Swarms, Egregores, & Autocults – Part I
A summary of the video with this title presented by Peter Limberg's The Stoa
Recently on The Stoa, four well-versed gentlemen1 sat around a virtual campfire to discuss Swarms, Egregores & Autocults. I’ve had to watch the video many times to glean, contextualize, and embody the insights therein. I recommend you do the same, if not to comprehend, then to observe the participatory framework of the discourse: insight through turn-based, oral collaboration.
Meanwhile, I want to take some time to summarize some threads that I found useful. Let’s start with some definitions.
I. Swarms
What is a swarm? A swarm is a massive network apparatus that takes advantage of open-source dynamics to turn all decision-making into memetic warfare. Open-source refers to the fact that no formal licensing dictates who or what composes the swarm. Memetic warfare is a fancy way of saying propaganda.
A recent example of a swarm is the network of Western institutions and officeholders (including Twitter bluechecks!) that coordinated asynchronously to disconnect Russia from the global financial system within a matter of days of Vladimir Putin invading Ukraine.
As John Robb describes, swarms:
are maximalist. They possess no penchant for de-escalation or compromise;
have no sense of their own mortality, nor a requisite sense or risk and fear;
capture agents at multiple scales – from individuals, to corporations, to supranational bodies.
In the case of geopolitics, swarm dynamics are pernicious because they can dismantle long held agreements to prevent catastrophe within a fortnight. For 70 years, the post-WWII consensus fostered peace through a set of interlocking agreements on the use of nuclear weapons. Now, barely 30 days later after the Donbass was invaded, we all face the prospect of planet-wide radioactive destruction.
II. Egregores
What is an egregore? An egregore is an entity that spreads through the internet competing with other entities for control over human brain space.
You may have heard the saying, “people don’t have ideas, ideas have people” – if so, welcome to the egregore universe! Please take note that B.J. Campbell constrains the definition of egregore to the particular context of digital swarms in an industrial age.
When it comes to digital technology, smartphones are often used to outsource complex cognitive functions such as road navigation (Google Maps) and financial accounting (PayPal). The key aspect of this outsourcing is that the tool used is subject to updates based on feedback from external cues.
In this same way, a social media feed outsources the generation and updating of symbols that are used to form a coherent morality. Thus, if swarms describe the behavior and coordination mechanisms for political actions, i.e., tactics, then egregores describe the symbolic interface for the social dynamics that overlay swarms.
While traditional religions serve as coherent egregores, they operate on a O-O-D-A loop cycle length of ~a century; it takes a while for doctrinal disputes to initiate from bishops, percolate through to pastors, manifest in lay parishioners, and resolve in conference.
By contrast, Twitter will provide the new moral symbols in the course of a month, or or even a week (🏳️🌈 → ✊🏿 → 😷 → 🏳️⚧️ → 🇺🇦 ). Such a fast cycle time is profoundly disorienting. An additional symptom is that the egregore, underlaid with swarm dynamics, quickly memory-holes its previous behavior once a new set of moral symbols is foisted upon its human substrate.
III. Autocults
What is an autocult? An autocult is a cybernetic agent that shapes morals and answers to economic realities. The cybernetic aspect refers to fact that autocults require both human and non-human digital input.
While swarms and egregores describe the sociopolitical layer of coordination hysteresis, autocults lay bare the physical mechanics – namely, the process by which human emotion and energy are captured, transmitted, and decoded in symbols as they move from agent to agent. This process, while everpresent in a face-to-face conversation for instance, is mostly unconscious.
In the human body, a neuron contains an implicit generator function that decides to propagate, amplify, or dampen electrochemical signals based on its current state and orientation. However, the neuron retains no capability to understand how its individual action produces a rich response network within the larger nervous system.
Similarly, a human being may choose to “Like”, “Retweet”, and “Reply” to certain memes – and, crucially, ignore others – but has little awareness of how his actions feed the larger egregore that uses him as a substrate – whether that is an centrally mandated algorithm or an Evil Deity. From this thorough and distributed process of memetic selection, the highest-information-density memes emerge as symbols for egregores to interface with and deploy in contest against its rivals.
Because these memes carry such a high information density (one 300-x-300 picture can convey an entire sociopolitical orientation with a few well-chosen colors and words), it’s impossible for a single human brain to deconstruct it to the level of total comprehension.
There is much more to uncover from the video. This piece has already become quite long, so we’ll leave it here for now. Until then, I will leave you with an aphorism that captures the gist of this post.
Egregores, by way of autocults, provide swarms with the properties needed to enforce digital morality
Update April 10, 2022: Click here for Part II.
These are Jordan Hall (@jgreenhall), B.J. Campbell (@Freakoutery), Patrick Ryan (@TyrantsMuse), and John Robb (@johnrobb). And let me mention their lovely host, maestro of the The Stoa, Peter Limberg (@peternlimberg).