This book was inspired by the cold glare of a shark, which happened to meet my eyes in a train station bookstore. A full spread on the cover of a diving magazine displayed the prize-winning picture taken by the underwater photographer Doug Perrine. The image is of two copper sharks (Carcharhinus brachyurus) having their way with a hapless school of sardines. With sardines still stuck between their teeth, they are darting through the evasively maneuvering swarm, and the glance of one of the sharks during this feeding frenzy seems to fixate on the diver's camera. What Perrine managed to capture here so impressively is the famous sardine run – the annual migration of immense schools of sardines along the coast of South Africa. Their morphologies and dynamics number among the most fascinating phenomena of the animal kingdom that Alistair Fothergill and his team of BBC filmmakers had documented so vividly around the turn of the millennium.

Not long after this encounter, I coincidentally came across this image again: Perrine's photograph happened to adorn the cover of a small brochure that, in 2005, was used to advertise an upcoming consumer trend conference in Hamburg. Given the title ‘Schwarmintelligenz: Die Macht der smarten Mehrheit’ (‘Swarm Intelligence: The Power of the Smart Majority’), the symposium featured the keynote speaker Howard Rheingold, who had recently published his study of smart mobs, and thus shifted the focus away from sharks and schools of sardines toward the dynamics of highly concentrated network economies:

The trend conference in 2005 was thus right on trend. Swarm intelligence was on everyone's lips at the time and had just lately entered the discourses of the humanities and social sciences with the publication of Rheingold’s book.