I’m fascinated by swarms. Not swarms of insects, but simply the image of a swarm: a mass of individuals that descends on a place or a creature, inhabits it for a moment, then leaves. The swarm acts in concert, but need not necessarily do so consciously. It emerges from a sea of individuals, like a wave, then dissipates. The concrete example I have in mind is temporary habitats for people: take, for instance, the collection of trinket sellers that appear every day on the open square in the middle of the city (my city, but also surely many other cities around the world). It’s amazing how swiftly and efficiently they pack things in and out of their vans. They set up shop, create a marketplace from scratch, from an empty square, every morning, and then (almost) every trace of them is removed in the evening. Another example of the kind of swarm I have in mind might be the illegal drug market, or, more precisely, its physical structures — the way a black market can transform a street corner into a storefront into a street corner again in precious little time. (Of course, I can observe the trinket-sellers directly, but, happily, I’m not familiar with real-world black markets of any kind, be they for currency, drugs, weapons, tickets or anything else.)
I’m of the belief that one can only talk around one’s obsessions: there really is no readily apparent reason that comes to mind as to why I might have been fascinated by dinosaurs at age five or by football at ten or by anything else for that matter. I can only explain the source of the fascination by referencing further fascinations, as if the sum of the constituent fascinations could explain an interest in bridges or women or poker or economics, which is far from true; and the only way (that I know) of directly creating in another person an interest in a subject they appear uninterested in, is to relate the subject in some way to their previous interests, unless you have the patience and amorality to consciously mold the other person’s psychology into that of a person who would be interested in the given subject, and in either case, interest or fascination in itself remains an unanalyzable construct. And so while I understand why you might not see what’s to get excited about in swarms of the kind I describe, I can’t really convince you or explain to you in rational terms why I find them fascinating.
But I can try. One thing to note about swarms is that it’s really hard and getting harder to create new spaces, new communities, new markets physically. In the modern city, building a physical structure or accomodating an economy or niche is a slow, hard process, unless you circumvent the obstacles by remaining entirely virtual. There are bureaucratic obstacles, in that one often needs the permission of several different official entities through long and painful processes just to build a tiny shed or hold a small event on one’s own property, never mind public spaces. Often there are also physical barriers: hulking, looming urban constructs that lean over you and cast you in shadow and steal space, so that anything new has a hard time squeezing in. Creating a building in a crowded city, whether by somehow inhabiting a space that people have previously preferred to be open or simply considered uninhabitable, or by destroying something that stands in the way of the new, is an involved process. And so when people circumvent all this and create these temporary physical spaces, whether it’s a black market or a squatters’ village or a collection of hot dog stands in a park, I think it’s interesting.
After all, despite all the obstacles, most of the city just is there. Large parts of the modern city lack physical barriers to entry or use, or have weak barriers. If one is prepared, quite simply, to lower one’s standards and/or ignore the imaginary social context that prohibits entry or use, lots of the usual off-limits or unusable spaces that exist are just there, open and ready for use. You can just neatly step over all the imaginary structures, the social and political and legal contexts that have no existence in physical reality except as thoughts in our minds, and just be, inhabit, do. And while I’ve always imagined that it must be very hard to get a permit to erect structures or as much as sneeze in public, people are clearly doing just that, or they’d be thrown out of public spaces instantly.
Maybe my fascination also has to do with my related interest in glitches, in simulations and tableaux and fake realities. The city appears to me to be unconstructed, all surface: while we see new buildings popping up and old ones being torn down all the time, the modern city by and large feels, to me, like a video game world. You never see just how it’s constructed. It just exists, like it’s always existed. Every street seamlessly blends into the next, buildings transition to and from each other like they’re one entity, one big creature. There are no cracks, no glitches, nothing to suggest just how this marvelous structure was constructed out of what, seconds ago in geological time, must have been wilderness. Social groups, markets and niches seem the same: like in a video game, it’s like suddenly all the relationships just exist, they just popped up and the whole network of people suddenly springs into existence, and it’s hard for any one person to see the individual connections and relations that make up the social web get formed. I feel like swarms are like a glitch in reality, a sneak peek at the game engine that runs the modern world: we get to see how things are constructed, how they operate, and how they’re deconstructed, all in the space of an hour, a day or a small week. A festival, a seasonal market, a non-permanent fair, a black market, a bunch of hot dog stands in a park: you can actually see this little “city” form, you can explore how it’s all put together, and then you get to see it cease to exist, bit by bit.
That’s a little fascinating. To me. Maybe it’s just me.
Aug 27, 2010