Do Human crowds during protests resemble animal swarming behavior?

Philosophically I would argue yes, all organisms are capable of swarming. I do not think any species has been able to sufficiently adapt or evolve unless in copious and sufficient populations which requires some kind of implicit understanding of sheer numbers. Swarming only requires computation at the local level. Which is to say, swarming is an emergent behavior from being able to self-organize. I would imagine most organisms have some kind of drive for attraction and repulsion, whether its mates or predators. Those two instincts can drive the computation for swarming. I'm kind of applying some semantic flourish here but avoidance is kind of vaguely high-level concept for computational behavior. It's definitely not as cut and dry as what I said but you can certainly program it that way if you have a high-level language. I'm not saying it's difficult to understand by the way, I'm saying it's hard to write out predict complex behavior from simple rules because it's hard to simulate those systems. Self-organization falls into like, computational reality theories that are way above my head but a good place to start is cellular automata's theories of complexities.

Shorter answer: almost everything living on this planet is still here because it exploits some kind of metaheuristic that increases its advantage from there being more of it. To massage your statement, I think almost everything exhibits some kind of swarm intelligence. I think it's philosophically simpler to argue the following procession of ideas that swarm intelligence is a metaheuristic algorithm, all life is capable of computing these algorithms, but then ask the question what the hell is life exactly?

I'm being handwavy here because I don't have a rigorous definition for life and therefore can't answer you directly. Some kind of computational substrate that mutates and replicates? That's von Neumann's definition I think. You could probably do without mutation! Death and radiation already provide those conditions for you. Again, I'm curious as to how we self-organize in the first place. The hard part isn't how do we know how to fit ourselves into a larger system, but how do we reduce ourselves to a single unit? What makes an individual organism at a higher-level of abstraction one cohesive thing when it's actually made of layers and layers of processes?

Do viruses swarm? If you follow what I just said, that's if viruses compute the algorithm. But do they compute at all if they're technically just data? Is information itself a computer? What are we but games within games within games?

Nature really is the best computer science teacher if you want to be brutally effective at being inefficient.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metaphor-based_metaheu...

In good spirit, I would like to challenge your argument that protests are just a tool for minority opinions. I wholeheartedly disagree. Nonviolence collective action is one of the most powerful things about democracy. It is by no means a tactic. It may not have a cohesive strategy, but these movements can and do work the numbers games. For me at least, protests can define entire generations of politics well beyond the scope of elected representatives careers or laws that are passed. Anyways, the real meat of my argument: These events define our social contract. They are what define the timeline, not election dates and not term limits. Because ultimately what protests do is either refute or legitimize the value of a single vote. How many modern democracies were formed from rebelling against colonial or imperial rule?

I agree with you there that political success can be derived from persuading neutral parties or neutralizing opponents. However, I would not say ultimately, as you know that neither you nor I can predict chaos. We take polls, we make bets, and then everything's on the table because people don't make rational decisions.

You're right to be cynical. Everything we say and do either gains or loses votes for each side. Protests do need to be aware of the fact that issues are measured in salience, candidates based on congruence. There's this statistical idea of the "median voter", that frames the argument persuasively for me. Success comes from actually winning. And sometimes you have to remind people to stop being losers. We do not need a moment the opposition can then use to galvanize and consolidate their power, which they've already tried to artificially justify anyways.

Note: I have a distinctly American bias on what is appropriate for campaign strategy here that may seem obvious but I have tried my best to generalize my understanding of how election mechanisms work internationally as well.

I'm somewhat skeptical of the ability of politics to bring about meaningful change in the United States. It seems to me that a combination of propaganda from those in power and a political system that's biased towards the status quo is almost insurmountable. It just doesn't seem like face to face persuasion scales the way that media propaganda does.

They do also have a large amount of success in establishing as public knowledge that an idea is well supported, despite mainstream information channels claiming otherwise.

And finally, they have the form people take when fighting anti-democratic actions. What is a completely different action, but looks exactly alike from the outside.