1-3: authors and scapegoats
In a 1995 essay for Wired magazine titled "Viruses are Good for You," Julian Dibbell sets out to create a subcultural canon for key figures in the little-known history of computer virus production. In one typically romantic portrait from this collection, Dibbell features an interview with a hacker named Hellraiser, a founding member of the world-renowned virus-writers' group Phalcon/Skism,[7] who describes virus writing as the digital equivalent of graffiti. Recounting the pride that Hellraiser felt in knowing that his SKISM-1 virus was being flashed on computer screens worldwide, Dibbell conceptualizes Hellraiser's viral "tag" as a kind of hacker-authorial signature, but only at the expense of disavowing many outside components of how his virus actually came to its position of global prominence. For instance, although Hellraiser had gained notoriety amongst both cyber-libertarians and information security officials for his virus' rampage in late 1990, SKISM-1 was actually a mutation of an earlier program called the "Jerusalem virus" to which Hellraiser added only a few lines of code. Furthermore, once the virus had infected computers all over the United States, Europe, and South America, frustrating the ability of anti-virus software to keep up, the SKISM-1 virus had mutated again, both from the iterative remixing of likeminded hackers worldwide, but also from the continuous modulations that the virus had established from affective relations with other machines in the networked environments. Thus, despite the clear ways that viruses are continuously written and rewritten by multiple, contingent relations between human and non-human entities in the network environment, Dibbell continues to position viruses emphatically, if more benignly, as "encoded bits of their author's souls" made manifest in "clever jokes, crude graphics, and friendly greetings."[8]
An equally problematic, though perhaps even more telling, example appears in Dibbell's account of Robert Morris Jr. and the infamous "Internet Worm" he released into the ARPANET on November 2, 1988. Unlike Hellraiser, who saw his viruses, unproblematically, as objects fully under his artistic control, Morris' program began as the harmless "work of a bored graduate student" but soon evolved into a "massive blunder, a chain reaction that spiraled out of control."[9] However, despite this avowed loss of human intentionality and control over the machine, Morris was still held legally accountable[10] for the over $10 million in damages caused by the virus, even though it was widely recognized that the program replicated and evolved in excess of its original instructions. Clearly, although there is a kind of networked, machinic "agency" at work operating beyond the intentions of the virus author, the legal action taken against Morris again demonstrates the persistent attempt to inscribe sole agency to the individual human subject. For whether this attribution is mobilized in the interest of authorship or blame, this excessive focus on the individual displaces the fact that computer viruses collaborating in a networked environment often display a kind of uncanny, semi-autonomy of their own. This unique form of agency, which cannot be reduced to the intentional actions of the transcendental human subject, is perhaps better described in terms of the symbiotic force of the swarm, constantly aggregating and evolving from a complex web of distributed human and non-human actors.
![[7]](media/swarm-footnote-7.jpg){kind=link}
![[8]](media/swarm-footnote-8.jpg){kind=link}
An equally problematic, though perhaps even more telling, example appears in Dibbell's account of Robert Morris Jr. and the infamous "Internet Worm" he released into the ARPANET on November 2, 1988. Unlike Hellraiser, who saw his viruses, unproblematically, as objects fully under his artistic control, Morris' program began as the harmless "work of a bored graduate student" but soon evolved into a "massive blunder, a chain reaction that spiraled out of control."[9] However, despite this avowed loss of human intentionality and control over the machine, Morris was still held legally accountable[10] for the over $10 million in damages caused by the virus, even though it was widely recognized that the program replicated and evolved in excess of its original instructions. Clearly, although there is a kind of networked, machinic "agency" at work operating beyond the intentions of the virus author, the legal action taken against Morris again demonstrates the persistent attempt to inscribe sole agency to the individual human subject. For whether this attribution is mobilized in the interest of authorship or blame, this excessive focus on the individual displaces the fact that computer viruses collaborating in a networked environment often display a kind of uncanny, semi-autonomy of their own. This unique form of agency, which cannot be reduced to the intentional actions of the transcendental human subject, is perhaps better described in terms of the symbiotic force of the swarm, constantly aggregating and evolving from a complex web of distributed human and non-human actors.
![[9]](media/swarm-footnote-9.jpg){kind=link}
![[10]](media/swarm-footnote-10.jpg){kind=link}
| Previous page on path | Point 1 Path, page 3 of 10 | Next page on path |
Discussion of "1-3: authors and scapegoats"
Add your voice to this discussion.
Checking your signed in status ...