Introduction - Part 1
"Emergence is always produced through a particular stage of forces."
-Michel Foucault[1]
"Networks fail only when they succeed."
-Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker[2]
In epidemiological terms, an infectious disease is often defined as such if its growth and propagation can be linked to one or more specific vectors of transmission. As just one type of infectious pathogen, the virus always takes as its medium of transmission some sort of material form (air, water, blood, or body), but the particular ways in which it is able to infect and propagate are also conditioned and made possible by the historically and culturally contingent ways in which people interact. For instance, as media archeologist Jussi Parikka notes, the bubonic plague that ravaged the European continent in the fourteenth century was to a large extent only possible given the new paths of communication and transmission built by the Mongolian Empire, and in particular, the new ship routes charted along the Mediterranean to foster trade throughout Europe.[3] Likewise, in the case of the 2003 SARS epidemic, a viral strain that was originally localized in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong was able to spread throughout Vietnam, Canada, and the United States in only a few months by virtue of a mere twelve individuals carrying some "unexpected passengers" onto international flights.[4] Clearly, although there is a tendency to reduce disease to a solely biological phenomenon (i.e. "a natural disaster"), it is only by exploiting global networks of commerce, transportation, and communication that these viral epidemics were able to form their own networks of contagion. Or as a media theorist might say, it was only through the convergence and folding of forces that were both biological and historical, ontological and political in nature that these viral epidemics were able to spread semi-autonomously, horizontally, and peer-to-peer across the contagious space of universal communication.
While they differ from biological viruses in many key ways, computer viruses operate according to similar principles - taking this idea of "communicable disease" and extending it to the point of hypertrophy. But if the concept of a communicable disease is fundamental to the political ontology of the virus in both its organic and in-organic instantiations, it is a concept that is also seemingly fraught by internal contradictions. For although historical and contemporary examples of computer and biological viruses have shown us that contagion and communication are mutually reinforcing, this idea would seem to run counter to many popular attitudes towards disease in general and the virus in particular. With seemingly unanimous consent from the mass media, the state, popular culture, the information security industry, and epidemiology, the virus has historically been configured as threat, excess, anomaly, and deviant; as the penultimate "bad object" and problem to be solved. But while the virus, in both its biological and computational forms, does certainly have tendencies towards facilitating breakdown (though not all viruses are destructive or malicious), [5] it would be a mistake to claim that the virus is simply other or oppositional to the network, because it is in fact imminent to it. For it is only by exploiting communication across human bodies, national borders, and computer networks to such an extent that those networks become breached, clogged, and infected that the virus exposes from within the flaws inherent to their seemingly smooth, functional, and all-encompassing operations. Thus, on a fundamental level, viruses expose not just network breakdown, but networks that "work too well."
-Michel Foucault[1]
![[1]](media/footnote-1.jpg){kind=link}
"Networks fail only when they succeed."
-Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker[2]
![[2]](media/footnote-2.jpg){kind=link}
In epidemiological terms, an infectious disease is often defined as such if its growth and propagation can be linked to one or more specific vectors of transmission. As just one type of infectious pathogen, the virus always takes as its medium of transmission some sort of material form (air, water, blood, or body), but the particular ways in which it is able to infect and propagate are also conditioned and made possible by the historically and culturally contingent ways in which people interact. For instance, as media archeologist Jussi Parikka notes, the bubonic plague that ravaged the European continent in the fourteenth century was to a large extent only possible given the new paths of communication and transmission built by the Mongolian Empire, and in particular, the new ship routes charted along the Mediterranean to foster trade throughout Europe.[3] Likewise, in the case of the 2003 SARS epidemic, a viral strain that was originally localized in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong was able to spread throughout Vietnam, Canada, and the United States in only a few months by virtue of a mere twelve individuals carrying some "unexpected passengers" onto international flights.[4] Clearly, although there is a tendency to reduce disease to a solely biological phenomenon (i.e. "a natural disaster"), it is only by exploiting global networks of commerce, transportation, and communication that these viral epidemics were able to form their own networks of contagion. Or as a media theorist might say, it was only through the convergence and folding of forces that were both biological and historical, ontological and political in nature that these viral epidemics were able to spread semi-autonomously, horizontally, and peer-to-peer across the contagious space of universal communication.
![[3]](media/footnote-3.jpg){kind=link}
![[4]](media/footnote-4.jpg){kind=link}
While they differ from biological viruses in many key ways, computer viruses operate according to similar principles - taking this idea of "communicable disease" and extending it to the point of hypertrophy. But if the concept of a communicable disease is fundamental to the political ontology of the virus in both its organic and in-organic instantiations, it is a concept that is also seemingly fraught by internal contradictions. For although historical and contemporary examples of computer and biological viruses have shown us that contagion and communication are mutually reinforcing, this idea would seem to run counter to many popular attitudes towards disease in general and the virus in particular. With seemingly unanimous consent from the mass media, the state, popular culture, the information security industry, and epidemiology, the virus has historically been configured as threat, excess, anomaly, and deviant; as the penultimate "bad object" and problem to be solved. But while the virus, in both its biological and computational forms, does certainly have tendencies towards facilitating breakdown (though not all viruses are destructive or malicious), [5] it would be a mistake to claim that the virus is simply other or oppositional to the network, because it is in fact imminent to it. For it is only by exploiting communication across human bodies, national borders, and computer networks to such an extent that those networks become breached, clogged, and infected that the virus exposes from within the flaws inherent to their seemingly smooth, functional, and all-encompassing operations. Thus, on a fundamental level, viruses expose not just network breakdown, but networks that "work too well."
![[5]](media/footnote-5.jpg){kind=link}
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