Garden, Swarm, Factory
Polyps confounded political theorists in the 18th century. The creatures that collectively make up coral reefs acted in ways that defied both expectations of divine design and the established hierarchy of the animal kingdom. How could these lowest of organisms create such enormous structures—especially ones that appeared to be the product of one mind? How could microscopic creatures obstruct the ships of the most powerful forces on Earth, rupturing their hulls and forcing them to chart their way around polyp metropoli risen into islands? It’s no wonder that the anarchist anthropologist James C. Scott later drew an analogy between polyps and peasants. “Just as millions of anthozoan polyps create, willy-nilly, a coral reef,” he wrote, “so do thousands upon thousands of individual acts of subordination and evasion create a political or economic barrier reef of their own.”
The historian of science Whitney Barlow Robles quotes Scott in her wonderful book, Curious Species, where she explains how coral unsettled certainties. Fed by sunlight like grass, plants with their tentacles laid down layers of limestone. The power of polyps turned ideas of agency on their head, a molecular sightless mass acting as architect. Robles imagines it would be like “suddenly learning that butterflies, not people, planted all the trees in Central Park.”
It was a similar wonder at the endless events of the natural world that led classical liberals to draw connections between the order of nature and the order created by human exchange in the profane world of political economy. Philip Mirowski reminds us that natural metaphors serve double duty: they are “reassuring and graphically concrete images of order, situating humanity squarely at home in ‘its’ universe” while they also tame the disorder of nature, making “an unintelligible alien world comprehensible.”
Nature offered what Deirdre McCloskey calls the ”metaphors economists live by.” Because so much of our politics relies on an explicit and implicit understanding of economics, this means we live by those metaphors too. The intellectual movement of neoliberalism arrived at its ideas of the good society by thinking with and through nature. As the post-Cold War consensus around neoliberal globalization crumbles and the boundaries of individual freedom narrow, new metaphors might help us understand the successor ideology.
The British-Austrian economist and political philosopher Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992), the father of modern neoliberalism, claimed in his final book that “Darwin got the basic ideas of evolution from economics,” specifically from Adam Smith. To Hayek, the spontaneous order of society was the outcome of humans who, like polyps, operated without an ability to grasp the totality of their undertaking, but who nonetheless contributed to something sublime in its complexity and ever-expanding domain.
Reason, he wrote, was “overrated.” Human advance was not due to self-reflection but continually iterative adaptation: what we call custom and tradition are merely the outcome of long projects of trial and error towards more optimal outcomes. Political economy was not about individualism but about what the late great historian of economic thought Paul Lewis called “orders, orders everywhere.”
The challenge for policy, to Hayek and his like-minded neoliberals, was how to create the conditions for the coral reef of human economy—how to fine-tune the framework in which this could happen, balancing the needs of organisms to have enough resources to expand without determining advance how they would grow?
This is the puzzle that has plagued neoliberals from the beginning. Their solution was to analogize society to a garden—not an open coral reef in a crashing sea, but a contained biosphere where additions could be pruned or nurtured to produce optimal outcomes. In his acceptance speech for the Bank of Sweden Memorial Prize in Economics, Hayek inveighed against what he called the “pretense of knowledge” enjoyed by planners. Instead he praised “cultivation, in the sense in which the farmer or gardener cultivates his plants, where he knows and can control only some of the determining circumstances, and in which the wise legislator or statesman will probably attempt to cultivate rather than to control the forces of the social process.”
The garden as master metaphor has not endured. It was challenged first in the age of Web 1.0 by the deeper faith of Silicon Valley cyberlibertarians in the power of self-organizing markets. Upstart startups and coders preached a basic mistrust of the state as something to be escaped. While Hayek’s neoliberals had always seen a role for the government in the cultivating hand of the gardener, the first wave of Californian Ideology embraced the logic of the swarm. Regulation stifled innovation. Like murmurations of starlings moving in shifting formation through the twilight, the Internet would govern itself.
In a more recent turn over the last year, that same class of founders and CEOs—long inveterate skeptics of legacy East Coast elites—has made its peace with centralized authoritarianism. The fusion of Big Tech monopolism with an unprecedented concentration of executive power has narrowed the bands of tolerance for individual expression.
In the process, both garden and swarm have been replaced by a vision of society as factory. Biology has given way to physics. The evolutionary mind has been displaced by the very engineering mind Hayek set out to critique.
Connections between neoliberalism and science are often underappreciated. For Hayek, an early moment of mobilization in Britain came in the 1930s in the effort to protect the practice of science from perceived incursions by leftist ideology. His opponents were organized in the “social relations of science” movement, which included radical historical materialists like J.D. Bernal and J.B.S. Haldane who questioned science’s claim to neutrality and believed true science could only be pursued under conditions of socialism.
The clash prefigured later challenges from science studies and postcolonial feminist fields, which questioned what is taken for granted as objective, given that objectivity is shaped by a social world constructed to reproduce certain hierarchies. Neoliberalism was, in the words of Martin Beddeleem’s learned dissertation, about “fighting for the mantle of science.”
Hayek’s collaborator Michael Polanyi—a chemist—was deeply concerned with the conditions under which research could flourish. One of his more interesting sidelines was his critique of the ideas of copyright and patent. He believed attributing scientific discovery to a single individual was a travesty of how science actually worked. By analogy, he described it as a theatrical production.
“Mental progress,” he wrote, “interacts at every stage with the whole network of human knowledge and draws at every moment on the most varied and dispersed stimuli. Invention, and particularly a modern invention which relies more and more on a systematic process of trial and error, is a drama enacted on a crowded stage.”
Polanyi pointed to the fact that the reef was always collective—never the outcome of a single guiding hand. His brother, Karl, author of the hugely influential book, The Great Transformation, which appeared in 1944, the same year as The Road to Serfdom, borrowed from him the idea that liberals believed in a “self-regulating economy.” For both champions and critics, the investigation of science became a microcosm for understanding the economy and human society as such.
Hayek’s most influential work was devoted to the problem of distributed knowledge. He argued there was no way for a single centralized system—even a computer-assisted one—to capture the full diversity of how resources were used. The world was a shifting array of needs and desires. Economics, for Hayek, was always a subset of the problem of evolution. This was why he used the metaphor of the policymaker as gardener rather than designer.
Critics have homed in on the analogy of policy to gardening. They have portrayed it as part of modern technocracy’s obsession with control—the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman is the most famous interpreter of this tendency. For him, “the gardening state” introduced a logic of ordinal ranking of humans that underwrote both positive and negative eugenics. By deciding that certain lives were more and less worthy of life based on utility and beauty—as the gardener separates weeds from flowers—a state project was set in train that ended with the mechanized murder of pathologized “foreign bodies” in the death camps. For Bauman, the garden state was modernity’s dystopian end point.
The garden has also been opposed to the jungle in the racialized contrast between civilization and savagery. In the 1950s and 60s, during the rise of international economic law, the contrast between the “rule of the market” and the “law of the jungle” was common—especially when applied to newly independent nations. These countries were seen as needing the discipline of international investment law to prevent them from acting on their “lower natures.”
In 2022, Vice-President of the European Commission Josep Borrell had to apologize for comments that seemed to self-consciously echo the lineage of Western paternalism and the white man’s burden. “Europe is a garden,” he said, “We have built a garden. Everything works.” But “most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden…the jungle has a strong growth capacity, and the wall will never be high enough in order to protect the garden. The gardeners have to go to the jungle.”
Critiques of the garden metaphor are obviously valid. Yet it’s worth remembering that even gardens—weeded, tended, and sprayed—are unpredictable and are partially valued for the harmony that emerges from their internal variety. Individual organisms respond in ways that aren’t entirely controllable. This is the volatile tension at the heart of neoliberal political economy: what balance can be struck between coercion and autonomous self-creation? How wild can the garden grow?
The gardening mindset has consistently opposed radical redistribution, preserving status quo inequalities. Those in power have long benefited from promoting a false sense of individual autonomy. “You’re your own flower”—so goes the deceptively empowering refrain. And the unsustainable, extractive nature of humanity’s relationship to the natural world has been relentlessly exposed by both Marxist and non-Marxist ecological thought.
Yet arguably in recent years, we’ve moved to something more radical. The garden, like any ecosystem, requires not only trimming but also nourishment—some level of care. Neoliberal political economy, too, requires a degree of buy-in, not only bare consent but also emotional investment. In the first 100 days of the new presidential administration, the spectacle of constituents at town halls protesting potential cuts to Social Security and Medicare was telling. The social provisions offered to U.S. citizens may be minimal but they are a crucial way of securing legitimacy. The flowers demand their water and fertilizer.
The reciprocity of this arrangement seems to be lost on those occupying the heights of the Trump administration. From the so-called Department of Government Efficiency helmed until recently by Elon Musk to the coauthors of Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 in cabinet positions, the intention to dismantle the federal state—built iteratively over a century—is both open and deliberate. There is also a brazen rejection of the entire multilateral architecture of international economic governance in the world trading system—the product of the 20th-century economic gardening mentality.
There is, in short, a rumbling will to let a new logic take over, to trample the garden, to stop using herbicides—from the shock grenades of tariffs so high they amount to embargoes at the global level to the withdrawal of vaccine mandates for childhood diseases long seen as eradicated.
If the garden is dead, what has taken its place? Here we have to follow the two-step signaled at the top: the unlikely move from an embrace of the anarchic energy of the swarm to the antiseptic space of the factory. How did this happen?
In the 1990s, the emerging tech world of Silicon Valley became enamored with the idea of self-organizing systems. Kevin Kelly, editor of Wired, praised the potential of such systems—organisms or agents in a kind of ramped-up version of the polyp analogy—making decisions collectively without central coordination.
The book’s copy heralded “the dawn of a new era in which the machines and systems that drive our economy are so complex and autonomous as to be indistinguishable from living things.” This enthusiasm extended to Nicholas Negroponte’s MIT Media Lab, where Rodney Brooks created the robots captured vividly in Errol Morris’s documentary Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control.
The optimism of the time suggested the Internet might become a place without rules, echoing the utopian tone of John Perry Barlow’s oft-repeated Declaration of the Rights of Cyberspace delivered from Davos in 1996: “Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.”
But how did the logic of the garden intersect with the logic of the self-governing swarm supposedly arising through digital networks? Looking at the history of locusts and aphids, one could see how their imperatives might conflict. The swarm logic, with its capacity for devastation, posed a direct threat to the cultivated “gardens” of political economy.
In fact, the consumption of the garden by the swarm became one of the great imaginative tropes of the early 21st century. If Barlow represented the first wave, the second might be represented by the tech entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan, whose talk at the Y Combinator Summer School in 2013 titled “Silicon Valley’s Ultimate Exit” declared war on what he analogized to the former industrial “Rust Belt” by calling the “Paper Belt” of Washington, Boston, and New York with its laws, degrees, and newspapers. This was a vision of swarm logic turned against the legacy institutions of government, higher ed, advertising, journalism, and finance. Srinivasan’s rhetoric cast Silicon Valley as the vital swarm, laying waste to the decrepit, overregulated garden of American democracy and expertise.
Yet a moment’s reflection reveals that the political economy of the swarm does not autonomously produce its own stability. It is defined by volatility, by an ever-growing hunger for inputs—data, energy, attention, capital. If the dominant metaphor of the Internet in the 2000s was the cloud, then the swarm makes clear that the cloud is never self-sustaining: it must constantly descend on new fields, new user bases, new markets, to extract value.
The swarm had only a tenuous relationship with neoliberal political economy. It is hard to imagine Hayek endorsing the kind of disruption implicit in swarm logic. Despite his enchantment with the complexity of the natural world, he always was careful to note that humans required what he called a “thin layer of rules” deliberately designed. The state could never disappear. Part of this can be explained by biography. Witness to the collapse of world order twice over before he hit middle age, Hayek was committed to reestablishing stability, not destroying it. Those who lived through the long peace of the postwar Global North, by contrast, could afford a blasé attitude about what institutions could survive.
We can see the swarm as the biological metaphor at its outermost limit—spontaneous order without the gardener’s hand. And in many libertarian communities, this extreme form of order without order—capitalism without constraint—is simply called “freedom.”
This renegade wing of the libertarian right, particularly those on its anarcho-capitalist and tech-accelerationist fringe, often saw Hayek as a sellout—a servant of the welfare state. Their style was brasher, more apocalyptic, more inclined to dethrone the scientist and throw open the lab to chaos. Let the organisms run wild.
Nowhere did speculative fervor go further than in discussions of Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI. The fear—or fantasy—was that a singularity might be reached, where a runaway machine intelligence would subordinate humanity or simply convert it into paperclips or grey goo. Games like Katamari Damacy, where you roll through the world accumulating objects into a massive ball, were playful analogs of this devouring logic.
For a while, this swarm mentality prevailed. Yet the material reality of the technologies in question—and the actual incentives of the markets—never matched the anarchistic spirit. In her unlikely bestseller of 2018 on The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff walked readers through the process by which companies like Google and Facebook took the chaos of self-expression and turned it into a business model. Monetizing the madness, they sold ads back to the users.
If the adoption of AdSense by Google in 2003, in which they figured out how to turn “data exhaust” into advertising gold was one turning point, others came in 2007 and 2008. First, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone—a device famously “designed by Apple in California, assembled in China.” Like Milton Friedman’s pencil, the iPhone embodied globalized, anonymous production chains: from the artisanal cobalt mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo to the factory lines of Shenzhen.
Second, Elon Musk announced that the Tesla Roadster he was developing would have its most important component–the battery pack–made domestically. Unlike the iPhone, the core component of the Tesla would be not just designed but also assembled in California. And Musk, crucially, would seek total oversight over its production. This marked a betrayal of swarm logic. Musk was bringing the swarm back in-house, into a factory under his direct control.
In the years that followed, Musk’s philosophy revealed itself as deeply antithetical to the polycentric, improvisational neoliberalism of Hayek or even the knowledge-ecological sensibilities of thinkers like Michael Polanyi. Neoliberal thinkers tolerated unpredictability not just as a side effect but as the very source of innovation. What appeared as a “freak” often turned out to be an adaptive mutation.
Musk had little time for such heterodoxy. His fury at the swarm logic of Twitter led him to buy it outright in 2022—seemingly in a moment of pique, provoked by anonymous users mocking him. What neoliberals in their more tolerant mode might have been seen as a celebration of spontaneous order and egalitarian expression—or functional safety valves for repressive desublimation—Musk interpreted as an intolerable affront. There was only one person allowed to make bad jokes at others’ expense: the boss.
Musk has said repeatedly that the only laws he believes in are the laws of physics. But even this is selective. His and Peter Thiel’s shared philosophy favors a narrowed, mechanistic vision of physics—one that emphasizes control, force, and determinism over uncertainty or emergence. Hence their enthusiasm for the factory—not just as a site of production, but as a metaphor for society itself. A place where behavior is monitored, optimized, and disciplined. Where unpredictability is engineered out.
Hayekian neoliberalism, by contrast, treated factories as necessary but limited spaces. Society as a whole could not—and should not—run like assembly lines. Without space for independent judgment and failure, inefficiencies calcify. Innovation dies. For Musk and Thiel, however, total control justifies itself. Monopoly is the goal. The early liberal arguments for antitrust, decentralization, and pluralism are dismissed as weak. Control is purity. Surveillance is hygiene. Competition, as Thiel famously put it, is for losers.
Peter Thiel’s associate, Alexander Karp, offers a vivid portrait of the engineering mindset in his recent co-authored book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, that became an instant #1 New York Times bestseller. The first argument of the book is an entreaty to Silicon Valley to shed its squeamishness and fully embrace the national security state. Federal defense research and DARPA-style partnerships are not embarrassing anomalies but the true heritage of tech innovation. The second argument of the book is bolder still: tech’s capacity must be used to remake the state itself—to optimize its bureaucracy, digitize its functions, and prepare for new security threats.
Here the logic of the swarm reemerges—but fully subsumed into the war machine. Karp and his co-author invoke bees, starlings and other standbys of the 90s Wired genre—but much more frequent are references to autonomous drone swarms as the future of warfare. Drawing on battlefield innovations in Ukraine and Gaza, they suggest the military must adapt to small-scale, self-organizing weapons systems. This is the dialectical reversal: the free swarm now tamed, disciplined, re-engineered within the command-and-control architecture of the state. The swarm has entered the factory. Chaos must be monitored. Vulnerability eliminated. Data cleaned.
It’s not hard to imagine this becoming the blueprint for a new model of society: a swarm economy under constant surveillance, where freedom means compliance, and where every expression must be legible to a central authority. What might sound like a contradiction will be solved, people like Karp reassure us, through the unimaginable processing capacity of coming models of artificial intelligence. The projected energy demands of AI have already meant the jettisoning of any prospect of an energy transition to “net-zero”—until recently a mainstream global goal. The jungle has been paved and the gardener replaced by a programmer who has, in turn, been replaced by a large language model that Karp promises will one day make decisions without human intervention.
Rule by algorithm accepts Hayek’s concerns about the pretense of knowledge—but with a twist. Rather than using the language of epistemological modesty to undercut demands for redistributive social justice or long-term planning, the factory-minded engineer says: we can never know the totality–so we must trust the machine.
In Curious Species, Whitney Robles reminds us that the polyp agglomerations—those coral structures built by tiny, collective labor—were dubbed “colonies” in the language of the European merchant empires and the Romans before them. The metaphor was no accident. Colonial science mapped political fantasies onto biological forms.
Robles insists that the polyps were never docile subjects. Yet, however resilient, the polyps are not immortal. When the waters around them acidify and warm, these vast reef-structures bleach and break apart. The microorganisms that once formed a community detach from the whole and float away—winking, fluttering, nearly invisible. A nothing. A dispersal. Polyp politics does not just teach us about creation. It teaches us about endings, too.
The neoliberal imagination, when it looked to nature, saw spontaneous order, unplanned complexity, and the beautiful unpredictability of emergent systems. But it often underestimated the possibility of collapse—not as failure of planning, but as a systemic consequence of the very freedom it prized.
What happens when the waters change? When the reef dissolves?
In our current moment, we are no longer just asking how order emerges, but how it vanishes. We are watching the garden trodden underfoot, the swarm militarized, the factory reinstalled as a total system of command. And in this long shift—from polyps to protocols, from butterflies to drones—there is a profound political lesson.
Freedom, when real, is fragile. So is spontaneity. So is improvisation. The forces of order may begin in a coral reef or a Central Park meadow, but they can end in a codebase, a drone cloud, or a boardroom with no windows.
The question is no longer whether we can find metaphors from the natural world to describe human society. It is whether we can preserve the kinds of life that those metaphors once made thinkable.
Quinn Slobodian is professor of international history at Boston University. His most recent book is Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right.
