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viralcontagion.wordpress/

http://viralcontagion.wordpress.com/. Gustave Le Bon. Gabriel Tarde. 19th century forefathers of contagion theory. Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd Individuals become stupid in crowds Collective intelligence in reverse Collective action is mostly unconscious and gullible

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  1. http://viralcontagion.wordpress.com/

  2. Gustave Le Bon Gabriel Tarde 19th century forefathers of contagion theory

  3. Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd Individuals become stupid in crowds Collective intelligence in reverse Collective action is mostly unconscious and gullible Big influence on Freud and 1930s fascism Gabriel Tarde’s The Laws of Imitation Society is imitation Distinction between society and individuals based on mostly accidental microrelations of imitation Innate tendency to imitate comes before language Big influence on Gilles Deleuze and Bruno Latour A network theorist or assemblage theorist Contagion Theory

  4. ImitationRays

  5. Although metaphors and analogies are part of recent viral discourse, network contagion exceeds them. Virality has a universal physics! Viruses are part of the fabric of network society. Part of its emergence. How viral is viral marketing? – Following the claims of memetics, viral marketers and network science, can virality be predicted and steered. What is the future of virality? This Lecture

  6. The Viral Metaphor

  7. What images do you think of when you hear the word contagion?

  8. Images of Contagion

  9. Metaphors are powerful They can transform the way we think about an object Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980)

  10. Metaphors of contagion are a powerful rhetorical tools How this becomes this

  11. Contagion metaphors arise from analogical reasoning

  12. Biological Virus Cells Gene code Spread via replication Able to do harm Able to evolve Computer Virus Computers Binary code Spread via replication Able to do harm Able to evolve The biological analogy

  13. Biological analogy in computer virus research • To name, categorize and order something novel… Cohen’s PhD in 1984 • To build immunological and epidemiological defences at IBM in 1990s –Digital Immune System • To metaphorically “transform” a playful and destructive code into a disease, a security threat, a “bad object”(Parikka, 2007).

  14. How computer viruses were transformed from objects of interest and play to… Bad Objects

  15. It all began with Viral Computer Games??

  16. Virus games as “bad” objects Demonstration of Darwinia Darwina

  17. Is it Alive?Legitimate QuestionCan machines self-reproduce? Information systems as a class of biophysical system – almost a living thing! ‘If you want understand life, don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes. Think about information technology’(Dawkins in Louw and Duffy, 1992 p. 34) John von Neumann’s work of self-reproduction Neo-Darwinist Richard Dawkins

  18. See Conway’s Game of Life Von Neumann and his contemporaries worked with a series simple rules (a few mathematical rules loosely based on biological laws) continuously applied to a collection of cells in a life game In 1970 Scientific American featured the work a Cambridge mathematician, John Conway

  19. Survivals. Every counter with two or three neighbouring counters survives for the next generation. • Deaths. Each counter with four or more neighbours dies (is removed) from overpopulation. Every counter with one neighbour or none dies from isolation. • Births. Each empty cell adjacent to exactly three neighbours--no more, no fewer--is a birth cell. A counter is placed on it at the next move. See Conway’s Game of Life

  20. Core War & Redcode

  21. 1960s-70s 1961 - DARWIN: A GAME OF SURVIVAL AND (HOPEFULLY) EVOLUTION by V. A. Vyssotsky et al.Bell Telephone Laboratories, Incorporated Murray Hill, New Jersey 1970 Conway’s Game of Life (a game of survival) A.K. Dewdney & Core War 1984 - A.K. Dewdney’s “Computer Recreations” in Scientific American (1984) 1 “Hostile programs engage in a battle of bits” 2 “Viruses, worms and other threats to computer memories” 3 “The first Core War tournament” 4 “Of worms, viruses and Core War” Bell Labs and Parc Xerox

  22. Core War, Scientific American & Computer Viruses • ‘When the column about Core War appeared last May, it had not occurred to me how serious a topic I was raising. My descriptions of machine-language programs, moving about in memory and trying to destroy each other, struck a resonant chord. According to many readers, whose stories I shall tell, there are abundant examples of worms, viruses and other software creatures living in every conceivable computing environment. Some of the possibilities are so horrifying that I hesitate to set them down at all.’ (A. K. Dewdney “A Core War bestiary of viruses, worms and other threats to computer memories”– Scientific American, 1984)

  23. A Case for Benevolent Viruses Fred Cohen Are 'Good' Computer Viruses Still a Bad Idea? Vesselin Bontchev Viruses Are Good for YouSpawn of the devil, computer viruses may help us realize the full potential of the Net. Julian Dibbell in Wired Magazine gives voice to Cohen, Ray and Ludwig. Dr Aycock's Bad Idea: Is the Good Use of Computer Viruses Still a Bad Idea? Tony Sampson M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, Volume 8, Issue 1, February 2005 "One wonders if the university will be held legally and financially responsible if any of the viruses written on their course break out and infect innocent computer users” Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos Anti-Virus Good Virus/Bad Virus

  24. Fred Cohen’s Benevolent Viruses • Benevolent Symbiosis And Tom Ray’s Tierra

  25. Stefan Helmreich on computer security rhetoric • ‘[C]omputer viruses lean on analogies from immunology and… encode popular anxieties about AIDS’ • ‘Computer security rhetoric… portrays viruses using images of foreignness, illegality, and otherness.’ Computer Viruses, Human Bodies, Nation-States, Evolutionary Capitalism by Stefan Helmreich http://web.mit.edu/anthropology/faculty_staff/helmreich/PDFs/flexible_infections.pdf

  26. Helmreich’s analysis of network security threats Rhetoric of HIV/AID used in computer security industry discourse

  27. SAFE SEX SAFE HEX (hexadecimal) See Parikka’s Digital Contagions, 2007 The Rhetoric of Contagion

  28. “As the AIDS-phenomenon raised the issue of responsible safe sex, computer viruses were understood as digital counterparts of sexually transmitted diseases.” Jussi Parikka discusses TheComputer Virus Crisis (Fites, Johnston and Kratz, 1989: 87–94) in “Digital Monsters, Binary Aliens – Computer Viruses, Capitalism and the Flow of Information” http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue4/issue4_parikka.html Defines what you can and cannot to do on a network Products should be purchased only from reputable dealers. Public domain programs and games downloaded from bulletin boards should be avoided. User’s responsibility to install and update “reputable” anti-virus to protect, e.g. online banking (Banking Code). Safe Hex = no hex with strangers

  29. Shoch and Hupp’s Accidental Worm (late 70s) Cohen’s PhD experiments (1983-84) Internet “Morris” Worm (first prosecution 1988) Melissa author 20 months prison sentence (2002) Gokar, Admirer and RedesiB author two years in UK (2003) Virus writers… the terrorists of the Internet Network Controllers Shut Down the Virus

  30. Universal Virality:From network vulnerability to network threats

  31. Virality in Network Science New Science of Networks establishes that networks are both… • Robust and flexible • Vulnerable and susceptible

  32. Robust and vulnerable? Nodes Links (Edges) Hubs (Clusters)

  33. 80/20 Rule

  34. Robust & Vulnerable?

  35. The Internet

  36. Too muchconnectivity& universal contagion • Global network of air transport = vulnerability to biological disease • Internet = computer viruses and worms • Cultural contagions (enhanced by Internet) – spreading of conformity, cults, fads • Financial contagion Jan Van Dijk, The Network Society (London: Sage, 2006) p. 187

  37. Increased contact ‘The age of globalization is the age of universal contagion’ ‘Along with the common celebrations… in our new global village, one can still sense the anxiety about increased contact… The dark side of the consciousness of globalization is the fear of contagion. If we break down global barriers… how do we prevent the spread of disease and corruption?’ Michel Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 2000) p. 136.

  38. “Insecurity spreads like contagion” ‘The threat today is not that of the 1930s. It’s not big powers going to war with each other… But the world is ever more interdependent. Stock markets and economies rise and fall together. Confidence is key to prosperity. Insecurity spreads like contagion. So people crave stability and order… the threat is chaos’. Tony Blair’s speech on the Iraq crisis delivered in the House of Commons on Tuesday March 18th 2003. Archived on the Guardian Unlimited website http://politics.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,4627766-111381,00html (accessed 5th Feb 2008)

  39. ‘Insecurity spreads like contagion’ Tony Blair’s Iraq speech, 2003

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