Swarm Tactics - Focusing collectives to amplify messages.

You feel stuck, helpless.

They’ve told you that you can’t drink the water so you must buy their replacement. They’ve flooded the feed with noise, so genuine cries can hardly be heard. A thousand flashing lights so fast and bright you barely register the photo of children’s bodies in the rubble. The news cycle a deranged treadmill chewing the legs off anyone who tries to keep up and roping arms from those who would hold it accountable.

It’s easy to become disheartened in amongst this, to think your voice and vision won’t inform change, far easier to retreat in to a world of streamed nostalgia and controllable dopamine. That is precisely why this is the landscape these systems of profit and power have shaped, a landscape designed to keep you placated. To trick you in to thinking the voice of ten executives in a boardroom is louder than ten million workers in the street.

Because in truth they know that a multi-million dollar marketing budget can be undone by a well placed meme. They’ve seen what one photo can do to a billion dollar war effort. They’ve witnessed the power a headline has to undermine a life’s work, because they dedicate themselves to monstering their enemies with such headlines.

In this landscape we need more didacticism than escapism. For as much as those escapist fantasy’s grant us reprieve, they remove us from the battlefield, a battlefield that is ever growing, whose stakes are climbing ever higher.

In this landscape we need to remember our history, a history they won’t celebrate, kept far from the centre of your mind for good reason. A history in which the Art Workers Coalition created one of the most powerful pieces of propaganda art. Taking the images of war photographers and the quotes of those who just followed orders and turning them in to something greater than the sum of their parts.

They produced a poster so stark that the MoMA who had agreed to fund it would back out of its agreement, and much like the Guerrilla girls and the New York Art fund, the AWC would not acquiesce to the pressure of industry titans. The AWC would produce and distribute the poster anyway, creating 50,000 copies with help from the New York Lithographers Union. They would use a grassroots network to then distribute these, garnering such attention as to see major media outlets pick up and circulate these story and by necessity the poster.

"And Babies.." - AWC 1969

Herein lays the power of the “swarm” the ability to undermine monolithic power structures through a thousand minuscule grains of sand, direction, momentum, and resultant erosion. None of us have a million dollars but a million of us have $1.

What’s more it’s easier now than it’s ever been. You don’t have to hit the streets with wheat paste to spread a message, you can just hit retweet. Replace pickets with posts, hit like on like minded views. They may call it slacktivism, say it won’t change anything, question what good is an image in the face of law and power, yet those in power spend millions to shape this landscape they say has no impact on the war, as though hill and stream mean nothing to an army. They hire bots as mercenaries to disrupt online discourse and communities, they manipulate algorithms to affect the spread of messaging. So if all this noise we make online truly means nothing, if it is so ineffectual, why are they so desperate to use and control it, why is the castle so scared of the sand, unless it understands what that same sand kicked up in to a swarm can do.