Archive
Virality and Digital Contagions
The publisher of my book Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses (2nd updated edition, 2016) has given free access to the preface by Sean Cubitt and my Introduction to the book. The download can be accessed on the publisher’s website.
From Sean Cubitt’s opening words:
“There is a disturbing etymological puzzle underlying the title. “Contagion” appears to be a late fourteenth-century coinage, appearing in the wake of the Black Death in mediaeval French and Middle English, from the Latin roots “con,” meaning “with,” and “tangere,” the active verb “to touch.” The puzzle comes from another word we associate at least equally closely with electronic media, “contact.” Here the root words are the same, with the only exception that “contact” comes from the passive form “tactum,” “to be touched.” Oddly, most people probably feel positive connotations about “contact,” but negative connotations from “contagion.” We have had six hundred years to develop these connotations, and yet there remains a nub of their origins: the contagious principle of something coming to touch us or to touch us together is more subjective than the principle of contact, where any two things could be brought together. The usefulness of the electrical contact as a major metaphor, dating back through early electrical experiments and familiar from the literature of the pioneering days of motoring and aviation, gives it both a certain objectivity and a sense of familiarity that we bring into the realm of communicative contact. Not so contagion, even though it is very close, at least etymologically.”
In this context, it might be also relevant to mention the piece the French publication AOC commissioned us with Tony Sampson to write on different models of virality and media.
Here’s the link to the French version.
And Boundary 2 Online published the English version: The New Logics of Viral Media.
Malware as Operational Art
I returned to some themes of Digital Contagions, on computer viruses and malware, in this short text commissioned for the Malware exhibition on at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam.
The history of malware is the history of inventing multiple forms of attack and defence, of borders and breaches, of evolutionary programmes, artificial life and system crashes (Parikka 2016). It is also an invention of different forms of artificiality that vary in scale from individual computers to entire infrastructures, with much in between. Malware such as computer viruses and worms are forms of speculative computing that have a long lineage of ideas about networking, connection, security and contagion. They are speculative software in the manner that Matthew Fuller defined as investigating the possibilities of programming – “Software as science fiction, as mutant epistemology.” (Fuller 2003, 30). As an art of the artificial, computer viruses have been likened to artificial life, but this artificiality also includes a parallel trajectory. Malware is about trickery in the same fundamental sense in which Vilem Flusser described art and design, suggesting that the word ‘artifice’ can trace its origins to the definition ‘trickster’ (Flusser: 1999, 18. See also Singleton 2015)
Malware is a bag of tricks for the designer – after infection things don’t look the same, scales are distorted, interfaces are taken over, maps are redrawn, routes are rerouted, connections are slowed down to a snail’s pace, much is stolen, and things are twisted to the perpetrator’s advantage. Of course, much of this could be said to pertain to any operation of power.
Perhaps, in short, malware is the truth about software.
…read the rest of the essay here.
Tap My Head, Mike My Brain: Experiencing Digital Culture
March 7th, Tuesday, we will be launching our new books with Tony Sampson in London. Tony’s wonderful study The Assemblage Brain and my Digital Contagions (2nd, revised edition with a new preface by Sean Cubitt that can also be read for free online) will form the context for our short talks under the broad rubric of “experiencing digital culture”.
A short description below and to book tickets (free) see Eventbrite. Kings College London and their Arts & Humanities Research Institute are hosting the event.
We’ve worked with Tony since our joint edited book The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture, which I still feel is a timely book with a pretty impressive cadre of writers such as Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey (on evil media!), Steve Goodman, Luciana Parisi, Susanna Paasonen, Greg Elmer, Alex Galloway, Eugene Thacker and many others. Ever since, I’ve always gotten a lot out from following Tony’s work, and same applies to his new book.
I also wrote the blurb for The Assemblage Brain and can warmly recommend it:
‘Tap my head and mike my brain’; Tony Sampson’s new book might silently echo Pynchon’s famous lines, but this is also an original, inspiring, and theoretically savvy take on the culture of the affective brain, from sciences to business, cybernetics to political power. Warmly recommended.
Description
Insects and Media (a short interview)
During an earlier transmediale I was interviewed by Daniel Fetzner in Berlin. This short interview is now downloadable here as a PDF [insects-and-media-interview] and briefly discusses Insect Media with also a nod to Digital Contagions and “viral capitalism”.
Reference to the interview:
Fetzner, D./Dornberg. M. (2015) BUZZ – Parasitäre Ökologien. Freiburg
A Museum of Viruses
I just submitted to the publisher the new, 2nd and revised edition of Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses, a book that came out for the first time with Peter Lang in 2007. Around the time of submission, the new Archive.org online museum of computer viruses was launched and made rounds in the popular press too.
Already in 2002, Museum for Applied Art in Frankfurt am Main, Germany engaged in exhibiting viral art its I Love You-Exhibition. Curator Franziska Nori expressed the importance of this topic: museums and cultural centres need to engage with this new form of cultural activity that tells the story of hackers and programming skills. The museum was to become also a laboratory where new cultural phenomena of digital culture are given a voice.
I wrote a general audience piece about the new Malware museum for The Conversation. For those of you who read German, Die Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote a piece “Unterhaltsame Viren“. The new edition of Digital Contagions should be out by late 2016, or early 2017, just suitably to celebrate its 10th year!
Denials of Service
I wrote a short text on “Denials of Service” for the just released new book There is no software, there are just services. (Meson Press and downloadable as an open access PDF).
The book, edited by Irina Kaldrack and Martina Leeker, asks if software is dead. This is not merely a rehashed Nietzschean proclamation so much as an observation about the current digital industry landscape where “the (re)emergence of the service paradigm […] challenges traditional business and license models as well as modes of media creation and use.” Indeed, perhaps software is replaced by services. “The short essays in this edited collection discuss how services shift the notion of software, the cultural technique of programming, conditions of labor as well as the ecology and politics of data and how they influence dispositifs of knowledge.”
Meson Press is a recent publishing initiative at Leuphana University, Luneburg. Here’s a short interview with Mercedes Bunz explaining the idea of the Press.
Pour une archéologie des virus – an interview
Here’s an interview with me by Camille Paloque-Bergès published in French in Tracés (N° 21, 2011/2). It’s on the archaeology of (digital) viruses in contexts of security, biopolitics and media theory. It’s not exactly recent but I don’t think I have posted or even seen it online before.
The Dark Side
Another (what I am sure is going to be a) great event organized by the Center for 21st Century Studies at University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee: The Dark Side of the Digital.
Think of it less as the Dark Side à la Star Wars, but instead rephrase Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, the very last words of the album, after the final pulsations.. “There is no dark side really. Matter of fact, it’s all dark.”
>A review of Digital Contagions
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Anthony Enns raises good points in his flattering review of my Digital Contagions-book that just came out in the most recent issue of Leonardo Digital Review. Enns is himself well familiar with the debates in German media theory, having sat in the seminars of Friedrich Kittler and Wolfgang Ernst for years – and being still an avid visitor of Berlin like myself. Hence, it is no wonder that he places more emphasis on my book’s connections with the certain Kittlerian-mindset (but the “old”-Kittler of Discourse Networks and critic of digital culture). Enns is able to pick up on some really good points, but I just want to tackle some questions raised by the review.
1) Enns writes quoting me that viruses work through the principles of bottom-up emergence; I think this is only part of the picture, and I try to place them on the much wider strategic webs of definitions and articulations in which such ideas of emergence are read in their political contexts as well paying attention to the work of stratification that is as important as the idea of any distributed nature of viral networks. Such a focus on emergence is problematic if it is not specified, and instead of thinking virus software as a form of emergence, I try to think “emergence” as a form of interconnected complexity, a media ecology of sorts, where various scales of this phenomena are in constant interaction. We need to steer clear of the old ideas of internet as a distributed random network for emergence, and pay attention to for example the scale-free nature of contagions, as Tony D. Sampson has pointed out very well: we need to specify what kind of topologies are we dealing with in these milieus of accidents.
Later on in the book I refer to Katherine Hayles’s ideas relating to emergence: “Structures that lead to emergence typically involve complex feedback loops in which the outputs of a system are repeatedly fed back as input.” In other words, I also try to articulate how viruses are much a more systemic part of the loops in which software and even malicious accidents are tied to the new software business that was emerging, e.g. in the form of digital security.
2) This is why I want to steer clear of the idea that viruses are automatically vehicles of resistance; It’s not only that I reject that “viruses might represent the resistant logic of hackers attempting to subvert or appropriate corporate technologies” but that again, this image that stems from some 1990s tactical media inspired accounts, as well as a Deleuzian focus on viruses as tools of sabotage and non-communication, needs to be complexified. We need to pay attention to the singular modes of functioning of this specific software type, as well as the uses and misuses of the discursive iterations of its characteristics. This does not necessarily mean a straightforward failure of such programs of resistance, but a recognition of the multiple contextual forces in which resistance always takes place. In the Deleuzian context the idea of virus as a cut in communication made perhaps sense, but not in such contexts where accidents can be turned so easily as part of the strengthening of the security industry in itself – and this of course applies to much wider trends in security, as demonstrated after 9/11.
3) The first point also relates to how I don’t see capitalism as potentially even benevolent force, but as itself “viral” — viral capitalism is characterized less by substance than through its forces of deterritorialisation, variation, modulation. It feeds through differences, it spreads virally to a variety of practices and discourses that might superficially seem contradictory to itself. It’s not enough, as I argue following e.g. Luciana Parisi, to posit a dualism between the living “good” multitude and the big bad capitalism that sucks power out of the creativity of people, but to actually track the modes of invention, change and appropriation inherent in capitalism’s apparatus of capture. In other words, the only way I see capitalism as a living force is due to its powers of/for change. This follows from a variety of Marxist positions as well – and one could find really nice passages from Marx himself about capitalism & crises.
Machinology 