To be (part) or not to be (part)

I really appreciated Tristan's blog, as he provided several examples of how a behaviour that is part of our psychobiological system can be mimicked in technology both for positive actions, like forecasting traffic, or malicious purposes, like DDoS attacks. The inner ambiguity of herd behaviour is what sparks my interest the most. While in the past being part of a group was extremely important for survival reasons, today our individualistic society seems to condemn herd behaviour as a form of conformism, that shows a lack of critical thinking. This is certainly true in several contexts, such as financial bubbles. However, our forms of herd behaviour are way more complex. I would divide them into two categories: thinking “like the group” and thinking “as a group”.

We all witnessed during the Covid-19 pandemic how panic buying brought people to purchase large quantities of goods because of fear or greed. It was a vicious circle: since a lot of people were afraid of others acting selfishly and leaving insufficient supplies for everyone, they themselves caused the panic buying phenomenon. But conforming to a dominant way of thinking is different from integrating a shared perspective into our own unique outlook. Research has shown how behaving as a group can lower our sense of loneliness and raise our ability to form social bonds. Our identity is socially constructed in a way that emphasizes others’ influence on our own values and beliefs.

A crowd of tiny robots stay still in an empty space. As long as the room remains dominated by silence, we can hear that every robot is emitting a low frequency whose meaning is unknown. Everything stays quiet, until some visitors cross the empty space. Suddenly, each of the tiny robots starts following one by one a different person. As if they had an immediate and irreversible attachment to that individual in a robotic version of Konrad Lorenz's imprinting phenomenon. Meanwhile, their emitted frequencies start increasing, but they are still disharmonic and unclear.

This process is never-ending, until some visitors realize that, when they move together according to precise patterns, their robots start drawing closer and reproducing the same movement. And even their frequencies seem to agree! As soon as the visitors coordinate their directions, the robots will behave increasingly as a single entity, and even their frequencies will coalesce into a unique sound that resembles the tuning of an orchestra.

This project aims to emphasize the difference, as robotic as human, between behaving “like the group” and thinking “as a group”: while the former means following someone else with no critical thinking about the overall meaning of oneself’s actions, the latter is all about modulating our own agency in a broader context where it assumes a deeper value.