Page 53 →Chapter 3 Metaphors of Curation

In the process of these contemporary discussions, our rhetorical focus has settled almost entirely on property ownership, whether it be corporate, private, or communal. While this focus is kairotic and vital, it elides to some extent attendant issues of invention, originality, and authorial labor. Ownership and appropriation metaphors fail to help us closely examine some foundational aspects of our larger quandries about intellectual property: namely widely varied rhetorical perspectives on invention and labor, which come prior to issues of ownership in the writing and publishing process.

This was not always the case. Earlier arguments made by English writers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries deployed more nuanced metaphors that worked to tie labor to ownership. By necessity these authorship theorists were most often working writers struggling to exercise some agency concerning their work, which was not infrequently produced at the behest of patrons, publishers, or subscribers and then owned and distributed by members of the Stationers’ Company. The most prominent of these arguments are still commonly referenced within contemporary intellectual property literature but rarely presented in full historical context. Historical metaphors that tie authorial labor to a careful ethics of ownership offer us some guidance regarding our current arguments but must be understood in a situated way that considers the culture within which they arose. Further, attention to less commonly cited historical arguments about intellectual property and the work of curation can provide deeper insight into the ways that authorship and ownership were being considered in the early eighteenth century, and the ways these discussions were rhetorically calibrated to be most persuasive to audiences who lived in a very specific time and place. I focus on the natural metaphors used by Chambers and contemporary critics of Wikipedia to describe curatorial work and distributed collaboration. It is telling that both then and now, we have equated textual products with living children or cherished Page 56 →land while relying on nonhuman animals in order to understand and explain the work of textual curation, which can seem regimented and even nonhuman to the point of being soulless.

Milton was one of the earliest British authors to write explicitly on this topic, publishing his “Areopagitica” (1644) “in angry response to the reinstitution of licensing by Parliament [and in the process defining] the figure of the autonomous author, the man whose authority is not based on public office or sanction but on personal experience, study, and deliberation.”¹⁰ Pushing against the declaration that authors could not hold the publication or distribution rights to their own work, he constructed the proprietary-author-as-topos and portrayed books as “precious lifeblood” and living progeny, comparing their burning to a kind of murder. He followed this effort with “Eikonoklastes” in 1649, musing on the “human right, which commands that every author should have the property of his own work reserved to him after death, as well as living.”¹¹ Perhaps the most often cited property-based argument is John Locke’s “sweat of the brow” doctrine described in Two Treatises of Government (1689), which argued for labor’s role in property ownership. In spite of his efforts, the writer’s individual rights remained largely unrecognized at the turn of the next century.

In the first decade of the eighteenth century, Daniel Defoe became a champion of the autonomous author’s rights to ownership, publishing his Essay on the Regulation of the Press as well as a series of arguments in the Review. He continued the paternity metaphor, famously calling books “the Child of the [the Author’s] Inventions, the Brat of his Brain.”¹² Joseph Addison, in a 1709 piece for the Tatler, compared it to real property: “His Brain, which was his Estate, had as regular and different Produce as other Men’s land” (41). While these metaphors acknowledge the importance of the author’s labor and investment, they assume that all compositional processes for all genres are similar and consequently demand similar ethical stances on authorship and ownership regardless of the genre at hand. The animal metaphors attached to the Cyclopædia and Wikipedia both depart from these persistent property-based metaphors. Rather than locate the force of the argument in the products of authorial labor, the honeybee, the daw, and the piranha rely on process as the fulcrum for persuasion. Even Locke’s sweat was a product of labor already well underway; the foraging bee and daw return us to the inventional process undertaken before the transformative labor of textual curation.

In the final pages of the preface, Chambers employs nonhuman metaphors as a means of discussing the Encyclopedic Author’s function as a gatherer in an information ecology. In doing so he works toward rehabilitating the canon of Page 57 →arrangement as a form of composition that is distinct from but every bit as legitimate as the original invention we associate with the canonical Author. Chambers’s conceptualization of authorship through arrangement and transformation is illustrated in his use of two contrasting metaphors: the daw and the honeybee: “Call me what you will, a daw, and say I am stuck over with other peoples’ feathers, with all my heart. But it would be altogether as just to compare me to the bee, the symbol of industry, as that of pride. For though I pick up my matters in a thousand places, ’tis not to look gay my self, but to furnish you with honey. I have rifled a thousand flowers—prickly ones, many of ’em—to load your hive.”¹³

This turn in the preface provides a rich opportunity to contextualize arguments embedded in discourse that was very much informed by the natural philosophy and publishing communities of early eighteenth-century London. Carefully situating his metaphors for encyclopedic authorship and ownership, which are rather foreign to contemporary American understandings of the cultural value of bees and daws, provides an opportunity to examine not just the cultural meaning of these metaphors but also his understanding of the ways that authorship processes function within textual curation. While the meaning of his metaphors is not entirely lost to us, neither are the nuances completely clear. Far from making simple claims for industrious gathering, Chambers was making careful arguments for his own ethos as a very specific sort of writer as well as the ethos of his project, which he cast as a recomposed collection that transformed prior texts and knowledge in order to present a new product that was at the forefront of scientific thought. At various points these metaphors can be interpreted as establishing the writer’s and project’s ethos in terms of social class, economic value, moral virtue, and the mores of the Enlightenment project, as well as explaining the labor and ethics of encyclopedic authorship. Chambers claimed that the central compositional labor he performed centered on filtering and arrangement. By declaring the bee his mascot, he claimed an ethos of industry and virtue as a worker devoted to gathering and transforming an important good. It was an argument that he knew well.

Chambers was well read, maintaining a personal library of hundreds of volumes that likely filled much of his large apartment at Gray’s Inn.¹⁴ This collection included a number of texts that touched on both historical and contemporaneous fascinations with bees, including a thorough collection of classical texts as well as multiple volumes of Bacon’s work and commentary on them.¹⁵ While not formally educated beyond basic schooling, he was an accomplished autodidact and certainly familiar with the classical canon as it was understood in his time. His use of the bee as a metaphor for authors and authorship was hardly new, and the Page 58 →catalogue indicates that he was aware of much of its lineage as well as the most prominent uses of honeybees as metaphors in contemporary discourse.

Plato deployed apian imagery in his critique of poetry in the Republic,¹⁶ and the direct comparison between bees and authors dates back at least to Virgil. In his 1996 essay on Chambers, Yeo pointed out that Chambers’s comparison is remarkably similar to that Erasmus makes in De Copia.¹⁷ The structure and argument of these quotes are indeed a striking—but not unusual—example of appropriation on Chambers’s part. “The student, diligent as a little bee, will flit about through all the gardens of authors and will attack all the little flowerlets from whence he collects some honey which he carries into his own hive: and, since there is so much fertility of material in these that they are not all able to be plucked off, he will select the most excellent and adapt it to the structure of his own work.”¹⁸ Through this metaphor both Chambers and Erasmus draw on a long-standing metaphor that stretches back before Lucretius’s time and was most famously employed in the classical realm by Aesop as well as Virgil, whose bees symbolize virtuous, communal industry in the Aeneid¹⁹ and the Georgics.²⁰ John Dryden had produced a fresh and labor-intensive translation of the Georgics in the 1680s, which remained in circulation. Chambers kept two editions in his library, one plain and one with gilt leaves.²¹

Francis Bacon was another early English adopter of this metaphor, using it to explain transformative creative labor in science: “The men of experiment are like the ant; they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course; it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own.”²² One of its most prominent, recent instances that Chambers was almost certainly aware of was in Jonathan Swift’s Battle of the Books, which included “The Fable of the Spider and the Bee.” Here Swift casts the bee as a natural transformer of found materials, morally superior to the spider, who is bloated by consumption in a house that is merely made from materials pulled from its own body. His allegory is intended as commentary on the culture of Paternoster Row and Fleet Street, casting the bee as author and the spider as critic.²³

Chambers was also likely familiar with Aesop’s Fables, which contains no fewer than six tales of a jackdaw or crow masquerading above his station.²⁴ This tale was such basic cultural knowledge in this period that the Oxford English Dictionary indicates that a secondary meaning of “daw” in the early eighteenth century referred to Aesop’s fable “The Bird with Borrowed Feathers,” which tells of a daw in peacock’s plumes. In this tale a daw gathers tail feathers that fell from peacocks as they molted. He straps them all to his own tail and impersonates a peacock in order to join their community but is soon discovered and disciplined Page 59 →by the real peacocks. The moral of the tale is “it is not only fine feathers that make fine birds.” This metaphor also persisted in British culture: as William St. Clair noted, “Robert Greene described his younger contemporary Shakespeare as ‘an upstart crow beautified with our feathers’” in the 1592 Groatsworth of Wit.²⁵ Chambers may well have chosen this rather déclassé bird as a metaphor for one potential perception of his own place in London society. In his case this sort of comparison would have insinuated that as someone from a farming family who had completed only a basic education, he was not learned at all and certainly not someone who could hope to gain the inherent virtues of upper-class breeding. Rather he was someone who hoped to gain a reputation for being knowledgeable by associating himself with other truly educated individuals and stealing their knowledge for his own gain. It would have been an indication of false pride in false accomplishments. Bees, on the other hand, occupied a much more respectable rank as heraldry elements and as an imperial symbol that was frequently embroidered on royal regalia. They also played a central role in the English economy and culture, and their hives were often depicted as metaphors for the monarchical system. Aligning himself with these insects cast him as industrious, valorous, and inherently respectable.

Chambers’s casting of the bee as textual gatherer can be read as a commentary on curatorial processes of collection, filtering, and recomposition that are specific to the encyclopedic genre. Contrasting it with the daw provides a contextualizing counterpoint of a different sort of collecting. The daw, now more commonly known as the jackdaw, is a member of the crow family; the western jackdaw is common across Europe and particularly England. Hunted as vermin by order of Henry VIII, the bird is omnivorous and noisy and perhaps most famous for its attraction to shiny objects, which it returns to its nest, much like magpies do. Daws are intelligent thieves, but they do not attain even bricolage with their findings. While its nest is a carefully composed dwelling, the items it brings back to it are merely stashed rather than arranged. Chambers’s initial comparison to a daw can be read simply, unflatteringly implying that the author has stolen many shiny bits of information and compiled them into an encyclopedia. This comparison parallels in our contemporary metaphor of piracy, which implies random collection rather than arrangement, as well as moral corruption demonstrated through the act of theft.

By casting the encyclopedist as a bee, Chambers makes a distinction between poetic authorship associated with original genius and the curatorial composition process undertaken by the encyclopedist. An encyclopedist, then, is a selective Page 60 →textual harvester who transforms gathered materials into a contribution to human knowledge and education. This composer explicitly relies on external materials and his or her knowledge of where they may be found, devoting a substantial portion of labor to the gathering or collection process, followed by a period of filtering and transforming the gathered materials. This aspect then also reinforces the idea of the encyclopedic author as assessor and recomposer: where daws gather objects at random for the purposes of mere collection, the bee focuses on gathering a specific substance and then working collaboratively to transform it into a derivative product by adding enzymes in the course of exchanging the nectar with other bees through their proboscises and using their wings to evaporate the water content.²⁶

The finished product enters into the economy of the hive, which is itself a precisely arranged structure built with standardized cells that support life through functioning as both nursery and storehouse. The daw’s tendency to gather random objects into assemblages develops a palpable rhetorical tension when contrasted with the orderly structure of the hive. Daws build rather messy nests that consist largely of piles of sticks, decorating them with irregularly placed found objects. In other words they are hardly renowned for strict architectural design. The geometric perfection of bee-built cells and the symmetry of hive boxes and skeps are a stark contrast to these twig piles and denote a more careful and certainly replicable composition process.

This core structure is highly adaptable to spatial situations, and bees build on limbs, in trees, and even in the ground. “In insects, the mathematical precision of architecture, planning, adjusting is confined not to the intelligence of imposing form on matter,” explained Jussi Parikka, “but to primitive life (self)organizing itself into a habitat. Bees are an apt example used by various writers. . . . in that they are seen as inherently geometric architects.”²⁷ The abilities of the architects to adapt to available space is similar the flexibility of successful information architectures built by textual curators. As Parikka put it, “Instead of a representational approach to building and technology, insects suggest a mode of inhabiting and creating space by which they seem to track the contours and tendencies of the matter at hand and in order to push it toward certain key forms, singularities.”²⁸ This flexibility also extends to the material of the hive: “The combs and the building breathe, live with their surroundings and form only a transductive membrane instead of a closed space.”²⁹ Curatorial work is highly contextual, and successful texts are products of many vested interests which in turn influence information collection and architecture at both macro and micro levels. Reference texts live and breathe within their cultural moment, responding to the interests and pressures of their time. They expand with new information and contract through acts of textual deletion, vandalism, and censorship. In order to not only survive but Page 61 →consistently present usable, findable information, they depend on standardized architectures and interface conventions that can account for necessary fluctuations.

In making this comparison, Chambers was not appealing just to cultural associations of the day, but also to the bee’s long history in England as an important farm animal, a vital economic good and property, and to bee products as essential, everyday materials that crossed social classes and occupations.³⁰ Bees, honey, and beeswax were both mundane and sacred, valued within the home and within the rituals of the church. Consequently they were also a central economic good and had been for centuries. A general understanding of the ways honeybees were prized in English culture from the medieval period through the late eighteenth century allows us to attend to the considerable claims to ethos and value that Chambers made through this metaphor.

In the centuries before electricity, beeswax was prized for its clear, warm light and sweet smell. Beeswax candles burned cleaner and were far more convenient to manage than more affordable light sources such as rush lights.³¹ The candles were needed to light both the rooms of small homes and the candelabras of aristocratic great halls. Candles were so valued that they were frequently offered as allowances for members of the castles and great houses and collected as taxes or used to pay fines.³² Candle making, or chandlery, was an essential and venerated craft. The still-operational Worshipful Company of Wax Chandlers, who trace their lineage to a twelfth-century royal decree governing “German merchants trading in beeswax in London,” gained ordinances in 1371 and were granted a royal charter in 1484.³³ The chandlers sold wax not just for candles, but also for images, figurines, and other religious objects.

The market value and virtuous associations of beeswax were further driven by the church, since candles were required for a wide variety of religious services. Beeswax was so valuable that Henry III gifted one thousand pounds of beeswax to Westminster Abbey in 1247 for “the making of a giant taper for Candlemas.”³⁴ Monasteries also kept commonly kept bees, “and rents and tithes from their substantial lands could be paid by their tenants in wax,” as Hattie Ellis noted in her cultural history of honeybees. The monks produced candles for religious use, and many also became purveyors of honey and mead, bringing substantial money into the monasteries’ coffers. Honey was the central sweetening agent in England for centuries since sugar was not imported to Britain until the fifteenth century and was not relatively common until the colonization of the West Indies in the seventeenth century.³⁵ As a result beehives themselves had significant market value. Wild beehives were as valuable as domestic ones, and both were considered Page 62 →taxable property of the landowner. Beekeeping and the processing of bee products was, until the late medieval period, an important and active profession practiced throughout the kingdom by individuals and communities.

The economic value of apiaries fell after Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in the late 1530s, which included an injunction against the use of beeswax candles for religious purposes.³⁶ However, while the number of England’s hives declined, the honeybee’s status did not. Beekeeping remained an important craft throughout the United Kingdom, and a number of significant technical texts were devoted to it. As late as 1768 Thomas Wildman began his Treatise on the Management of Bees by writing, “As the value of honey has however lessened [owing to the West Indian possession], luxury has increased the price of wax, which is now become the greatest supply of light in all polite assemblies.”³⁷ Hives were so essential in everyday life that schoolchildren were routinely trained in their care and housewives were encouraged to profitably include hives in their gardens, as William Lawson did in The Country Housewife’s Garden (1631).³⁸

In comparing the encyclopedist to a honeybee, Chambers made a claim for the pervasive, mundane virtues of reference texts. The Cyclopædia included information on military, legal, and religious topics and grew to include some craft knowledge in its subsequent editions—all areas of information that were relevant to daily life. Bees’ connection to the church through the sacramental candles and as an income source for monasteries reinforced Chambers’s claim to an ethos of moral virtue that spoke to the overall value and propriety of his project as well as the transformative labor of the encyclopedic authorship process. This foundation of moral virtue may have rhetorically ameliorated the heretical alphabetical arrangement of the text, which imposed man’s order on God’s creation. It also put in place a counterpoint to another claim made through this metaphor: an alignment with the British Enlightenment.

The problem of constructing an optimal hive became a topic of scientific inquiry in the mid-seventeenth century. Up until then, domestic beehives were most often kept in either hollowed logs or woven skeps, neither of which provided a clear means of extracting the honey and comb or a way of observing the bees at their work. It was necessary, then, to destroy the hive during the honey harvest and for both bees and beekeeper to begin again each year. As the British Enlightenment dawned, gentlemen scientists turned their heads toward this problem.

Their work on what was known as “rational beekeeping” began with the Reverend William Mew’s construction in 1649 of an octagonal wooden hive with Page 63 →glass observation windows. With it he planned to make notes on the bee’s activities as well as on meteorological events by means of the observational ornaments he placed on top of the hive.³⁹ After commencing his observations in 1652, he gave the plans to Dr. John Wilkins at Wadham College, University of Oxford, who built one and in turn gave the plans to John Evelyn in 1654. This transfer proved precipitous, as Eva Crane has pointed out in her comprehensive history of beekeeping: “When the Royal Society was founded in 1660, Wilkins became its joint first Secretary. Christopher Wren was also a Founder Fellow.”⁴⁰ It was the famed architect Wren who created the first stacked (or tiered) hive, also with observation windows, and made the problem of building a better beehive one of the Royal Society’s problems of interest. Advances in beehive construction and beekeeping continued throughout Chambers’s life and the production life of the Cyclopædia, from John Gedde’s original patent on the octagonal, tiered hives that were eventually set up in the king’s gardens at Windsor, Whitehall, and the Falkland Palace to Thomas Wildman’s public bee displays and publication of A Treatise on the Management of Bees in 1768.

By aligning himself with the bee, Chambers located himself and his encyclopedia at the cutting edge of science. This was a strategic construction of ethos in a project that purported to include “the figures, kinds, properties, productions, preparations, and uses of things natural and artificial.” In making such a claim he aligned the Cyclopædia with one of the central projects of the preeminent scientific society in London and with a utilitarian area of science that most people of the time would identify as valuable. The text’s content bore this ethos out, as he relentlessly grounded the articles in canonical scientific texts and the most recent advancements of the day.

The hive is also, as the Royal Society was documenting through its studies, a social structure reliant on the cooperation of its community for wealth and survival.⁴¹ A single bee cannot supply enough honey or heat to fuel a hive or even just itself through a winter. Rather the survival of the hive depends on the full collective that is the hive, much as the success of an encyclopedia depends on a communal store of knowledge developed by many scholars and thinkers. In the first edition preface, Chambers is explicit about his reliance on numerous previously published resources. But as he prepared the second edition over the next decade, he went himself one better by proactively working to develop a wide collective of contributors. By 1734 he was no longer so concerned about justifying the social process of building an encyclopedia. During the revision process Page 64 →he placed the previously mentioned magazine advertisements soliciting article submissions from the reading public, thus creating an early analogue version of a publicly authored encyclopedia.

The honeybee metaphor’s collective aspects also bridged a unique view of the hive as a way of understanding and discussing England itself. The prevalence of honeybees and their hive as a metaphor for the commonwealth⁴² and model society is a striking example of the differences between the ways that early eighteenth century English culture understood and deployed honeybees in everyday discourse and the ways that our own twenty-first-century American society approaches them with suspicion of being “wild” and “killer.” Chambers was making a comfortable comparison to an agricultural animal that humans had worked alongside and, as apiary science improved, domesticated. Bees were such an integral aspect of everyday household life in the British Isles that there developed the tradition of “telling the bees,” or visiting the hives daily to recount the household gossip and keep the bees informed.⁴³ We retain some vestiges of positive tropes related to bees: the intense collaborative productivity of transforming raw materials into a finished product was frequently understood as a metaphor for both virtuous industriousness and an aspirational model of a perfect society. Isaac Watts’s Divine and Moral Songs for Children, first published in 1720, contains the familiar verse

How doth the little busy bee

Improve each shining hour

And gather honey all the day

From every opening flower.⁴⁴

While contemporary interpretations arguably had a decidedly moral aspect that was grounded in Christian notions of proper conduct and industry, during the two centuries surrounding Chambers’s life and work, the trope of the hive-as-ideal-society appeared again and again in heavily circulated texts, including William Butler’s The Feminine Monarchie, still considered a central text by honeybee historians, and John Daye’s The Parliament of Bees.⁴⁵ This valorization of industrious, docile bodies with fierce dedication to their hive invited rhetorical identification by the populace that was immensely useful for an empire with a fervent, expanding economy that was on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution. As workers began to transition from farm to factory in the later decades of the eighteenth century, the factories themselves could be figured as buzzing hives. Increasingly docile workers reported daily, performing discrete, skilled work that built corporations and contributed to the collective economy rather than to their own farmsteads.

Darker connotations for the hive were also developing. Bernard de Mandeville’s notorious 1705 pamphlet The Grumbling Hive or Knaves turn’d Honest was a remarkably successful publishing property, republished with an essay and remarks in 1714 as The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits. After a slow early reception, it eventually became one of the most widely read books of the time, and Chambers kept a two-volume 1732 edition in his library.⁴⁶ Far from the virtuous connections drawn from the honeybee’s association with the church and with literal sweetness, Mandeville’s tale portrays England as a flourishing hive whose wealth is dependent on the wickedness of its recalcitrant citizens. “Most writers are always teaching men what they should be, and hardly ever trouble their heads with telling them what they really are,” he wrote.⁴⁷ The perfection of vice is as vital as the perfection of virtue, the writer argued: vanity, pride, and envy are surely among man’s sins, but they also create industry and wealth. His bees are “Sharpers, Parasites, Pimps, Players, Pick-pockets, Coiners, Quacks, Sooth-Sayers” whose transgressions further create employment through the justice system as well as for locksmiths, guards, and the like (3). He also targeted clerical hypocrisy and acknowledged prostitution as a trade.

As the British empire continued to extend its reach, attention to the social order of the hive increasingly focused on the drone as a worthless citizen who deserved banishment.⁴⁸ This metaphor also persisted in the publishing world, which railed against plagiarists and copyright infringers.⁴⁹ Drones’ only contributions to the colony are to mate with the queen; they neither gather pollen nor tend the hive nursery. Because of their lack of contribution to the collective, they are banished by the workers at the end of the summer as the hive begins its final preparations for winter. On the first cold day, the drones perish. As the century progressed, the poor, with their perceived failure to contribute to the English hive, were increasingly labeled as drones. This metaphoric degradation of the poor had precedent in Bacon’s “An Advertisement Touching upon a Holy War,” in which he referred to rebellious masses as a bee swarm. “Bacon’s essay best reflects the English mind-set regarding poor people, but many English writers found this drone image a convenient analogy to convince poor people to go to the newly emerging colonies in America,” historian Tammy Horn has written, adding that the metaphor was also taken up by John Cotton when he encouraged the tradesmen to “hive off” as swarms do when a hive divides itself in two (11). The bee, then, came to signify the natural and divine order of British social stratification as well as social engineering.

In contemporary American discourse, bees no longer occupy the central, familiar role that they most often did in Chambers’s England. We retained positive Page 66 →vestiges while our ties to England were stronger and garden hives more common. These associations were intertwined with Protestant work ethics: industriously transforming raw materials as the colonies were settled was frequently understood as virtuous aspiration to a more perfect society than had been available in the old country. This moral aspect was grounded in Christian notions of propriety, industry, and logic. In this view, as in the earlier English perspective, bees retained a semblance to the unfallen natural world, wild and mysterious, but also knowable.

During the twentieth century apian metaphor shifted considerably. The hive, built on logical, flexible social order and the collective performances of its individual actors, was transmuted into the swarm, a locus of anxiety. With its unintelligible relationality, the swarm exemplifies and expands fears of the crowd that were previously manifested as disdain for unwashed, impoverished masses that might revolt. It simultaneously reveals fears of being subsumed by the crowd, carried along by distributed performance against one’s individual will. As J. Kennedy and Eberhart point out in their work on swarm intelligence, “social is the primary aspect of swarm.”⁵⁰ By nature swarms disrupt ideals of individualism, posing tremendous anxiety for a culture that cherishes its self-image of being composed of rugged individuals who engage in exceptional performances of individual agency. In contrast to the individual bee as a discrete, taxonomized member of a hive, the swarm exists outside of any perceived structure, acting as a unified, adaptable organism. This collective is greater than the sum of its parts, engaging in distributed work and collective intelligence, “especially by providing individuals with more information than their own sense can gather.”⁵¹ The swarm is the ultimate egalitarian society, disrupting any stable notion of hierarchy that observers might wish to impose. Instead, this collective coordinates action in ways that our present-day popular consciousness casts as indiscernible and, in contrast to the Enlightenment advances in logical beekeeping, largely unintelligible.

This unintelligible, distributed performance became a central 20th century trope in media depictions of swarms. Parikka observed that “seemingly automated behavior is described by Maeterlinck as a ‘strange emotion.’ Here the emotion acts as a trigger of a kind that points to the way bodies are affectively coordinated in the organizational form. The swarm is a becoming that expresses potentialities that are always situated and yet moving.”⁵² The swarm is necessarily contingent and contextual, then, responding to its environment. We anticipate these unintelligible, agile responses with fear, assuming that their purposeful actions will result in harm. Since the killer bee scares of 1970s and 1980s, bees have been popularly imagined as unpredictable, as less solitary and more likely to swarm, as progenitors of painful, bodily harm. The garden bee skep is a rare object these days, and we approach hives not with the expectation of honey but with the fear of finding “killer” or “Africanized” bees.

Page 67 →These fears are made manifest in twentieth-century cinema and television productions. As the world rested between the World Wars and then entered the terrible years of World War II, swarms pursued various deserving Hanna Barbera⁵³ and Disney⁵⁴ cartoon characters. Swarm behavior in Springtime for Pluto (1944) is particularly striking, depicted as both agile and contextualized within the ongoing war: the swarm takes on the shape of military technology, alternately becoming a rocket or bomber plane and firing “missiles” of bees. Decades later Saturday Night Live’s recurring Killer Bees sketch (1975–78) would also speak to wartime anxieties, albeit in a very different fashion. Using the tabloid trope of Africanized killer bees that then appeared every American checkout stand, the Killer Bees depicted the Other, functioning as comedic commentary on revolutionary immigrants from Mexico as well as clandestine U.S. involvement in South American civil wars.

The 1970s also saw substantial string of horror movies devoted to bees and swarms. These monstrous collectives began to replace the postatomic denizens of 1950s and 1960s Creature Features, which were frequently represented as individual agents, even when they functioned within crowds: The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), the ants of Them! (1954), or the heroic daikaiju⁵⁵ that have populated Godzilla movies from 1954’s Gojira to the present. Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) was a startling departure from these monsters, relying on natural rather than mutant creatures and portraying coordinated swarm behavior as a malevolent force that stems from unintelligible motives. The birds’ apparent lack of motive is an important horrific element, serving as Hitchcock’s MacGuffin, or plot device, that drives the narrative and his characters in their heroic resistance to the birds. This theme proliferated throughout the 1970s in films such as The Hellstrom Chronicle (1971), Killer Bees (1974), Phase IV (1974), The Bees (1978), and The Swarm (1978). In the following decade swarms diversified into cockroaches in Creepshow (1982), alien parasites in Night of the Creeps (1986), and spiders in 1990’s Arachnophobia.

At the turn of the millennium, heavy integration of two other recurring elements invigorated what was becoming a tired, albeit nostalgic, trope: technofears concerning automation and human/machine integration began to replace the unintelligible natural agent, and crowds comprising individual actors were augmented by the swarm. Horror of automation and cyborgs had circulated for thousands of years, beginning with classical tales of Greek automaton warriors and extending into the early twentieth century through the heavy circulation of Rossum’s Universal Robots (1920) and Metropolis (1927), among other artifacts. Integration of this trope with the fear of the swarm reveals uniquely modern concerns about the potential of technologies to subsume and dominate humanity. These anxieties are perhaps best exemplified by the Borg of Star Trek: The Page 68 →Next Generation, and Star Trek: Voyager, who first appeared in 1989.⁵⁶ Cybernetic drones composed this collective society, known as the Hive, in a nod to the films that came before it, or alternately as the Collective. Collective members are made, not born, having been abducted from their home planets and assimilated by being injected with a swarm of nanobots. All targeted life forms receive the Borg’s famous warning: “Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated!” No agency is possible for individuals within the Hive, controlled by their internal nanobots and external prosthetic technologies. Members of the collective are stripped of their ability to perform in any way except as part of the swarm’s coordinated action, or to even consider other possibilities. This unthinkingness and inability to conceive of exerting individual agency is a dramatic depiction of the hive mind.

As the Internet increasingly became a part of daily life for most first-world users, the idea of hive mind appeared frequently in discussions of distributed collaboration and the potential of collective intelligence in digital environments. While some of the connotations attached to it were hopeful, including a sense of global community and shared purpose, it also conveyed contemporary anxieties about the potential cruelty of swarms and the possibilities of assimilation into borg-like digital communities. Distributed work processes within closed groups such as Anonymous can appear to be inhuman and even near-automatic to external observers, sometimes leading to comparisons between the living, organic hive and networked machinery. “Just as a beehive functions as if it were a single sentient organism, so does an electronic hive, made up of millions of buzzing, dim-witted personal computers, behave like a single organism. Out of networked parts—whether of insects, neurons, or chips—come learning, evolution, and life,” wrote Kevin Kelly.⁵⁷

The notion of hive mind emerged in the 1990s alongside chaos and complexity theory. Joseph Reagle traced its evolution from those earlier inquiries into the ways that order can spontaneously emerge from chaos, noting that former Wired editor Kevin Kelly posited hive mind as “a theory in understanding social organization and intelligence.”⁵⁸ Just after the turn of the century, prominent publications on emergent distributed collaboration focused further attention on this topic area: Rheingold’s Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, S. Johnson’s Emergence, and Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody.⁵⁹ Each of these scholars explores issues related to coordination and cooperation in decentralized crowds. Collectively their work drew the attention of technologists, activists, and others who were interested in understanding the ways that large groups of people accomplish a central goal with minimal communication or direction. Much of the conversations surrounding this phenomenon were positive, focusing on the scalability of work and the potential for evading surveillance as well as the quasi-mystical qualities of something like collective intelligence.

Page 69 →But the metaphor of the hive also carried with it connotations of assimilation into communities that discourage individual, rational thought or wisdom. As Reagle put it this criticism contends “that the fanatical mob producing Wikipedia exhibits little wisdom and is more like a Maoist cult of monkeys banging away at the keyboards and thumb pads of their gadgets, disturbing the noble repose of scholars and displacing high-quality content from the market-place.”⁶⁰ The hive, critics have written, was dehumanizing, an assault on individualism and rationality that was evidenced in many ways, not the least of which was Wikipedia’s rejection of expertise and insistence on consensus. Jaron Lanier waged the most extended assault on what he understood as the hive aspects of Wikipedia, arguing that its collectivism created an aura of superhuman authorship: “Wikipedia . . . works on what I call the Oracle illusion, in which knowledge of the human authorship of a text is suppressed in order to give the text superhuman validity. Traditional holy books work in precisely the same way and present many of the same problems.”⁶¹ Throughout his arguments he returns to what he understands as the erasure of the individual Author’s signature, visibility, expertise, and style. Lanier sees the common voice and signature of the Wikipedian hive as a decontextualization of information that consequently impoverishes both the source and the reader.⁶²

The perceived anonymity and decontextualization of Wikipedian authorship has often been constructed metaphorically as piranha-like schooling behavior, largely dependent on episodes of violent swarming behavior. Pirhanas are popularly imagined as vicious predators in recent made-for-TV movies like Mega Pirhana and Pirhanaconda but in reality are simply schooling fish who prefer to live and work in groups, functioning communally to scavenge food and defend themselves from threats.⁶³ “The Piranha Effect” refers to the swarms of editors who descend on articles related to timely news topics, building out and negotiating revision of extensive articles in real time as events unfold. Similarly a community of editors may be drawn to an article whose topic is suddenly in the news, being prepared for a Featured status review that may lead to possible inclusion on Wikipedia’s front page, or experiencing an influx of vandalism. During review periods for articles that have been marked for deletion, concerned editors engage in a relatively rapid debate about whether an article should stay or go, moving quickly to generate consensus for their viewpoint. The term originated in the French Wikipedia community and entered English with Jimmy Wales’s description of it: “You start with a little tiny article and it’s not quite good enough, so people are picking at it and sort of a feeding frenzy and articles grow.”⁶⁴ This practice of building full articles from “little tiny” article stubs has been the foundation of textual development within the project. Andrew Lih examines the phenomena at length in his project history The Wikipedia Revolution, relating its influence Page 70 →on the development of not just article text but also the ubiquitous dot maps that appear on every town article.⁶⁵

Strangely enough, the piranhas are a utopian metaphor for Wikipedia, offering a misleading impression of the ways that authorial agency develops within the community and its processes. The swarm is an inclusive collective that assimilates but rarely rejects actors. In the popular imagination, all piranhas in a school look the same and recognize each other as collaborators in the process of, say, stripping a cow carcass down to the bones. Their coordinated frenzy moves relentlessly forward toward the goal, never stopping for negotiations or resistance to central policies. Piranhas do not revert each other’s contributions. No piranha is discouraged from participation, and none foment revolution or quietly leave the school. The school does not develop incommensurable philosophical differences. All these things are true and even encouraged within the ontology of Wikipedia, resulting in complex curatorial performances that are heavily shaped by policy and surveillance.