Viral Style: Technology, Culture, and the Politics of Infection

This book provides an ethnographic and cultural history of computer viruses in computer culture and industry, in the computer underground, and in the popular imagination. In the discourses of computer viruses, these three seemingly distinct domains inflect on each other in interesting and often surprising ways. The goal of this project is to trace out those intersections and moments of collision to better understand both the underground group of programmers who create viruses, cultural reactions to them and the social and political contexts in which their actions have meaning.

Computer viruses are perhaps the best known, yet least understood, element of the computer underground. While most people are acquainted with the idea and effects of computer viruses, few understand the social, cultural, and political implications from either the point of view of virus writers or from the impact that narratives of viral infection have had on the popular imagination. From AIDS and Ebola to the Michelangelo computer virus, the discourse of viral infection has permeated the social consciousness for the past two decades. What has been remarkable is the manner in which the notion of a virus, as a purely biological phenomenon, has undergone a technological transformation, becoming instituted in the popular vocabulary and imagination as something that is able to infect technology. The result has not only been to give life to the virus itself, but also, in the process, to render the technology of the computer organic as well.

This work combines three approaches. The first is an effort to historicize the notion of viral infection in terms of its relation to the moment of technological transformation when it became possible to speak of a computer virus and to trace out the impact of this transformation on computer culture, popular representations of computers and viruses, and the computer industry. The second approach is focused on media and cultural criticism to trace out the cultural, social, and political implications of what viral infection has connoted in the last half of the 20th century, through an examination of artifacts of popular culture as well as the evolution of various metaphors for infection and technology. Third, this work approaches the culture of underground virus writers ethnographically to apprehend the cultural, social, and political motives of this group of programmers who actively constitute themselves as a subculture of technology that is both driven by these narratives of viral infection as well as constitutive of them.

The Rhetoric of Code

As computers play an increasingly important role in the fabric of society, the principles that organize their functioning, similarly, become increasingly integrated into your social fabric. One of those organizing principles pits those who create computer hardware and software (experts) against those who use them with little or no understanding of how the technology itself functions (end users).

To the typical end user, and to our culture as a whole, computer programming, coding, appears to be a highly technical operation, inaccessible to anyone without specialized training or an innate sense of how computers work. As a result, programs and software emerge as fully formed products, identified by title and corporation, but rarely identified through the conventions of authorship.

As a system of production, code is seen as instructions that make (or allow) a computer to perform particular operations. Rarely is programming seen as a creative or artistic act. Coding is so closely tied to the machines that execute the code that, for the most part, we are never able to look past coding as instruction in order to view it as creative process. By comparison, it seems absurd to consider music as a set of instructions to make a CD player produce sound or Citizen Kane as a set of instructions to make a DVD player and television produce images. But we treat code in precisely this way, without any consideration for the artistic and creative element necessary to produce it.

This book is an effort to examine the ways in which code is, itself, rhetorical. In doing so, I focus on two dimensions of coding. First, I examine the ways in which computer languages are used as media of expression. In particular, my examination focuses on the culture and community surrounding the computer language perl. Created by Larry Wall in 1987, perl has become a favored language for hackers with an interest in personal expression and has been the language of choice for web and Internet programmers. Beyond the basic functioning of perl as a computer language, it has also been stretched to accommodate other agendas, including poetry contests and acts of political resistance. Second, I explore the culture of code in an effort to examine how code is used in a variety of political and cultural contexts. Systems of surveillance, hackers, and virus writers all rely on code in different ways to create, maintain, and disrupt various social conventions that regulate our privacy and security.

I argue, through all of these examples, that any public policy, legal or otherwise, which seeks to regulate code as a product rather than as a social, cultural or political system of expression is doomed to fail. Worse yet, to ignore the fundamentally human nature of code also threatens the basic civil rights of both experts and end users.