Insect metaphors for human collectivity obscure capitalism’s human costs.

Evidence

It has been fashionable to forget this and to feign indifference. Some question the “special” moral status of human beings and even compare them to ants and bees, whose collective life has certainly fascinated humans for millennia. Insect metaphors have long been adopted into the technical language of computing; we have swarm robotics, registry hives, and the like. Perhaps there is some force to such analogies when infrastructures of connection enable the aggregation of human-data traces on a vast scale. But there is a danger in such metaphors. No one has yet shown that human beings are collective animals in a zoological sense; pretending they are may divert attention from the human costs of capitalism’s new social order. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 478

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: ‘swarm’ as ideology — how computing’s insect metaphors naturalize data aggregation and depersonalize extraction.
• XREF: connects to: Anthropomorphic market imagery reinforces rather than demystifies the market’s power — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 266; Neoclassical economics depicts capitalism as idealized parody or fairy ballet — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 137; Moral violations get theorized as production failures within a factory metaphor of society — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 490 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Moral violations get theorized as production failures within a factory metaphor of society #exemplifies (0.90) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 490
• Neoliberalism absorbed natural-science metaphors to become a comprehensive worldview beyond economics #expands (0.80) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 153