IF/THEN
A Book Review of ÒDigital Contagions: A Media Archaeology
of Computer VirusesÓ by Jussi Parikka (Peter Lang Books, 2007, 327 pages)
{loop:file =
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-Fred Cohen, Computer Viruses: Theory
and Experiments
We
cannot be done with viruses as long as the ontology of network culture is
viral-like.
-Jussi Parikka, The Universal Viral
Machine
One could be forgiven for assuming that a
book with the title ÒDigital
Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer VirusesÓ would be of sole interest
to those sniggering hornrimmed programmers who harbor an erudite loathing of
Bill Gates and an affection for the Viennese witch-doctor. Actually, it is a
rather game and enthralling look, via a media-ecological
approach, into the acutely frightening, yet hysterically
glittering, networked world in which we now
reside. A world where the distinct individual is pitted against - and thoroughly
processed by - post-human semi-autonomous software
programs which often ferment anomalous feelings of being eaten alive by some
great indifferent artificiality that apparently functions semi-independently as
a natural being.
Though no J. G. Ballard or William S. Burroughs, Jussi Parikka nevertheless sucks us into a fantastic black
tour-de-force narrative of virulence and the cultural history of computer
viruses (*), followed by innumerable inquisitive innuendoes concerning the
ramifications for a creative and aesthetic, if post-human, future. Digital
Contagions is impregnated with fear and suspicion, but we almost
immediately sense that it also contains an undeniable affirmative nobility of
purpose; which is to save the media cultural condition Ð and the brimful push
of technological modernization in general Ð from catastrophically killing itself off.
This admirable embryonic redemption is
achieved by a vaccination-like turning of tables, as Parikka convincingly
demonstrates that computer viruses (semi-autonomous machinic/vampiric pieces of
code) are not antithetical to contemporary digital culture, but rather essential traits of the techno-cultural logic itself. According to
Parikka, digital viruses in effect define the media ecology logic that characterizes
our networked computerized culture in recent decades.
We may wish to recall here that for
Deleuze and Guattari, media ecologies are machinic operations (the term
machinic here refers to the production of consistencies between heterogeneous
elements) based in particular technological and humane strings that have
attained virtual consistency. Our current inter-network ecology is a comparable
combination of top-down host arrangements wedded to bottom-up self-organization
where invariable linear configurations and states of entanglement co-evolve in
active process. Placing the significant role of the virus in this mix in no
uncertain terms, Parikka writes that, Òthe virus truly seems to be a central
cultural trope of the digital worldÓ. (p. 136) Indeed digital viruses are
recognized by Parikka as the crowning culmination of current postmodern
cultural trends - as viruses, by definition, are merger machines based on
parasitism and acculturation. So it is not only their symbolic/metaphoric power
that places them firmly in a wider perspective of cultural infection; it is
their formal structure, in that they procure their actuality from the
encircling environment to which they are receptively coupled.
Moreover, with the love of an aficionado, Parikka lucidly demonstrates
that computer viruses are indeed a variable index of
the rudimentary underpinning on which contemporary techno culture rests. He
astutely anoints the indexical function of the virus by establishing not only
its symbolic melancholy power in relation to the human body and sex, but by
folding the viral life/nonlife model (**) into key cultural areas underlying
the digital ecology; such as bottom-up self-organization, hidden distributed
activity and ethereal meshwork. In that sense Parikka describes network ecology as both actual and virtual, what
I have elsewhere identified as the viractual. (Briefly, the viractual is the stratum of activity where
distinct actualizations/individuations are materialized out of the flow of
virtuality.) But some viruses do not simply yield copies of themselves, they
also engage in a process of self-reproducing autopoiesis: they are copying
themselves over and over again but they can also mutate and change, and by
doing so, Parikka maintains, reveal
distinguishing aspects of network culture at large.
I would add that they mimic the
manneristic aspects of late post-modernism in general, particularly if one sees
modernism as the great petri dish aggregate in which we still are afloat. So
computer viruses are recognized here as an indexical symptom also of a bigger
cultural tendency that characterizes our post-modern media culture as being
inserted within a modern (purist) digital ecology. This aspect provides the
book with a discerning, yet heterogeneous, comprehension of the connectionist
technologies of contemporaneous techno culture.
But beyond the techno-cultural relevance,
the significance of the viral issues in ParikkaÕs book to ALL
cultural production is evident to anyone who has already recognized that
digitalization has become the universal technical platform for networked
capitalism. As Parikka himself points out,
digitalization has secured its place as the master formal archive for sounds,
images and texts. (p. 5) Digitalization is the double, the gangrel, that
accompanies each of us in what we do - and which accounts for our cultural
feelings of vacillating between anxiety and enthusiasm over being invaded by
something invisible - and the sneaky suspicion that we have been taken control
of from within.
To begin this caliginous expedition, Digital Contagions plunges us into a haunting,
shifting and dislocating array of source material that thrills. Parikka
launches his degenerate seduction by drawing from, and intertwining in a
non-linear fashion, the theories of Gilles Deleuze and FŽlix
Guattari (for whom my unending love is verging on obsession), Friedrich
Kittler, Eugene Thacker, Tiziana Terranova, N.
Katherine Hayles, Lynn Margulis, Manuel DeLanda, Brian Massumi, Bruno Latour,
Charlie Gere, Sherry Turkle, Humberto Maturana and
Francisco Varela, Deborah Lupton, and Paul Virilio. These thinkers are
then linked with ripe examples from prankster
net art, stealth biopolitics, immunological
incubations, the disassembly significance of
noise, ribald sexual allegories, antibody a-life projects, various infected prosthesis, polymorphic
encryptions, ticklish security issues, numerous medical plagues, the coupling of nature and biology via code, incisive
sabotage attempts, anti-debugging trickery, genome sequencing, parasitic spyware, killer
T cell epidemics, rebellious database
deletions, trojan horse latency, viral marketing, inflammatory political resistance, biological weaponry, pornographic
clones, depraved destructive turpitudes,
rotten jokes, human-machine symbiosis as interface, and
a history of cracker catastrophes. All are
conjoined with excellent taste. The shock effect is one of discovering a
poignant nervous virality that has been secretly penetrating us everywhere.
Digital ContagionsÕs genealogical
account is proportionately impressive, as it devotes satisfactory space to the
discussion of historical precedent; including Turing
machines, Fred CohenÕs pioneering work with
computer viruses, John von Neumann's cellular automata theory (i.e. any system
that processes information as part of a self-regulating mechanism), avant-garde
cybernetics, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the Creeper virus in the
Arpanet network, the coupling machines of John Conway, the nastily waggish
Morris worm, Richard DawkinsÕs meme (contagious idea) theory; and even the
under known artistic hacks of Tommaso Tozzi. Furthermore, the viral spectral as
fantasized in science fiction is adequately fleshed out, paying deserved
attention to the obscure but much loved (by me, anyway) 1975 book The
Shockwave Rider by John Brunner and the
celebrated cyberpunk novel by Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash; among other speculative books and hallucinatory films.
But the pinnacle of interest, for me, of this engaging
and educative read is its conclusion where Parikka sketches out an alternative radical media-ecological perspective hinged
on the viral characteristics of self-reproduction and a coupling of the outside
with the inside typical of artificial life (a-life). He correctly maintains
that viral autopoiesis undertakings, like Thomas S. Ray's Tierra virtual ecology art project, provides quintessential clues
to interpreting the software logic that has produced, and will continue to
produce, the ontological basis for much of the economic, political and cultural
transactions of our current globalizing world.
Here he has rendered problematic the safe
vision of virus as malicious software (virus as infection machine) and replaced
it with a far more curious, aesthetic and even benevolent one; as whimsical artificial
life (a-life). Using viral a-lifeÕs tenants of semi-automation,
self-reproduction, and host quest; Parikka proposes a living
machinic autopoiesis that might provide a moebius strip like ontological
process for culture.
Though suppositional, he bases his procedure
in formal viral attributes - not unlike those of primitive artificial life with
its capability to self-reproduce and spread semi-autonomously (as viruses do)
while keeping in mind that Maturana/VarelaÕs autopoiesis contends that living
systems are an integral component of their surroundings and work towards
supporting that ecology. Parikka here picks up that thread by pointing out that recent polymorphic viruses are now able to evolve in
response to anti-virus behaviors. Various viruses, known as retroviruses, (***)
explicitly target anti-virus programs. Viruses with adaptive behavior,
self-reproductive and evolutionary programs can be seen, at least in part, as
something alive, even if not artificial life in the strongest sense of the
word. Here we might recall John Von NeumannÕs conviction that the ideal design
of a computer should be based on the design of certain human organs - or other
live organisms. The artistic compositional benefit of his autopoiesic virality theory, for me, is in allowing thought
and vision to rupture habit and bypass object-subject dichotomies.
I wish to point out here that although biological
viruses were originally discovered and characterized on the basis of the
diseases they caused, most viruses that infect bacteria, plants and animals
(including humans) do not cause disease. In fact, viruses may be helpful to
life in that they rapidly transfer genetic information from one bacterium to
another, and viruses of plants and animals may convey genetic information among
similar species, helping their hosts survive in hostile environments.
Already various theories of complexity
have established an influence within philosophy and cultural theory by
emphasizing open systems and adaptability, but Parikka here supplies a further
step in thinking about ongoing feedback loops between
an organism and its environment; what I am tempted to call viralosophy. Viralosophy would be the
study of viral philosophical and theoretical points of reference concerning malignant
transformations useful in understanding the viral
paradigm essential to digital culture and media theory that focuses on
environmental complexity and inter-connectionism in relationship to the
particular artist. Within viralosophy, viral
comprehension might become the eventual - yet chimerical - reference point for
culture at large in terms of a modification of parameters, as it promotes
parasite-host dynamic interfacings of the technologically inert with the
biologically animate, probabilistically.
So the decisive, if dormant, payload that is triggered by reading this book, for me, is
an enhanced understands of pagan and animist sentiment which recognizes non-malicious looping-mutating energy feedback and self-recreational
dynamism that informs new aesthetic becomings which may alter artistic output. Possibly
heuristic becomings (****) that transgress the established boundaries of
nature/technology/culture and extend the time-bomb cognitive nihilism of Henry Flynt. This affirmative viral
payload forces open-ended multiplicities onto art that favor new-sprung
conceptualizations and rebooted realizations. Here the artist comes back to
life as spurred a-life, and not as a sole
articulation of the pirated environment of currency. So the so-called art virus
is not to be judged in terms of its occasional monetary payload, but by the
metabolistic characteristics that make art reasonable to discuss as a form of
extravagant artificial life: triggered emergence, resilience and back door
evolution.
(*) A computer virus is a
self-replicating computer program that spreads by inserting copies of itself
into other executable code or documents. A computer virus behaves in a way
similar to a biological virus, which spreads by inserting itself into living
cells. Extending the analogy, the insertion of a virus into the program is
termed as an "infection", and the infected file, or executable code
that is not part of a file, is called a "host".
(**) Scientists have argued about whether viruses
are living organisms or just a package of colossal molecules. A virus has to
hijack another organism's biological machinery to replicate, which it does by
inserting its DNA into a host.
(***) Retroviruses are
sometimes known as anti-anti-viruses. The basic principle is that the virus
must somehow hinder the operation of an anti-virus program in such a way that
the virus itself benefits from it. Anti-anti-viruses should not be confused
with anti-virus-viruses, which are viruses that will disable or disinfect other
viruses.
(****) A heuristic virus cleaner works by
loading an infected file up to memory and emulating the program code. It uses a
combination of disassembly, emulation and sometimes execution to trace the flow
of the virus and to emulate what the virus is normally doing. The risk in heuristic
cleaning is that if the cleaner tries to emulate everything, the virus might
get control inside the emulated environment and escape, after which it can
propagate further or trigger a destructive retaliation reflex.
Joseph Nechvatal
Mid-September 2007, Marrakech