On one level, this undue focus on the human aspects of viral production are understandable, or at the very least, serve an understandable function. Computer viruses are, after all, often written by humans, and, in the more high profile, national-security cases, the relentless hunt to trace them back to their origin and ascribe accountability to a responsible individual serves the purpose of pathologizing (and often criminalizing) the creator.[11] But even if we can understand the basis for these human biases, remaining complicit in this anthropocentrism by studying computer viruses solely from the perspective of familiar questions like representation and authorship will leave substantial issues untouched. For, even if the majority of viruses do simply infect a host computer and execute a set of instructions written by a programmer, how do we deal with the increasing trend in network technologies towards genuinely autopoietic, swarm systems like artificial life "organisms," genetic algorithms, and self-reproducing viral programs, not only in fringe hobbyist or hacker circles, but in the everyday functioning of Internet culture? Furthermore, if the material agency of the computer virus represents a threat not only to human authorship or accountability, but to the user's pleasurable impression of control over their machine, what can be said to count as an "actor" in a digital network ecology? And perhaps most importantly, if these life-like, viral assemblages are capable of establishing contingent relations of mutual affect, evolution, and incorporation in concert with other machines in the network environment, all with very little input from human actors, what are the consequences of the swarm formation for politics in a networked society of control?

But before we can even begin to answer these questions, it will be necessary to outline how traditional notions of the body, agency, and control have historically been reformulated by the dynamic ontological and behavioral characteristics of the swarm. For, although these characteristics have found their perhaps most perfect instantiation in the operative modes of the computer virus, it is also important to recognize that the swarm has a much longer, though equally contentious, history throughout the duration of Western thought.