2-6: [CTRL] + C, continued
But if the copy command appears as a consistent operation throughout the history of modern media technologies, this copying (just as in the case of biology) is often intimately tied to immateriality. Tracing an entire genealogy of themes related to immateriality in media, Bill Brown states that the modern media's ability to copy is often thought to annihilate both the materiality of the referent ("the real world") and the materiality of the medium itself. This is, of course, true of Jean Baudrillard's discussion of the simulacra as well as a number of other film theorists who participate in the modern "melodrama of besieged materiality,"[16] but, more to our purposes, it is especially true for discussions of the computer. For instance, Brown, citing Friedrich Kittler's Grammophone, Film, Typewriter, writes that the computer seems to participate in the "dematerialization of the concept of a medium in general" by virtue of its reduction of all media into code.[17] Furthermore, he notes that when all the operations of other media like text, photography, and video can be numerically described in terms of a universal Turing machine, the simulation of other media, their dissemination, and thus, their copying operate according to different principles of production than the analog media of industrial times - in other words, there is a paradigm shift from the copying of products to the copying of instructions for products.[18] Thus, extending Benjamin for the age of electronic reproducibility, and mirroring the move from Fordist to Post-Fordist economies, we might say that in this dematerializing notion of copying instructions we have the same totalizing impulse that we saw in the case of copying DNA - information as a tool for the infinite transformability, mediation, and incorporation beyond the limitations of the material body. Performing a parallel operation wherein the "human dream of transcending materiality"[19] is realized via the equally transcendent dream of infinite copying without loss, both traditional media studies and biology separate information from matter, and thus, mind from body. The consequences of this evolution as it relates to the computer are, of course, manifold for our understanding of the computer virus.
![[16]](http://scalar.usc.edu/nehvectors/lipshin/media/copy-footnote-16.jpg){kind=link}
![[17]](http://scalar.usc.edu/nehvectors/lipshin/media/copy-footnote-17.jpg){kind=link}
![[18]](http://scalar.usc.edu/nehvectors/lipshin/media/copy-footnote-18.jpg){kind=link}
![[19]](http://scalar.usc.edu/nehvectors/lipshin/media/copy-footnote-19.jpg){kind=link}
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