Truth (n.) loves to hide; concealment dwells in its heart, the way dark woods surround a clearing.
Truth (n.) lives by exclusion: the same decision that sets up the true also posits the false.
Information (n.) past a certain point stops informing and starts deforming; communication likewise turns merely cumulative.
Information (n.) has transparency as its essence: everything must lie open, ready and available for everyone.
Information (n.) is pure exteriority — it has no inner space to withdraw into, no heart beating within it.
The Smartphone (n.) is a digital mirror that renews the mirror stage after infancy — a narcissistic room where the other never speaks.
The Smartphone (n.) erases every negativity with its simple input and output, and with it the ability to think in a complex way.
The Smartphone (n.) promises freedom and radiates compulsion — above all the compulsion to communicate, since more communication means more capital.
Image (n.) nowadays are livelier than the people in the café who look at them.
An Image (n.) made consumable is a tamed image, iconoclastic for all its abundance: it loses the madness that was its truth.
An Image (n.) is now a model rather than a likeness: we flee into pictures to be better, more beautiful and more alive than we are.
A Photograph (n.) is glued to its referent like the condemned man to the corpse, or like fish swimming in convoy as if in eternal coitus.
A Photograph (n.) is mortal like a living thing: born in sprouting silver grains, it flourishes a moment, then fades under light and damp.
A Photograph (n.) is tautological by nature: a pipe in it is always, intractably, a pipe.
Power (n.) raises the odds of a yes where a no is possible — and since no is always loud, power is a kind of silence.
Power (n.) likes to veil itself in secret and invents the truth that enthrones it; information hunters see it only as a barrier.
Power (n.) grows with asymmetry: the more one-sided the communication, the greater the power.
Sovereignty (n.) in the age of the Net belongs to whoever can command its shitstorms.
Sovereignty (n.) means, in acoustic terms, the power to produce absolute quiet — to make everyone else fall silent at a stroke.
Sovereignty (n.) after the war of the airwaves belongs to whoever commands the waves of space, not the exception.
The Crowd (n.) announced the modern age: the divine right of the masses was about to replace the divine right of kings.
The Crowd (n.) of organized workers was not volatile but voluntative: united by one will, it marched — and the mass is power.
A Crowd (n.) needs more than a chance gathering of bodies; it takes a common spirit to fuse people into one.