Digital Monsters, Binary Aliens – Computer Viruses,
Capitalism and the Flow of Information
Jussi Parikka, Department of Cultural History, University of Turku,
Finland.
As an analogy to a computer virus, consider a biological disease
that is 100% infectious, spreads whenever animals communicate,
kills all infected animals instantly at a given moment, and has
no detectable side effects until that moment. If a delay of even
one week were used between the introduction of the disease and
its effect, it would be very likely to leave only a few remote
villages alive, and would certainly wipe out the vast majority
of modern society. If a computer virus of this type could spread
throughout the computers of the world, it would likely stop most
computer usage for a significant period of time, and wreak havoc
on modern government, financial, business, and academic institutions.
(Fred Cohen, 1984)
We feel that “The Virus” is the “stranger”, the “other”,
in our machine, a sort of digital sans papier—uncontrollable diversity.
Once Hollywood, like Empire, finished killing “Indians” and the
“Soviet Russians”, the Hollywood propaganda machine had to build
other anti-Empire monsters to keep alive the social imaginary
of 2001: aliens, meteors, epidemic... so many monsters. Now the
“virus” equals damage, it is easier to sell the idea of a “full
spectrum” anti-virus product that would “kill them all”, with
no distinctions. Instead, our work says that there are many types
of viruses: good, evil, entertaining, boring, elegant, political,
furious, beautiful, and very beautiful. ‘There are no good viruses’,
anti-virus producers say. (Luca Lampo, net art group [epidemiC],
2002)
Computer worms and viruses are not just technical entities,
bits of digital code - they also express central traits of
information culture. In a world where production focuses more and
more on information instead of goods, an information error registers
as a break-up within the system.[1]
In capitalism, time is money and so too is information : a malicious
piece of computer code seems to be an attack on the very basics
of global order. The connection between information capitalism—a
well-researched topic in itself—and computer viruses has not, however,
been sufficiently explicated.[2]
Computer worms and viruses can be understood as accidents of digital
culture. An accident, as Paul Virilio writes, is not in intended
to mean the opposite of absolute and necessary, rather, the term
signifies an inherent part of an entity since its production. Accidents
are internal to technologies: ‘Since the production of any “substance”
is simultaneously the production of a typical accident, breakdown
or failure is less the deregulation of production than the production
of a specific failure, or even a partial or total destruction.’
(Virilio, 1993: 212) The train introduced the train accident (Schievelbusch,
1977); with the boat came the boating accident; and data storage,
such as film, includes the inherent ‘accident’ of erasure of information
(Lundemo, 2003). In a similar fashion, computer viruses can be conceived
as internal to the media ecology of digital capitalism.
This article deals with articulations of digital accidents, focusing
especially on how the virus has been signified as a problem for
national security, international commerce and the individual user.
In information capitalism production is increasingly tied
to information networks instead of physical regions, and information
itself, in the form of entertainment, news services, communication
services etc., is the ‘end product’ of production machinery: ‘The
novelty of the new information infrastructure is the fact that it
is embedded within and completely immanent to the new production
processes. At the pinnacle of contemporary production, information
and communication are the very commodities produced; the network
itself is the site of both production and circulation.’ (Hardt &
Negri 2001: 298) In other words, as Manuel Castells (1996) argues,
the contemporary world is based on networks and paths of flow(s)
that are informational, and digital technology provides the necessary
background for this contemporary media society. What are at stake
are not computers per se, but networks.
By offering an outline of a cultural history of computer viruses
this article endeavours to expose the genealogical roots of contemporary
discourse on information diseases. It considers three instances
within the cultural history of computing that I find crucially important
considering the fear of contagion increasingly evident in present-day
discussions: anti-virus technologies, the ethics of computing and
the figure of the responsible user. These themes are analysed as
expressions of information capitalism based on digital communication,
networking and connectivity. However, at the same time as the virus
has been articulated as a problem of information capitalism, it
has also been captured as a part of that same machinery. Anti-virus
software became a lucrative business. In general, what I argue in
the latter half of my article is that viruses and worms are not
simple anomalies or “enemies” of digital capitalism, but an integral
part of it. Hence, capitalism is viral in itself, meaning that
its essence lies exactly in its capability of infecting the outside
in order to replicate itself.. There is no absolute Other for the
capitalist logic of expansion. What is crucial is the understanding
of this constant double articulation of the virus as a threat and
an integral part of the contemporary society. The seemingly contradictory
themes of the virus as the threat and the essence of capitalism
are, in fact, intertwined and operate in sync. The ideas of risk
control, safety measures and the construction of the responsible
user are thus to be read as integral elements of viral capitalism:
with these elements, or discourses, the fear of computer viruses
has been turned into a part of the flows of consumer capitalism,
products and practices that “buy off” anxiety. My article will begin
by outlining the historical elements that provide the background
for the general operations of viral capitalism.
The Virus Risk
Computer viruses have been perceived as a problem since the beginning
of the 1980s. The first officially recognized paper on viruses
was Fred Cohen’s Computer viruses – Theory and Experiments,
released in 1984. Cohen’s definition has since become a classic:
We define a computer ‘virus’ as a program that can ‘infect’ other
programs by modifying them to include a possibly evolved copy
of itself. With the infection property, a virus can spread throughout
a computer system or network using the authorizations of every
user using it to infect their programs. Every program that gets
infected may also act as a virus and thus the infection grows.
(Cohen, 1984)
Cohen was the first to emphasize the risks of computer
viruses and similar sorts of self-spreading software programs. While
earlier virus-like programs were tests within computer laboratories
in universities, Cohen saw these mini-programs as serious threats
to the whole of networked information society. Commentators have
underlined that his work demonstrated the ‘universality of risk,
and the limitations of protection’ (Slade, 1992), meaning that potentially
every computer system was vulnerable. If we recall the quote from
Cohen which prefaced this article, a computer virus equivalent to
a biological disease that is absolutely infectious and spreads when
communicating, would ‘stop most computer usage for a significant
period of time, and wreak havoc on modern government, financial,
business, and academic institutions.’ (Cohen, 1984). This was probably
the first ‘worst-case-scenario’ concerning viruses—since then, similar
predictions have been plentiful.
Cohen’s work was the first in a number of influential books,
articles, papers and essays dealing with viruses. Time magazine
- one of the first among the popular media to take up the virus
issue (as early as 1985) - warned of the threat of malicious software
and of hackers who wanted to sabotage computer systems with dangerous
mini-programs (Murphy, 1985). In addition, the industry of anti-virus
programs was born, and with it, new techniques and programs for
virus recognition, destruction and prevention. Nowadays, technological
anti-virus programs can be divided into three kinds:
1) Pre-emptive measures aimed at stopping the virus from entering
the systems,
2) Virus-specific software for scanning particular, pre-determined
signs or search strings which imply that a virus is present. These
programs are often also able to remove the virus.
3) Generic detection software for searching system anomalies.
By scanning for unusual behaviour within a computer, the program
might be able to conclude that a virus or some other malicious mini-program
is present. (Harley, Slade & Gattiker, 2001: 143–144)
The anti-virus industry had been growing since
the first computer virus and worm incidents in 1986–1988, but doubts
about the seriousness of the virus threat were also raised. Was
the success of the industry due to superficially constructed hype,
unfounded fears of killer viruses attacking the base of organized
society? Users were intimidated with reports of hundreds of viruses
spreading at the beginning of the 1990s, even if only 70–80 of these
600 known PC-viruses were encountered in real life; others were
mostly research specimens and laboratory examples (Wilding, 1992:
66). The aim—conscious or not—was to create an atmosphere of ‘digital
fear’ as illustrated in the following example from Virus Bulletin-magazine:
Rather like Hitler’s V1 ‘flying bomb’, no-one
knows when or where a computer virus will strike. They attack
indiscriminately. Virus writers, whether or not they have targeted
specific companies or individuals, must know that their programs,
once unleashed, soon become uncontrollable. It is, perhaps,
the saddest indictment of these people that they are prepared
to hurt anybody and everybody. (Virus Bulletin, 1989: 2)
Consequently, new viruses meant a boom for the
anti-viral software industry. For example, the Michelangelo virus
scare in 1992 raised public awareness concerning the threat of malicious
software, especially in corporate environments. Sales of anti-virus
programs went up with special ‘Michelangelo Limited Edition’ scanners.
Because of the huge demand, there were even speculations that the
virus originated within the anti-virus community itself in order
to increase their profits. (Zajac 1992) This link does not however
have to be intentional. It is part of the virality of capitalism
that accidents and break-ups can be turned into elements of its
productive flows. In this way, concerns about viruses were in total
sync with the consumer products produced to relieve the anxieties
of the new digital culture. Fear was “reconciled” by participating
in the consumer market.
However, as Fred Cohen had already concluded,
no anti-viral software could give absolute protection and purely
technical solutions alone would be insufficient. Of course, the
detection and recognition of viruses was the corner stone of a successful
computer security policy, yet these procedures were not enough.
Techniques for computer virus protection were to be understood as
techniques for risk reduction, not removal:
anti-virus software can’t ‘stop’ viruses, any
more than a police station can ‘stop’ crime. In a perfect world,
a global social engineering programme (as social scientists understand
it, rather than hackers) might attempt to educate computer users
of all ages and persuasions in the mysteries of ‘ethical’ computing.
However, it is not realistic to expect the application of a purely
technological approach to individual systems to solve what is
essentially a special case of a worldwide social problem. (Harley,
Slade & Gattiker, 2001: 140)
Security, or the reconciliation of fear, was
thus only postponed and not obtained at all. Security in the context
of risk society is not something attainable but only a shifting
horizon, or a limit, which can be approached. To put it another
way, consumerist digital security functions according to the (Lacanian)
logic of desire as lack: never finding fulfilment but rather always
postponed.. This, as Deleuze and Guattari (1983) have shown us,
is the essential coupling of psychoanalysis and consumer capitalism.
Digital Sanitation
Computers and so-called personal computing in
particular represented a new phase in development of society. While
a hundred years earlier, at the turn of the 19th-century,
western societies in general had to cope with the new pressures
of mass society, the computer culture of the 1970's and 1980's had
to deal with similar problems of ‘over-crowdedness’. Alongside the
technical safeguards mentioned above, the issue of security policy
was raised, as was the more general question of the meaning of electronic
interaction. The threats to internal security via networks and malicious
software created an atmosphere of distrust, expressed in Ken Thompson’s
frequently cited article ‘Reflections of Trusting Trust’ from 1984.
Thompson was the 1983 Turing award winner for the Association for
Computer Machinery (ACM). His point was simple: every piece of code
is potentially malicious if it does not originate from oneself.
( Thompson, 1984; see also Ferbrache, 1992: 9)
Thompson’s statement of suspicion
can be understood as an expression of a certain process of‘modernization
and detraditionalization’ within the computer world. The birth of
network computing also meant being in frequent contact with more
and more people, most of whom would not be known. Implicitly Thompson
posed the problem as follows: as long as self-reproducing programs
are made by computer specialists everything is fine, but when this
knowledge ends up in the hands of a wider public, the key institutions
of society become threatened. Consequently, Thompson, and others
after him, wished for an official recognition of the situation and
the threats posed by these untrustworthy intruders. According to
Thompson, the problem was a lack of general understanding of the
security problems of digital culture. The utopia of connectivity
was suddenly also producing connections that, it was feared, would
jeopardize the whole system.
The problem of unethical computing
broke news headlines when the first worm incident captured full
media attention. The 1988 Morris- or Internet-worm was discussed
on most major evening TV-news shows in the US and was visible in
major newspapers as well. Originally intended as a harmless prank,
the worm forced major parts of the Internet to shut down, causing
huge amounts of loss of computing time. Named after the programmer,
college student Robert Tappan Morris Jr., the worm had a bug that
caused its uncontrollable spreading. Most noteworthy are the reactions
within the media and the positions taken. (See, eg. Lundell, 1989:
1–18)
According to several commentators,
the hacker behind the worm had attacked the very basis of an open
society. The Morris worm incident, despite the huge amounts of literature
on technical details of the worm, was defined as a human problem.
One of the participants in the discussion, Eugene Spafford, notes
that the problem was due to the fast pace of technological revolution.
According to Spafford, while it was totally acceptable in the 1960's
that pioneering computer professionals were hacking and investigating
computer systems, by the end of 1980s, the situation had changed.
Society had become dependent on computing in general: ‘Entire businesses
are now dependent, wisely or not, on the undisturbed functioning
of the computers. Many people’s careers, property, and lives may
be placed in jeopardy by acts of computer sabotage and mischief.’
(Spafford, 1989: 686)
So basically, the problem was
not what Robert T. Morris did, but where he did it. The Internet
had risen to become a symbol of the central trends within computerization
and the whole of information capitalism. Networking, as perceived
by Manuel Castells (1996, 2001), was the keyword of the late 20th-century
information society, and the Internet in particular was to be the
backbone of its digital infrastructure. The original technical open
architecture resonated with cultural trends; in order to ease the
spreading of networking, the internet-architecture was planned so
as to leave freedom to the local network provider, facilitating
the interworking of heterogenous networks. (See Leiner et. al.,
1997; Abbate, 2000)
However, as the growing number
of virus and worm incidents since the mid-1980's demonstrated,
open architecture could not be as open as had been hoped. Using
the allegory of a (biological) disease that occurs in over-crowded
circumstances (cholera, for example) commentators warned against
the dangers of dirty computing practices that go hand-in-hand with
the over-crowdedness of the emerging digital culture. Bryan Kocher
saw the Morris worm as a ‘hygiene lesson’, referring to the incident's
similarities with all kinds of epidemic diseases:
Just as in human society, hygiene
is critical to preventing the spread of disease in computer systems.
Preventing disease requires setting and maintaining high standards
of sanitation throughout society, from simple precautions (like
washing your hands or not letting anyone know your password),
to large investments (like water and sewage treatment plants or
reliably tested and certified secure systems). (Kocher, 1989:
3 & 6)
Thus, Kocher presents information
society in terms of an ecological system, with diseases that have
to be weeded out in order for the healthy parts to grow. In other
words, the flow of capital must be maintained through hygienic operations
that keep the economy “healthy”. Disease is to be cured in order
for the functional system to go on producing. While hygiene, cleanliness
and order had been the central building blocks of 19th-century
modernity, the same ideas were now being adopted as part of the
media ecology of the computerized society of the end of the 20th-century.
In this new context, the cultural idea of sickness continued to
play the same pejorative and heavily loaded symbolic role as previously
in cultural history. (See Sontag, 2002; Lupton, 1994: 560–562)
The Responsible User
At the centre of these “hygienic
measures” stood the individual user. Since computers had, until
the 1970s and 1980s, meant big constellations used by professionals
in computing centres, the process of the individualization of digital
culture changed the security emphasis. Computing and computer security
had become a personal issue since the end of the 1970s and the rise
of network environments. (Denning, 1979)
[3] To quote Mark Drew:
Traditionally, computer security
was someone else’s problem, invariably performed by someone else
on behalf of the user. Distributed Computing has removed the traditional
support personnel from the scene and made the user perform all
the management roles: system programmer, analyst, engineer, support
group, recovery manager, capacity planner, security officer, and
so forth. PC viruses brought the issue of technology and support
for end users to the forefront. Now the users had to make sure
they could recover and perform the security officer role on their
system. Many failed, most did not know what to do, others chose
to ignore the problem, many were unaware. (Drew, 1994: 93)
The user found herself in a
new situation. The change of computer culture from centralized,
hierarchical systems based on mainframe computers to personalized,
user-friendly desktop computers resonates with the general cultural
change from a heavily centralized society of industrialism, Fordism
and mass production to a network society of decentralized organization
structures and individual responsibilities.[4]
The individual person, whether at work or at
home, became the consuming and producing computer user. She was
understood as a valuable key point in keeping up the flows of capital,
which appeared more and more in the form of digital data, of information,
since the 1980's. So, when Jean-Francois Lyotard wrote his The
Postmodern Condition in the late 1970's, he pinpointed computers
as the key machines in the circulation of information. What Lyotard
neglected was the fact that computers were no longer controlled
by large institutions, but increasingly by individual users at home
and at work. (Lyotard, 1979; Nye, 1997: 165 - 166) This trend became
emphasized during the 1980's.
The shift resulted in a huge
amount of manuals and articles advising people as to safe computing
habits. Write-protection, caution with new software, limiting
accessibility, making back-ups, using specialized malware protection
software, safe file-sharing and general awareness of computer activities
were things that came to be expected of the user. (Van Loon, 2002:
165–166; see also, Brothers, 1990; Fites, Johnston & Kratz,
1989: 87–93). The user had to be educated to become a responsible
computer user. Even if the personal computer revolution was based
on such values as innovation, self-enhancement, experimentality
and liberation, the reality was something different. [5]
This is due to the fact that - as Jon
Marshall (2003) has pointed out - knowledge workers have since the
1960's been seen as key actors in the Post-Industrial or Informational
Revolution. Hence, even if they are celebrated as the new hackers
of digital culture (Himanen, 2001), they are simultaneously under
several demands and pressures due to their importance as nodes within
flows of money and information.
In addition to the ethics of
computing, avoiding viruses became a responsibility often referred
to as “safe hex”. As the AIDS-phenomenon raised the issue of responsible
safe sex, computer viruses were understood as digital counterparts
of sexually transmitted diseases. The computer virus crisis
from 1989 defined safe hex using several key points, things to do
and things not to do (Fites, Johnston and Kratz, 1989: 87–94). Among
other issues the book advised reasonable care with programs. They
should be purchased only from reputable dealers, while public
domain programs and games downloaded from bulletin boards should
be avoided. As in AIDS-discourse, sex with strangers became an irrational
risk, and similarly computer security culture warned against the
dangers of non-secure software. Aptly, one commentator advanced
the following solution to the problem of effective virus protection:
Increased awareness and motivation training for new computer users
and for the population of future computer users, teaching them to
be cautious, e.g., to avoid putting untrusted software into their
computers as they would avoid putting tainted food into their bodies.
(Parker, 1990: 552)
The connection between notions
of the human body and care of the self and computer viruses has
been noted by Susan Sontag (2002). Sontag analyses the political
implications of AIDS rhetoric while also referring to how the metaphors
moved into computer talk. These digital contagions borrowed
from the language and articulations with which the HI-virus was
animistically characterized. The segregation and marginalization
of alleged “high-risk groups” was replicated also in computer virus
culture, as analysed by Jeffrey Weinstock (1997). However, contrary
to what Weinstock suggests, moral judgments are not absent from
computer virus paranoia. As argued above, the individual users in
general are at the centre of this discourse that tries to keep up
the “normal” flow of information. The moralizing judgments are targeted
against users who copy pirate games, download software from dubious
BBS’s or net sites, or, as is often mentioned, visit pornographic
websites. The creation of this morally responsible subject was part
and parcel of the new digital order. As Deborah Lupton has argued,
this was made comprehensible by a connection made with a public
health discourse that stressed the individual’s responsibility ‘to
stay healthy, avoid risk and resist indulgence in certain behaviours
defined as “dangerous”' (Lupton, 1994: 561).
For this reason, when Byte-magazine
instructed its readers to ’Keep your PC Healthy’ (Williams, 1988),
it was not just a metaphor but also an order-word (Deleuze and Guattari,
1987: 106–108), guiding the user to proper computing. Jerry
Pournelle, also in Byte, similarly emphasized this when he
writes:
The best way to avoid computer
virus infections is to be careful where you get software. If you
don’t put strange programs in your system, you can’t get strange
results. That ‘free’ copy of a program you got from a bulletin
board may be more costly than you think. You’re not even safe
getting pirated software from a friend; even if there have been
no signs of infection, some virus programs don’t wake up for a
long time. (Pournelle, 1988: 199)
Flow and Disruption
Stefan Helmreich points out
how computer viruses group together the interests of nation states
and evolutionary capitalism. Computing discourse with its references
to sexual contaminations provides a powerful image and justification
for counter measures. Helmreich analyses how the idea of sexual
intercourse putting the body at risk has endowed digital communication
with sexist undertones: a vulnerable system is symbolically feminine,
implying that safe computers are impenetrable, masculine and thus,
male. Consequently, the issue is essentially a political one:
Computers are imagined as pristine,
autonomous entities that exist prior to their embedding in networks—an
idea that echoes the liberal conception of society as made up
of individuals who exist prior to the society of which they are
a part, an ideology deeply written into U.S. political culture.
The Internet body politic is supposed to be made of rational actors,
agents who enter responsibly into a kind of Rousseauian social
contract. (Helmreich, 2000: 477)
But what about capitalism?
In what way are the issues within the history of computer diseases
analysed above connected to the notion of informational economy?
As mentioned at the start of this paper, contemporary capitalism
is essentially connected to the digital infrastructure. Digital
flows—be it entertainment products, informational services or computer
mediated communication—construct the essential backbone of a global
economic regime. The deterritorialization of capitalism to encompass
the whole globe depends on the networks of connection and communication
that computerization and telecommunications have brought about.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri place this turn towards information
capitalism in the 1970s and the end of the Vietnam War, after which
transnational companies spread across the globe. Digital flexibility
and informational networks are the key issue in this new global
order, where ‘communication and control can be exercised efficiently
at a distance, and in some cases immaterial products can be transported
across the world with minimal delay and expense.’ (Hardt & Negri,
2001: 294–295) Thus, as Hardt and Negri suggest, the network is
to be considered as the organizational model of production instead
of the assembly line, the paradigmatic symbol of industrial capitalism.
In general, this theme of networks
and knowledge production is part of the discussion concerning the
'informationalization' of the economy, a discussion that started
during the 1960's and 1970's with the writings of Peter Drucker,
Alvin Toffler and Daniel Bell. Jon Marshall has summarised the key
points of these discussions as follows:
1. ‘Knowledge or information
is central to the “new economy” both to its organisation and to
the production of wealth. Information is the society’s raw material.
Facticity is important.
2. The use of Information
Technology is changing society—it is a shift at least comparable
to that from Agrarian Society to Industrial Society. There is
often a technologically determinist ring to the argument.
3. Knowledge workers are central
to this change—either as creative innovators or manipulators
of symbols. They are forming an increasing percentage of the work
force.’ (Marshall, 2003)
These themes have been pushed
forward within capitalism for decades. In 1995, Bill Gates
foretold the way digital networking would revolutionize the business
world via improvements in productivity through such technologies
as Web publishing, video conferencing, e-mail, etc. ‘Corporations
will redesign their nervous systems to rely on the networks that
reach every member of the organization and beyond into the world
of suppliers, consultants and customers.’ (Gates, 1996: 153) According
to Gates, especially the Internet was to provide ‘friction-free
capitalism’, which is to be understood as a contemporary technological
version of Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Quoting Gates: ‘We’ll find
ourselves in a new world of low-friction, low-overhead capitalism,
in which market information will be plentiful and transaction costs
low. It will be a shopper’s heaven' (Gates, 1996: 181).
Nicholas Negroponte (1995)
offers a similar view of the future. According to Negroponte’s frequently
cited ideas, the world is changing from atoms to bits. Hence, in
the world to come, businesses will be dependent on digital information,
selling bits, not things. In Negroponte’s prophetic and optimistic
vision, the future world of information will be a world of expressing
one’s selfhood and interacting with intelligent technological environments.
Paraphrasing Being Digital, the information highway will
provide a global marketplace where people and machines interact,
without friction in a wonderland of never-ending digital consumption.
This is basically what Manuel Castells refers to as the ‘faceless
capitalist collective, made up of financial flows operated by electronic
networks.’ (Castells, 1996: 474) Against this background worms and
viruses have been judged as ‘loss of money’:
In a corporate environment
when a virus is reported by an antivirus software, whether it
is a false alarm or not, the normal flow of operation is interrupted.
It takes at best several hours to contact the antivirus technical
support and to make sure it was a false alarm before the normal
operation is resumed. And, as we all know, time is money. And
in the case of a big company, time is big money. (Gryaznow, 1995:
T-7) [6]
Viruses appear primarily as
disruptors that have to be shut out of the circuit in order to find
the perfect equilibrium of communication, or the frictionless state
of economical transactions. Thus, the view of viruses as disconnectors
of flows of information and therefore also of flows of capitalism
seems to fit nicely in with these articulations of “the new digital
economy.” Truly, the virus-parasite seems to be the excluded third,
as Michel Serres (1982) suggests. This is also in accordance with
Deleuze’s idea of viruses as a form of luddism in contemporary culture.(Deleuze,
1990: 240–247)[7] Paraphrasing
Deleuze, we may state that every society has its own kind of technical
machine expressing the social machinery. While the industrial societies
of modernity depended on thermodynamic machines, whose passive danger
is entropy and active danger comes from sabotage, contemporary societies
of control express themselves in terms of cybernetic machines handling
information flows. Information interference, piratism and computer
viruses are the dangers of this machinery, disrupting the flows
of information. The capitalism of the 19th-century was
based on the ownership of the means of production as well as the
management of certain key places of production, but control societies
are based on selling services and buying actions, deterritorialized
as fluid networks of the global operations of money. In general,
the central technological machines of capitalism (the typewriter,
the calculating machine, the Turing machine, etc.) have incorporated
the operations of abstraction, standardization and mechanization
and the computer is no exception. With these technologies for the
deterritorialization of production and money, wealth becomes increasingly
an issue of exchange and circulation. The money commodity has found
its ultimate form in the digitalization of money in the form of
e-money and e-commerce, and, instead of presenting a sudden rupture,
has followed the immanent logic of capitalism. (Cf. Gere, 2002:
19–30)
We must note, however, that
although viruses and worms can be understood as disruptions within
the technological dispositif of the society of control, they have
other non-technological contexts as well. While ‘communications’
has been the general technological trend of computer culture since
the 1960s, it has also grown to be the general expression of contemporary
society to such an extent that one can talk about a society of communication.
While digital technologies of connectivity provide the framework,
the utopia of communication provides the horizon for contemporary
notions of work and leisure within capitalism. The whole of capitalist
culture is increasingly based on both material and symbolic communication—producing
communication in a way that the content of what is communicated
is more or less irrelevant. The pure fact of communication resonates
with the needs of information capitalism. [8]
The Nokia slogan ‘connecting people’ provides
the ultimate crystallization of information capitalism. (See also
Hardt & Negri, 2001: 346–347) Thus, the concept of virus as
a disrupter of communications functions also on a more conceptual
level, as a marker of the general accident (Virilio, 1993) of a
digital culture based on connectivity.
These issues of ethics and
responsibilities concerning malicious software are not to be understood
as ideological constructs in the traditional sense, but as productions
of desire. There is no false consciousness, hiding the real
operations of capitalism. Instead, the figure of the responsible
user is intrinsically linked to the idea of capitalism, which takes
advantage of the accidents and disintegrations of flows. The problems
of so-called malicious software were answered with the antidotes
of anti-virus programs and ethics of computing, but the aim was
not so much to keep the viruses out but to incorporate them as elements
of the flow. Namely, malicious software programs such as viruses
and worms have not been regarded solely as problems for information
capitalism; they have also been converted, captured as a part of
it. This idea stems from a conception of capitalism as an apparatus
of capture, a machine of appropriation. The accidental form of the
virus actually expresses the essential logic of capitalist digital
economy perhaps in a similar fashion as the Serresian parasite is
the excluded third but, at the same time, also the term making possible
the functioning of the system. Disruptions are not excluded but
short-circuited as part of the flexible machinery of capitalism.
Perhaps this is also the fundamental meaning behind the idea of
viruses as the general accidents of digital culture. Accidents are
absolute and necessary, and all “substances” carry with them their
own accidents. In a paradoxical manner, capitalism is its
own accident, which is the constant breaking up and recreation of
flows. Capitalism “evolves” via accidents in a manner that makes
it possible to talk about “viral capitalism” and viruses at the
heart of digital culture.
Following Deleuze and Guattari,
we can state that capitalism works as an immanent axiomatic. Instead
of understanding it as a regime of transcendental power, capitalism
should be seen as working through an axiomatic of decoded flows;
it actually is a generalized decoding of flows. Production
does not flow to a privileged class of rulers, but ultimately towards
itself, that is, towards the body of capital that deterritorializes
constantly. Flows are decoded so that they can be connected to the
capitalist machinery through axiomatics. Quoting Deleuze and Guattari:
Flows of property that is sold,
flows of money that circulates, flows of production and means
of production making ready in the shadows, flows of workers becoming
deterritorialized: the encounter of all these flows will be necessary,
their conjunction, and their reaction on one another—and the contingent
nature of this encounter, this conjunction, and this reaction,
which occur one time—in order for capitalism to be born […]. (Deleuze
and Guattari, 1983: 223–224)
Deleuze and Guattari emphasise
that it is not so much the decoded flows but the process
of generalized decoding, deterritorialization which is crucial to
capitalism. This is to be understood through the notion of conjunction,
the ultimate power of capitalism to appropriate the outside as a
part of itself. Capitalism knows no limit (but schizophrenia) and
continues to push itself forward. It is a continuing machine of
the new, inventing itself all the time, refusing to tie itself to
any final transcendent point. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, 223–250;
Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 20; see also Goodchild, 1996: 97–98)
In this sense, no disruption of the capitalist logic is able to
stay transcendentally Other in relation to that order. For the capitalist
machine of decoding, nothing seems to be absolutely hostile.
In Empire, Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri elaborate on these ideas. Their main point—following
Deleuze’s and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus—is
that capitalism is immanent and works through the notion of empire.
We do not live in a world of overcoding despotic imperial regimes,
but of a global body of capitalism that emphasizes the continuing
processual nature of informational culture. Capitalism lives in
a perpetual state of metamorphosis and holds the ability to transform
itself without reference to a transcendent order. Therefore, for
Hardt and Negri, the capitalist axiomatic is:
[…] a set of equations and
relationships that determines and combines variables and coefficients
immediately and equally across various terrains without reference
to prior and fixed definitions or terms. The primary characteristic
of such an axiomatic is that relations are prior to their terms.
(Hardt and Negri, 2001: 326–327)
Hence, the idea of a completely
immanent and ever reforming capitalistic machine is able to convert
and conjugate contradictory, minoritarian, disruptive and even potentially
revolutionary constellations to itself. This is concretely illustrated
by the case of computer viruses. Even if viruses act as disruptions
of information and thus flows of money, they have been integrated
as productive parts of the information hegemony. The years 1986
and 1987 saw the first more or less widespread viruses in the US,
Brain and Leligh; and around 1987 and 1988 the first anti-virus
program kits and companies emerged. Flushot, Vaccine, Antidote,
Data Physician etc. mark not only the metaphorisation of the computer
world as a biological system, but also, to put it bluntly, the capitalization
of computer viruses with the rise of the anti-virus industry. Prevention
of malicious software conjugates as part of the flow of informational
capital. This marks the point where viruses, at least indirectly,
are captured as parts of the flow. A quote from the website of the
G-Connect Internet dealer testifies how viruses have been
captured and normalized as a part of the flow of business revenues:
Customers are willing to pay
extra for virus protection, especially if a service provider can
transparently maintain this service without distributing software
updates or upgrades. Using POPmaestro and an anti-virus server,
virus protection can be quickly and easily implemented to generate
profitable revenue, and increasing the stickiness of a service
provider’s offering. (G-Connect, 2004)
In addition, flexible global
capitalism lives at the heart of the anti-virus discourse, as Stefan
Helmreich notes (2000: 485–487). Computers and anti-virus protection
are modelled on discourses that emphasize adaptation, flexibility,
agility and adjustability. (See Martin, 1994) These features have
been emphasized especially since the early 1990s with the introduction
of polymorphous viruses, which are able to create numerous variations
of themselves, rendering them potentially invisible to traditional
virus scanners.
What Helmreich does not point
out, however, is that viruses also act in accordance with
this evolutionary capitalism. Polymorphous viruses are programs
that are capable of adjusting and adapting, just as capitalism in
general as described by Deleuze and Guattari as well as Hardt and
Negri. Paradoxically, then, capitalism itself is viral, advancing
via mutations and adaptations within heterogeneous systems (See
Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 10). Capitalism has no external limit,
only an internal one, which is capital itself. Hence capital replicates
itself via a constant displacement, a constant process of deterritorialisation
and reterritorialisation. This is also a constant process of “introducing
breaks and cleavages” with which reshape and remodel its order.
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1983: 230–233)
Capitalism also creates its
own machines, Deleuze and Guattari continue. The network virus as
a way of operating crystallizes the logic of capital, the two being
conceptually intertwined. The virus as a specific, non-linear form
of evolution proceeds via rhizomatic jumps between heterogeneous
elements, for example between different species. At the same time,
it brings along its own bits of information with which to capture
the code of the new host. Similarly, capitalism can be conceptualised
as a molecular coupling that - due to its immanent nature, expressed
in the universal code of money and nowadays with the equally universal
power of the digital code - can adapt to foreign places and anomalous
contexts. Capitalism functions via a constant folding of the outside
and the inside.
Hence the idea of capitalism
as a (computer) virus designates the actual functioning of the system.
If ‘computer’ is understood as the technical machine operating the
decoding of flows of the abstract machine of capitalism, then is
not the virus conceptually at the centre of this social machine
as well? While viruses are a logical part of the computer system
in that they use the normal operating and programming procedures
of computers, they are also to be understood as essential parts
of the logic of capitalism. ‘Like a missionary or a vampire, capital
touches what is foreign and makes it proper’, write Hardt and Negri,
and we might add that, like a virus, capital keeps transforming
the world with its own piece of program code, spreading without
an internal limit. (Hardt and Negri, 2001: 226) [9]
In a way, capitalism invents these kinds of
accidents and risks in order to keep itself busy. This idea of ‘if
it’s not broken, break it’ provides an apt description of the functioning
of the so-called information capitalism. (See Murphie and Potts,
2003: 186–187, 190–191) Dangers and risks produce excellent needs
and products in the consumer market, which aims to provide tools
for controlling the uncertainties and anxieties of everyday life.
(See Bauman, 1993: 204–205) In this sense digital capitalist culture
seems to be maybe the first one that has really succeeded in converting
its own accidents to its own profit. This, of course, as has been
analysed above, is due to the internal functioning of this cultural
machinery, aptly expressed in the technicality of the universal
machine of computer, able to potentially simulate the functioning
of any other machine. This universality at the heart of the technical
machine acting within the more abstract machine of digital capitalism
means in other words the potentiality to code all the world according
to its own image.
In this light, the discourses
of fear, risk control, user education and other safety measures
are in fact also an expression of this viral capitalism. Through
an effective feedback loop and short-circuiting of disruptions and
interruptions, threats of capitalism are turned into general fears
and risks, which in turn are translated into consumer products that
aim to control that fear and deliver safety. In our case, this refers
to the complex discourses and practices of anti-virus software and
digital security policies. The truly responsible user is one who
takes care of herself and her loved ones by protection—and, as it
happens, influential part of the protection comes in the form of
commodity products.
Epilogue: Viral Art
In my article I have mapped
the paradoxical position of the computer virus within digital capitalist
culture. Computer virus research was captured as a productive part
of the system of information society, countering the potentially
disruptive breakage induced by viral programs. Computer viruses
and worms were, however, continually represented as damage inflicting
products of psychotic persons. (See, for example, Highland, 1988)
These one-sided notions of computer viruses have been called into
question during the past few years within some net art-projects,
which offer maybe the most profound understanding of this contemporary
phenomenon. This understanding means a kind of “rendering-visible”,
an exposition, of the internal machinery of the virus event. As
quoted at the beginning of the article, Luca Lampo, from the art
group [epidemiC], describes the discourse of computer viruses
as connected to the general mental history of Occidental thought
that has tried to rule out the Other as an ‘uncontrollable diversity’.
Lampo notes how this discourse is inherently tied to the business
of virus protection:
Now the “virus” equals damage,
it is easier to sell the idea of a “full spectrum” anti-virus
product that would “kill them all”, with no distinctions. Instead,
our work says that there are many types of viruses: good, evil,
entertaining, boring, elegant, political, furious, beautiful,
and very beautiful. ‘There are no good viruses’, anti-virus producers
say. (Lampo, 2002)
Contemporary technological
risks are very much media risks, and computer viruses are also media
viruses, meaning that they are perceived, valorized and signified
within the simulacra of contemporary media. (Van Loon, 2002) This
is what Lampo in general refers to as the Hollywood production machinery,
which constructs ever-new aliens and monsters, lining up computer
viruses with such previous dangers as ‘Indians’ and ‘Soviet Russians.’
And Lampo’s Hollywood is deeply tied to other interests as well.
As briefly noted earlier, computer viruses and worms have so far
been articulated according to the perspectives of the State and
the international economic system. These definitions have served
as important mediators with which the very concrete notion of viruses
as damagers of organized society have been transformed into a productive
instance of that very same system. To upkeep this productivity,
it has also been important not to consider the multiplicity of viruses
there actually is, and not to introduce public, free remedies to
the problem that is constantly touted.
The net art groups [epidemiC]
and 0100101110101101.ORG participated in the Venice Biennale
of 2001 in an exhibition aimed at exposing this unquestioned status
of viral programs. They programmed the Biennale virus with a new
programming language Python and presented it as a piece of net art.
Loyal to the traditions of media art, their art work can be understood
as taking an everyday element of media culture and decontextualizing
it in order to map the networks of power and articulation that signify
it in our everyday life.
Biennale Source Code © 0100101110101101.ORG
The virus was intended to show
how viruses and media are deeply connected: viruses live on media
coverage, a certain hysteria or paranoia of contagion. The Biennale
virus source code was printed on T-shirts and sold on CD-ROMs in
order to turn upside down the one-sided understanding of viruses.
As the artists themselves explained:
Additionally, by showing the
code in the pavilion, by printing it on t-shirts and post cards,
we want people come close to it, and so demystify the aura of
a virus. They can find out how it looks like, and that it works
exactly as any other software. (Cited in Sollfrank, 2001)
Another similar exposition of
computer viruses and worms within media art took place with the
I Love You-exhibition in Germany (2002–2003). The underlying
theme of I Love You seemed to be the sheer multiplication
of the notions of viruses: viruses were understood in the exhibition
not just as an economic threat but also as aesthetic creations,
acts of resistance and cultural constructions.[10]
For example, the net artist Jaromil (2002) describes viruses as
poetry that resists uniform majoritarian (digital) language, bringing
in unexpected elements within the flow of communication:
In considering a source code
as literature, I am depicting viruses as though they were the sort
of poems written by Verlaine, Rimbaud et al., against those selling
the net as a safe area for straight society. The relations, forces
and laws governing the digital domain differ from those in the natural.
The digital domain produces a form of chaos—which is inconvenient
because it is unusual and fertile—on which people can surf. In that
chaos, viruses are spontaneous compositions which are like lyrical
poems in causing imperfections in machines ‘made to work’ and in
representing the rebellion of our digital serfs. [11]
How does this, then, relate to
the connections between capitalism and informationalism that I have
been describing? Why bring in these ideas by net artists of viruses
as poetry? The answer lies in Jaromil’s writing: he continues by
arguing that ‘making the digital language stutter’ is a political
act. Viruses as poetry of the computer networks are aimed at battling
the capitalist powers who dream ‘of turning the Net into a virtual
shopping area for their own forms of business’. These conceptions
do not have to be interpreted as a form of irresponsible vandalism
or a criminal state of mind, but as culturally and historically
critical acts trying to expose the functioning of discursive and
non-discursive networks of power within contemporary society, the
complex interminglings of viruses, anti-viruses and capitalist axiomatics.
Consequently, when Nicholas Negroponte (1995: 229) exuberantly states
that ‘[l]ike a force of nature, the digital age cannot be denied
or stopped’, we have to remember that every ecological system has
its parasites and viruses that question the notion of linear predetermined
progress; capitalist and technological determinism are challenged
by ‘the uncontrollable diversity’ introduced by viruses.
Author's Biography
Jussi Parikka is a licentiate of philosophy and a doctoral student
at the Department of Cultural History, University of Turku, Finland.
He is working on his thesis on the cultural history of computer
worms and viruses. His other research interests include the interconnections
of Man and Machine, poststructuralist media theory as well as the
questions of media history, especially media archaeology. Homepage
at: <http://users.utu.fi/juspar/>
Notes
[1] A computer virus is a tiny
piece of programming code, ranging from 10 kilobytes to 30 kilobytes.
It is designed to attach a copy of itself to a host program, potentially
infecting and spreading infinitely. Often computer viruses also
include a ‘trigger’ and a ‘payload’. This means, for example, that
a virus will trigger after, say, fifty boot-ups, releasing its payload.
These payloads vary: some viruses play a song, others format your
hard disk, and some do nothing out of the ordinary. Some classic
viruses have dropped letters off the screen one by one, imitated
the Yankee Doodle tune and printed insults. While a virus attaches
itself to other programs, computer worms are self-contained and
do not need to be part of another program to propagate. Basically,
and technically, these are two different kinds of programs. In this
article I, however, use the term ‘virus’ in a general manner to
refer to self-spreading computer programs without necessarily making
the distinction. [back]
[2] On cultural theory concerning
viruses, see e.g. Helmreich (2000), Lupton (1994), Ross (1990) and
Sampson (2004). [back]
[3] Narratives of computing during
the 20th century are analysed in Suominen (2003). He
argues for a three-phased understanding of computerized modernity:
1) the age of attraction (1920–1958), 2) the age of automation and
integration (1958–1973), and 3) the age of intimacy and personal
computing (1973–). [back]
[4] The notion of moving responsibilities
and risks to the individual is a general theme of risk society as
defined by Beck (1986). As Bauman (1993: 203) notes, collectively
produced risks are placed on individuals; controlling risks is turned
into an individual project. [back]
[5] In Byte-magazine this
novel situation of personal computing was also seen as problematic:
“No one truly wants personal computer security. Access control,
passwords, authorizations, and the procedures needed to enforce
them are all part of the old world of mainframes: Microcomputers
are about freedom and simplicity, not bureaucracy.” (Kochanski 1989:
257). In general the issue of the educated user had to do with the
new phenomenon of commercial software designed for the public, the
lay user. For example, in 1984 the Scientific American articulated
the importance of computer literacy, of teaching average
people correct computing: ‘What then is computer literacy?
It is not learning to manipulate a word processor, a spreadsheet
or a modern user interface; those are paper-and-pencil skills. Computer
literacy is not even learning to program. That can always be learned,
in ways no more uplifting than learning grammar instead of writing.
Computer literacy is a contact with the activity of computing deep
enough to make the computational equivalent of reading and writing
fluent and enjoyable. As in all the arts, a romance with the material
must be well under way. If we value the lifelong learning of arts
and letters as a springboard for personal and societal growth, should
any less effort be spent to make computing a part of our lives?’
(Kay 1984: 47) [back]
[6] In the same European
Institute for Computer Antivirus Research (EICAR) conference of
1995 Urs Gattiker acknowledged the problem viruses present for the
Information Highway and the business opportunities in networking
businesses on the Internet: ‘For managers and policy makers alike
the flourishing InfoBahn [Information Highway] is making it difficult
to ensure a safe and natural progression of use of this technology.
Everyone is anxious to capitalize on this new frontier. Growth has
been incredibly rapid and those organizations who have not already
established an InfoBahn presence may miss golden business opportunities.
With the rapid computerization of information and data, however,
protecting privacy and safety/security of data subjects and information
systems becomes crucial while simultaneously maintaining the viability
and accessibility of information. The freedom to acquire information
will be facilitated by the hybridization of the telephone, television
and the computer. Data collection will become easier with each evolution
of technology. Data subjects will become information.” (Gattiker
1995: P1-14) [back]
[7] In 1975 John Brunner
(1976) wrote his The Shockwave Rider science fiction
novel, which introduced a similar conception of viruses: in a world
controlled by Orwellian procedures of digital surveillance and control,
viruses—or tapeworms as Brunner calls them—are entities of disruption
and resistance that expose the logic of power operating in the novel’s
world. [back]
[8] The Finnish philosopher
Jussi Vähämäki has analysed this culture of communication, drawing
on the works of Gilles Deleuze, Guy Debord, Paolo Virno and Maurizio
Lazzarato, among others. See e.g. Vähämäki 2003. On the utopia of
communication at the heart of digital culture see Flichy 2001. [back]
[9] Viral capitalism
is exemplified in the so-called commercial viruses or ‘viral marketing’,
a kind of an elaborated version of chain letters and spam. See Harley,
Slade & Gattiker 2001: 409. On the principles of the ‘new economy’
as expressed in the mid-1990s, see Tapscott 1996; Kelly 1997. [back]
[10] See the I
Love You-exhibition catalogue at http://www.digitalcraft.org/index.php?artikel_id=244.
[back]
[11] This conception
of digital language can be understood for example through a Deleuze-Guattarian
view of language as rhizomatic. Language and writing are not images,
representations of the world, but intertwine, work within the world.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 3–8) [back]
References
Abbate, Janet. Inventing
the Internet. (Cambridge, Massch.: The MIT Press, 2000.)
Bauman, Zygmunt. Postmodern
Ethics. (Oxford & Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993).
Beck, Ulrich. Risikogesellschaft.
Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1986).
Brothers, M.H. ‘Computer Virus
Protection Procedures’, In: Peter J. Denning (ed.) Computers
Under Attack. Intruders, Worms, and Viruses. (New
York: ACM Press, 1990), 357–380.
Brunner, John. The Shockwave
Rider. (New York: Ballantine Books, 1976).
Castells, Manuel. The Rise
of the Network Society. (Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1996).
Castells, Manuel. ‘Informationalism
and the Network Society.’ In: Himanen, Pekka, The Hacker Ethic
and the Spirit of Capitalism, (New York: Random House, 2001),
157–178.
Cohen, Fred. ‘Computer Viruses
– Theory and Experiments.’ DOD/NBS 7th Conference on Computer Security,
originally appearing in IFIP-sec 84, also appearing as invited paper
in IFIP-TC11, ‘Computers and Security'’, V6#1 (Jan. 1987): 22–35.
http://www.all.net/books/virus/index.html
Deleuze, Gilles. Pourparlers 1972–1990.
(Paris: Les éditions de minuit, 1990.)
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. Anti-Oedipus.
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, transl. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem,
and Helen R. Lane. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
1983, 1972).
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. A Thousand
Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia II, transl. Brian Massumi.
(Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, 1980).
Denning, Dorothy. ‘Secure Personal Computing
in an Insecure Network’, Communications of the ACM. Volume
22, (8 / August 1979): 476–482.
Drew, Mark. ‘Distributed Computing – Business
Risk or Risking the Business’, EICAR Conference Proceedings
(1994): 93–114.
Ferbrache, David: A Pathology of Computer
Viruses (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1992).
Fites, Philip; Johnston, Peter; Kratz, Martin.
The Computer Virus Crisis (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold,
1989).
Flichy, Patrice. L’imaginaire d’internet
(Paris: La Découverte, 2001).
G-Connect Website, (2004).
http://www.g-connect.co.il/html/AntiVirus.shtm
Gates, Bill. The Road Ahead (London: Penguin
Books, 1996).
Gattiker, Urs. ‘The Information Highway: Opportunities
and Challenges for Organizations.’ EICAR Conference Proceedings,
(1995): P1-1– P1-18.
Gere, Charlie. Digital Culture (London:
Reaktion, 2002).
Goodchild, Philip. Deleuze and Guattari. An
Introduction to the Politics of Desire (London: Sage, 1996).
Gryaznow, Dmitry O. ‘Scanners of The Year 2000:
Heuristics.’ EICAR Conference Proceedings, (1995): T4-1–T4-11.
Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio. Empire
(Cambridge, Massch. and London: Harvard University Press, 2001).
Harley,David; Slade, Robert and Gattiker Urs
E. Viruses Revealed! Understand and Counter Malicious Software
(New York: Osborne/McGraw-Hill, 2001.)
Helmreich, Stefan (2000). ‘Flexible Infections:
Computer Viruses, Human Bodies, Nation-States, Evolutionary Capitalism’,
Science, Technology, & Human Values Volume 25, (4/Autumn
2000): 472–491.
Highland, Harold. ‘Case History of a Virus Attack.’
Computer Fraud & Security Bulletin Volume 10, (4/1988):
4–7.
Himanen, Pekka. The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit
of Capitalism (New York: Random House, 2001).
I Love You. Exhibition Catalogue at http://www.digitalcraft.org/index.php?artikel_id=244
Jaromil. ‘:(){ :|:& };:’ In: ‘I love You’-
exhibition catalogue, 2002, http://www.digitalcraft.org/index.php?artikel_id=292
Kay, Alan. ‘Computer Software.’ Scientific
American, volume 251, (September 1984): 41–47.
Kelly, Kevin. ‘New Rules for the New Economy:
Twelve Dependable Princibles for Thriving in a Turbulent World.’
Wired (5.09 / 1997) http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.09/newrules.html.
Kochanski, Martin. ‘How Safe Is It?’ Byte,
(June 1989): 257–266.
Kocher, Bryan. ‘A Hygiene Lesson.’ Communications
of the ACM Volume 32, (1/1989): 3 & 6.
Lampo, Luca. ‘When The Virus Becomes Epidemic.’
An Interview with Luca Lampo by Snafu and Vanni Brusadin. (18.4.2002).
http://www.epidemic.ws/downJones_press/THE_THING_Interview_files/index_files/display.forum.
Leiner, Barry M. et al. ‘The Past and Future
History of the Internet’, Communications of the ACM Volume
40, (2/February1997): 102–108.
Lundell, Allan. Virus! The Secret World of
Computer Invaders That Breed and Destroy (Chicago, New York:
Contemporary Books, 1989).
Lundemo, Trond. ‘Why Things Don’t Work. Imagining
New Technologies From The Electric Life to the Digital.’
In: Pasi Väliaho and Tanja Sihvonen (eds.) Experiencing the Media:
Assemblages and Cross-overs, (Turku: University of Turku, 2003),
13–28.
Lupton, Deborah. “Panic Computing: The Viral
Metaphor and Computer Technology”, Cultural Studies. Volume
8, (3/October 1994): 556–568.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. La Condition Postmoderne
(Paris: Minuit, 1979).
Marshall, Jon. ‘Internet Politics in an Information
Economy’, Fibreculture Journal, Issue 1, (2003), http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue1/issue1_marshall.html.
Martin, Emily. Flexible Bodies. The Role of
Immunity in American Culture from the Days of Polio to the Age of
AIDS (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994).
Murphie, Andrew and Potts, John. Culture &
Technology (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2003).
Murphy, Jamie. ‘A Threat from Malicious Software’,
Time,( November 4 1985).
Negroponte, Nicholas. Being Digital (London:
Hodder & Stoughton, 1995).
Nye, David. Narratives and Spaces. Technology
and the Construction of American Culture (Exeter: University
of Exeter Press, 1997).
Parker, Donn B. ‘The Trojan Horse Virus and Other
Cimoids.’ In: Peter J. Denning (ed.) Computers Under Attack.
Intruders, Worms, and Viruses (ACM Press, New
York, 1990), 544–554.
Pournelle, Jerry. ‘Dr. Pournelle vs. The Virus’,
Byte, (July 1988).
Ross, Andrew. ‘Hacking Away at the Counterculture.’
Postmodern Culture 1.1. (1990).
Sampson, Tony. ‘A Virus in Info-Space. The Open
Network and Its Enemies.’ M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture,
(2004), http://www.media-culture.org.au/0406/07_Sampson.html.
Schievelbusch, Wolfgang. Geschichte der Eisenbahnreise.
Zur Industrialisierung von Raum und Zeit im 19.Jahrhundert (München
and Wien: Hanser, 1977).
Slade, Robert. ‘History of Computer Viruses’,
(1992), http://members.tripod.com/thermopyle/sladehis.htm.
Sollfrank, Cornelia. ‘Biennale.py – The Return
of the Media Hype’, Telepolis, (2001), http://www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/sa/3642/1.html.
Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor and
Aids and Ist Metaphors (London: Penguin Books, 2002).
Spafford, Eugene . ‘Crisis and Aftermath’, Communications
of the ACM, Volume 32, (6/June 1989): 678–687.
Suominen, Jaakko. Koneen kokemus. Tietoteknistyvä
kulttuuri modernisoituvassa Suomessa 1920-luvulta 1970-luvulle
(Tampere: Vastapaino, 2003).
Tapscott, Don. The Digital Economy: Promise
and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence (New York: McGraw
Hill, 1996).
Thompson, Ken. ‘Reflections on Trusting Trust’,
Communications of the ACM, Vol. 27,(8 / August 1984): 761–763.
Van Loon, Joost. Risk and Technological Culture
(London & New York: Routledge, 2002).
Virilio, Paul. ’The Primal Accident.’ In: Brian
Massumi (ed.) The Politics of Everyday Fear (Minneapolis,
London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 210–218.
Virus Bulletin. Editorial, (July 1989).
Vähämäki, Jussi. Kuhnurien kerho. Vanhan työn
paheista uuden hyveiksi (Helsinki: Tutkijaliitto, 2003).
Wilding, Edward. ‘Computer Viruses – A Management
Overview’, Computer Law & Security Report, Volume 8,
(2/1992): 66–69.
Williams, Gene B. ‘Keep Your PC Healthy’, Byte.
(Fall 1988).
Zajac, Bernard P. ’The Michelangelo Virus – Was
It a Failure?’ Computer Law & Security Report. Volume
8, (3/1993): 137.
TOP |
