All of these concerns regarding both popular perceptions of the swarm, as well as the actual ontological details of their organization, provide important clues for how we can begin to parse the fundamentally ambivalent politics of the computer virus. For, as a software object programmed according to principles of swarm intelligence, the computer virus may, to a certain extent, represent the ideology of its original creator, but increasingly, it may have been born solely from its interactions with other machines in the networked environment. And while it is true that the computer virus may be "released" from an authorial point of origin, the global effects through which the virus actually makes itself known only make sense in the context of its autonomous reproducibility and mutation beyond this point of origin via its affective relation to other software agents. But if the agency of the viral author is continually deferred and disseminated, and at times appears as completely absent, what can we say about the ideology or intentionality behind (or within) swarms? And even if the imminent control of protocol provides the primary method for at least partial control of swarms, are these rules enough to keep these semi-autonomous software agents in check?

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