The Universal Viral Machine: Bits, Parasites and the Media Ecology of Network Culture: Essay by Jussi Parikka.
Quote: >During the past few decades, biological creatures like viruses, worms, bugs and bacteria seem to have migrated from their natural habitats to ecologies of silicone and electricity. The media has also been eager to employ these figures of life and monstrosity in representing miniprograms, turning them into digital Godzillas and other mythical monsters. The anxiety these programs produce is largely due to their alleged status as near-living programs, as exemplified in this quote on the Internet worm of 1988: "The program kept pounding at Berkeley's electronic doors. Worse, when Lapsley tried to control the break-in attempts, he found that they came faster than he could kill them. And by this point, Berkeley machines being attacked were slowing down as the demonic intruder devoured more and more computer processing time. They were being overwhelmed. Computers started to crash or become catatonic. They would just sit there stalled, accepting no input. And even though the workstations were programmed to start running again automatically after crashing, as soon as they were up and running they were invaded again. The university was under attack by a computer virus." Such articulations of life in computers have not been restricted to these specific programs, but they have become a general way of understanding the nature of the Internet since the 1990s. Its complex composition has been depicted in terms of "grassroots" and "branching structures", of "growing" and "evolution." As Douglas Rushkoff noted in the mid-1990s, "biological imagery is often more appropriate to describe the way cyberculture changes. In terms of the way the whole system is propagating and evolving, think of cyberspace as a social petri dish, the Net as the agar-medium, and virtual communities, in all their diversity, as the colonies of microorganisms that grow in petri dishes."<
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posted by johannes,
Thursday, January 26, 2006
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