Swarm Intelligence

How do the simple actions of individuals add up to the complex behavior of a group? How do hundreds of honeybees make a critical decision about their hive if many of them disagree? What enables a school of herring to coordinate its movements so precisely it can change direction in a flash, like a single, silvery organism? The collective abilities of such animals—none of which grasps the big picture, but each of which contributes to the group's success—seem miraculous even to the biologists who know them best, according to a fascinating article in National Geographic (a similar article appeared recently in the New York Times.)

Swarm behavior was a trendy topic when observers were stuggling to understand the movements of rioters in Seattle and elsewhere. The use of mass text messages was heralded as the key technological innovation leading to the emergence of the "smart mobs" that brought down trade summits around the world. Like so many other things, such talk has all but disappeared in a post-9/11 world where protest mobs hardly merit a mention in mainstream press coverage, and text messages are as mundane as McDonald's.

But swarm intelligence, not just as a way of coordinating street battles, is a rich field of study for anarchists. The notion that highly complex projects and behaviors can be coordinated without any centralized authority has been an article of faith for anarchists for a long time. Indeed, old time anarchist Peter Kropotkin prefigured much of today's conclusions about swarm behavior with his research (this links to an excellent article by Stephen Jay Gould about Kropotkin and his findings) on the role of mutual aid in evolution.

But now, biologists and computer scientists (and the military) have taken a serious interest in swarm intelligence, and their research is helping to explain how important decisions are made by groups of animals numbering in the thousands, even when many individuals disagree. That's the wonderful appeal of swarm intelligence. Whether we're talking about ants, bees, pigeons, or people, the ingredients of smart group behavior—decentralized control, response to local information, simple rules of thumb—add up to a shrewd strategy to cope with complexity.

The research has lead to another conclusion: crowds tend to be wise only if individual members act responsibly and make their own decisions. A group won't be smart if its members imitate one another, slavishly follow fads, or wait for someone to tell them what to do. When a group is being intelligent, whether it's made up of ants or anarchists, it relies on its members to do their own part. It should be clear that such conclusions apply not only to rioting. If anarchists as a whole are concieved of as a swarm—unique individuals without leaders following simple rules of thumb (e.g. don't behave oppressively, always try to prevent arrests, create alternative means of subsistence, don't snitch, etc)—the extent to which we follow our own rules and behave responsibly determines our strength. Unfortunately, many anarchists do imitate one another, slavishly follow fads, and wait for someone else to tell them what to do, and the result is that the entire swarm is endangered (look no further than Operation Backfire.)

Swarms accomplish incredible feats, from building underground cities to evading larger, faster predators at a moment's notice. They do so by relying on their keen sensitivity to local information, reliable means of direct communication, and an uncompromising individuality while simultaneously maintaining certain universal behavioral principles. Such a strategy may seem simple, obvious even (and no doubt some will even say, inaccurately, "We already do that!"), but the results are infintely complex and undeniably effective. Swarms do not require all individuals to think alike or agree; swarm intelligence is in fact an approach to making decisions despite differences. Adopting such a strategy would no doubt prove profitable for a decentralized swarm such as ours.