SoLiXG:The crowd
The crowd
Since the beginning of industrialization and dawn of democracy the crowd has been the great unknown, the indeterminable variable of history. Not quite a political constituency (demos), nor yet fully an ethnic community (ethnos), the crowd is made up by those who fall through the cracks of economic, political, epistemological, and ideological systems of representation, only to make such systems crack up as soon as they emerge from the social depths and present themselves as a force of historical change. A “phantom public” (Lippman), “the non-existent” (Badiou), an “unidentifiable social object” (Fassin), the “silent majorities” (Baudrillard): the crowd attains such epithets from its position beyond the threshold of sociological intelligibility. As Adorno put it: “the crowds [die Massen] are always the others”.
Since the invention of photography, each new media technology has been hailed as an instrument able to bring the mysterious being and agency of the crowd into the field of representation, as a tool for penetrating the crowd’s depths, exposing its being, deciphering its modes of existence, indexing its locations, surveilling its appearances, predicting its movements, managing its internal diversity, and exploiting its activity. Interactive digital technology appears in this chain as the ultimate crowd technology, promising to comprehensively register and represent human life within one system, thereby also offering the possibility to monitor, model, and mold human behavior so as to fit desired norms. In its post-digital incarnations, as the posited substratum of crowd funding, crowd sourcing, crowd management, crowd simulation, and impact crowd technology, the crowd may appear docile and obedient, conforming to algorithmically established models – a set of atomized human units responding to selected stimuli, calculated to produce predefined economic or affective values. The meaning of the concept of the crowd is apparently now inverted: no longer a collective whose agency is unknown, the crowd merges with its digital imprint and becomes one with its representation. The crowd replicates itself in the form of the Cloud, which absorbs the features of the crowd within itself. Henceforth, the cloud offers the digitized technical infrastructure of the crowd.
However, like the crowd, a cloud can be represented only from the outside and from a distance (Weizman). Its contours set it off against the surrounding environment, or the blue sky. But once you are inside a cloud, or become part of a crowd, you no longer see them, can no longer represent them. They are similar to a network of relations, an energy field, or a fog: detectable only through whatever expressions, actions, or symptoms they project and present. Hypothetically, therefore, the twinned phenomena of crowd and cloud hold the secrets of the Social Life of XG.