My slow ascent from the realms of Morpheus was abruptly accelerated by a sudden pounding on the ceiling from the neighbors upstairs. As a result, I was rudely yanked into reality—like a buoy held underwater and suddenly untethered from the bottom. There was no point in indulging in the otherwise pleasant ritual of lying in bed after waking up. The kids upstairs were clearly planning to play thrash metal on the increasingly overstretched strings of my nerves, while their parents accompanied them with percussion instruments typical of renovation work.

I wished them…
Good morning.

I looked out the window at the neighboring apartment block. A woman was vigorously shaking some kind of rug from her balcony. I got up, put water on for tea, and turned on the radio. “Creep” by Radiohead was playing.

I went to the bathroom to flush some water, and at that exact moment something thudded on the ceiling, right above my head. Screw them. Before washing my hands, I cast a brief glance at the unattractive face in the mirror that was still lagging behind in its awakening—and then something hard fell again on the neighbors’ bathroom floor. Yes, once more, directly above my head.

A few minutes later I was staring at a news website, sipping red tea whose aroma had finally begun to displace the smoke in my head. My eyes got stuck on an annoying banner ad—one of those my ad-blocker was powerless against. Flashing on it were… earplugs! Damn it. Another banner was advertising some chocolate for diabetics! That genuinely irritated me. Why on earth had someone decided that this was the ad I needed to see? As far as I knew, I didn’t have diabetes. True, for the past few days I had been thinking about getting some blood tests done—just as a precaution—to check my values, including blood sugar, purely for information and peace of mind. And I had searched online for the nearest lab. That’s all.

But… did I really not have diabetes…?

I shifted my gaze to the article headlines. “Time to Take Out the Trash” was the title of some political analysis. I didn’t even start reading it, but out of curiosity I glanced at the comments below. The usual exchange of verbal feces, among which it’s hard to spot a meaningful opinion. One of the first comments caught my eye because it was written in all caps:

“SINK DOWN ALREADY, YOU USELESS OLD MAN! TAKE YOUR BLOOD PRESSURE PILLS AND SHOOT YOUR INSULIN REGULARLY SO YOU DON’T GET A STROKE, HAHAHA.”

I headed toward the bedroom to pack my backpack for the gym. I glanced again through the window at the building across the street. The woman on the balcony was still shaking her rug.

Suddenly, I felt very tired.
Wouldn’t it be better to skip the workout today and just rest…?

I first encountered the concept of the “human swarm” in the remarkable book The Hacked Human by Igor Shnurenko. By “human swarm,” he describes the future of societies in the information age, in which the individual has lost their individuality and consciousness has dissolved into collective imperatives imposed from above. The individual has died and been reborn as a drone of the system. This aggregate of human bio-units is directed through various methodologies by a hierarchical and totalitarian system that organizes and steers them in the name of its own goals—which, naturally, have nothing to do with human well-being or development.

The human being switches to command mode in every area of life, according to some general plan and the role assigned to them. Dystopian. But according to the author, people are already being organized into swarms through various methods based on the study of human behavior and personal data.

If the system knows an individual better than the individual knows himself—if it knows even his “dirty laundry”—it can entangle him in dependencies so tightly that there is no escape. To begin with, it can pressure him, threaten him, exhaust him, irritate him, drive him mad, tempt him, blackmail him, bribe him, seduce him, destabilize him, crush him, destroy him, make him ill, and so on… This can be done through real and virtual means whose common denominator is that they would be impossible to prove. And they may be carried out through the human swarm itself.

Such methods would resonate with the psyche of a specific individual—his life situation, fears, hopes, problems, and vulnerabilities. If the individual gives in, he will be “socialized” into the swarm, entangled in dependencies, and his mind duly washed. The swarm grows, and those who control it grow stronger.

So then…
didn’t I begin this post with one possible story?