In The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895), Gustave Le Bon defined modernity as the “age of crowds.” He identified it as a critical point in time when human thinking was in the course of changing. It was a “period of transition and anarchy.”1 In taking form, the society of the future would have to reckon with a new power—the power of masses. Thus, Le Bon laconically observes: “The age we are about to enter will in truth be the ERA OF CROWDS.”2
Le Bon saw that the received power structures were falling apart. Now the “voice of the masses” prevailed. The masses, he observed, have founded “syndicates before which the authorities capitulate one after the other; they are also founding labour unions, which in spite of all economic laws tend to regulate the conditions of labour and wages.”3 Parliamentary representatives are only their stooges. For Le Bon, the phenomenon of crowds expresses a new balance of power. The “divine right of the masses,” he predicts, “is about to replace the divine right of kings.”4 The ascent of the masses entails the crisis of sovereignty and heralds cultural decline. It means the “thoroughgoing destruction of … civilization,” for “civilization involves … conditions that crowds, left to themselves, have invariably shown themselves incapable of realising.”5
Clearly, we are facing a crisis again today—a period of critical transition that another upheaval, the digital revolution, has occasioned. Yet again, a formation comprising “the many” is beleaguering the standing balance of power and government. The new mass is the digital swarm. Its features distinguish it radically from the crowd—the classical form that the many assumed.
The digital swarm does not constitute a mass because no soul—no spirit—dwells within it. The soul gathers and unites. In contrast, the digital swarm comprises isolated individuals. The mass is structured along different lines: its features cannot be traced back to individuals. But now, individuals are melting into a new unit; its members no longer have a profile of their own. For a crowd to emerge, a chance gathering of human beings is not enough. It takes a soul, a common spirit, to fuse people into a crowd. The digital swarm lacks the soul or spirit of the masses. Individuals who come together as a swarm do not develop a we. No harmony prevails—which is what welds the crowd together into an active entity. Unlike the crowd, the swarm demonstrates no internal coherence. It does not speak with a voice. The shitstorm lacks a voice, too. Accordingly, it is perceived as noise.
McLuhan deemed Homo electronicus to be a man of the masses:
“Mass man” is the electronic occupant of the globe, simultaneously involved in all other people as if he were a spectator in a global ball park. Even as a man at a ballgame he is a nobody, so the electronic citizen is a man whose private identity has been psychically erased by over-involvement.6
In contrast, today’s Homo digitalis is anything but “nobody.” He retains his private identity, even when forming part of the swarm. Although he expresses himself anonymously, as a rule he has a profile—and he works ceaselessly at optimizing it. Instead of being “nobody,” he is insistently somebody exhibiting himself and vying for attention. The mass-mediated nobody, on the other hand, does not claim attention for himself. His private identity is extinguished. He has vanished into the mass. This also represents his good fortune: after all, if he is nobody, he cannot be anonymous. On the other hand, Homo digitalis often takes the stage anonymously. He is not a nobody but a somebody—an anonymous somebody.
What is more, the world of Homo digitalis evinces an entirely different topology. Spaces such as sports arenas and amphitheaters—that is, sites where masses meet—are foreign to this world. The digital inhabitants of the Net do not assemble. They lack the interiority of assembly that would bring forth a we. They form a gathering without assembly—a crowd without interiority, without a soul or spirit. Above all, they are isolated, scattered hikikomori sitting alone in front of a screen. Electronic media such as radio assemble human beings. In contrast, digital media isolate them.
Occasionally, digital individuals come together in gatherings—in smart mobs, for instance. However, their collective patterns of movement are like the swarms that animals form—fleeting and unstable. Their hallmark is volatility. Furthermore, these groupings commonly seem carnivalesque—ludic and nonbinding. Herein lies the difference between the digital swarm and the classic crowd, which—as in the case of workers assembled in a mass—is not volatile but voluntative. Organized labor is not a matter of fleeting patterns; it consists of enduring formations. With a single spirit, unified by an ideology, it marches in one direction. On the basis of will and resolve, it has capacity for collective action and takes standing relations of domination head on. Only when a crowd is resolute about shared action does power arise. The mass is power. In contrast, digital swarms lack such resolve. They do not march. Because of their fleeting nature, no political energy wells up. By the same token, online shitstorms prove unable to call dominant power relations into question. Instead, they strike individual persons, whom they unmask or make an item of scandal.
According to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, globalization has brought forth two opposing forces. On the one hand, it has erected a decentered, deterritorialized, and capitalist order of domination—“empire.” On the other hand, it has produced “multitude”—an aggregate of singularities communicating with each other over networks and acting collectively. Within empire, it resists empire.
Hardt and Negri base their theory on historically antiquated categories such as class and class struggle. Accordingly, they define multitude as being capable of communal action: “One initial approach is to conceive the multitude as all those who work under the rule of capital and thus potentially as the class of those who refuse the rule of capital.”7 Hereby, they interpret the power exercised by empire as the violence of allo-exploitation:
The multitude is the real productive force of our social world, whereas Empire is a mere apparatus of capture that lives only off the vitality of the multitude—as Marx would say, a vampire regime of accumulated dead labor that survives only by sucking off the blood of the living.8
It is meaningful to speak of class only when a plurality of classes exists. “Multitude,” however, signifies the sole class. All who participate in the capitalist system belong to it. In fact, “empire” does not refer to a ruling class that exploits the “multitude”: everyone now thinks him- or herself free, even while working to death. The contemporary achievement subject is perpetrator and victim in one. Negri and Hardt do not recognize this logic of self-exploitation, which is much more efficient than allo-exploitation. No one rules the empire. It is the capitalist system itself, which encompasses everyone. Today, exploitation is possible without any domination at all.
Those subject to the neoliberal economy do not constitute a we that is capable of collective action. The mounting egoization and atomization of society is making the space for collective action shrink. As such, it blocks the formation of a counterpower that might be able to put the capitalist order in question. Socius has yielded to solus. Contemporary society is not shaped by multitude so much as solitude. The general collapse of the collective and the communal has engulfed it. Solidarity is vanishing. Privatization now reaches into the depths of the soul itself. The erosion of the communal is making all collective efforts more and more unlikely. Hardt and Negri fail to notice this social development. Instead, they invoke a communist revolution to be achieved by the multitude. Their book concludes with a romantic apotheosis of communism:
Once again in postmodernity we find ourselves in [Saint Francis of Assisi’s] situation, posing against the misery of power the joy of being. This is a revolution that no power will control—because biopower and communism, cooperation and revolution remain together, in love, simplicity, and also innocence. This is the irrepressible lightness and joy of being communist.9