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Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses
Digital Contagions is the first book to offer a comprehensive and critical analysis of the culture and history of the computer virus phenomenon. The book maps the anomalies of network culture from the angles of security concerns, the biopolitics of digital systems, and the aspirations for artificial life in software. The genealogy of network culture is approached from the standpoint of accidents that are endemic to the digital media ecology. Viruses, worms, and other software objects are not, then, seen merely from the perspective of anti-virus research or practical security concerns, but as cultural and historical expressions that traverse a non-linear field from fiction to technical media, from net art to politics of software. Jussi Parikka mobilizes an extensive array of source materials and intertwines them with an inventive new materialist cultural analysis. Digital Contagions draws from the cultural theories of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Friedrich Kittler, and Paul Virilio, among others, and offers novel insights into historical media analysis.
- GenresHistory
327 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2007
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About the author
Jussi Parikka
32 books35 followersJussi Parikka is a Finnish new media theorist and Professor in Digital Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University, Denmark. He is also Professor in Technological Culture & Aesthetics at Winchester School of Art as well as Visiting Professor at FAMU at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague.
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January 31, 2024
Jussi Parikka’s Digital Contagions begins with simple provocation inspired by Paul Virilio’s L’accident originel: “The history of media and technology is a history of accidents.” Parikka diverges from Virilio in his reading of the “accident” as not only integral to an archeology of technology (the “train introduced the train accident”) but of disease, which he argues are themselves symptomatic of how cultures interact with one another. For Parikka, we must contend with the rise of the computer virus and digital worm on both fronts: the virus is an essential to any account of computer and network accidents as it is to human biology. While the virus and computer worm are often used interchangeably, they are two distinct programs: the virus will “attach itself to other programs,” whereas the computer worm is self-contained and does “not need to be part of another program to propagate.” Both are, generally, under the larger category of malware (“malicious software”).
The text is divided into three sections. The first is on fear and security, which connects the computer virus and worm to media, risk society, and (viral) capitalism. He begins this section on the notion of digital hygiene, which emerged as computer culture vernacular in the 1980s. The text then moves to describe the history of the virus, beginning with the “bug” (referring to computer malfunction) as term that gained currency in the 1940s when engineers found actual bugs that had crawled between the relays. (The vernacular term “debugging,” then, meant the literal removal of bugs and moths, which in particular were attracted to the bright lights.” In the 1970s, computers shifted to becoming personal assistants and lost the distinct “professionalism” that was associated with the operations of a mainframe, opening the devices to hobbyists and children. This in turn lead to an increased emphasis on connectivity and networks, which, of course, lead to more viruses: “viruses have been primarily a phenomenon of time-sharing, networking, and, broadly speaking, connectivity . . . The more users on the same network, the more viruses as well. The more homogenous the ecosystem, the more vulnerable.”
Viruses, according to Parikka, are difficult to disentangle from the rhetoric around AIDS (which gained traction within popular consciousness around the same period), as what viruses inflict upon an informational infrastructure is considered similarly to what AIDS inflicts upon the body. Parikka moves onto discussing what he terms “viral capitalism,” or “capitalism as capable of continuous mutation and hereogenesis.” The argument here leads to how an entire economy has been built upon viruses and security, particularly within post 9/11 internet culture as virus-protection software has become a multi-billion-dollar industry.
The second section follows the computer virus as a way of considering embodiment, ultimately arguing that virality “became central cultural figures in the sense that tuberculosis had been in the nineteenth century and cancer was in the 1970s.” The virus reimagines the body as open and, as Parikka continually asserts, “leaky,” as it is susceptible not only to disease but to information. Importantly, the computer viruses are hugely indebted to a field of biological references: “CPUs are referred to as brains; system networks are environments; computers get infected and sick; and these diseases are countered with vaccines.” Here, Parikka invokes William S. Burroughs, who figured language itself as a virus, one that is self-replicating with a human host. The last section continues its focus on the biology of the computer virus. Parikka here argues that “technological evolution and the notion of self-spreading computer programs have much more widespread roots in the cultural history of modernity than the security-oriented notion of a computer virus implies.”
For my own work, a useful line of inquiry is the potential interchange between the logic of the computer virus and the contemporary poem. While Parikka does not go as far to read any of the viruses as themselves significant literary artifacts, this seems like a potential omission when the first heavily-reported computer virus (called “Elk Cloner” and programmed in 1981-1982 in Richard Skrenta) was, in fact, a poem:
Viruses, much like most literary artifacts, are often defined by their circulation. The poem is, in fact, a limerick in near perfect trochees, a metrical unit that emphasizes the chantlike nature of the text, which is itself a mock advertisement. The title “Elk Cloner—the program with a personality” models this with its ironic use of a catchphrase, reminiscent of corporate branding initiatives, despite operating under the exact opposite logic: instead of trying to attract a consumer, the consumer is actively trying to get rid of the product that has non-consensually infiltrated their computer, making the advertisement taunting rather than beguiling. The virus’s metrical “catchiness, “via the chanting of the trochees, is itself reminiscent of its formal structure. The code “sticks” to the computer like glue in the same manner that the poem itself is meant to “stick” in your head. We might use the poem as the beginning of a larger history of viruses existing as literary artifacts: how do lines of code model the poetic logic of enjambment? How does the subversive infiltration of a foreign object, often in the spirit of deregulating information, offer a more active “form” than a simple unit of text on a page?
The 1980s, as Parikka notes, was a time in which programs were often “funny pranks or innocent tests” rather than actual malware. Another significant virus that borrows from the visual rhetoric of poetry is Cascade, which causes letters to fall to the screen. Parikka suggests that this marks a “breaking down of the new digital era, as well as the digital ontology of writing: good-bye to the discrete human-readable Gutenberg Galaxy of letters; welcome to the writing executed in code on screens. The machine code causes the visible surface layer of graphical user interfaces to crumble into pieces, underlining how language was no longer about meanings and natural languages; it functioned increasingly as the binary machine code (and the program language of intermediaries) that was more pragmatic and function oriented than semantic.” We also might consider Tommaso Tozzi’s experimental virus that displayed the word “Rebel!” and hacker art more generally. The Morris Worm would also be relevant here, and the media art of Zach Blas.
Follow my Substack here for more monograph reviews/recommendations as I (very slowly!) work through my graduate reading lists.
The text is divided into three sections. The first is on fear and security, which connects the computer virus and worm to media, risk society, and (viral) capitalism. He begins this section on the notion of digital hygiene, which emerged as computer culture vernacular in the 1980s. The text then moves to describe the history of the virus, beginning with the “bug” (referring to computer malfunction) as term that gained currency in the 1940s when engineers found actual bugs that had crawled between the relays. (The vernacular term “debugging,” then, meant the literal removal of bugs and moths, which in particular were attracted to the bright lights.” In the 1970s, computers shifted to becoming personal assistants and lost the distinct “professionalism” that was associated with the operations of a mainframe, opening the devices to hobbyists and children. This in turn lead to an increased emphasis on connectivity and networks, which, of course, lead to more viruses: “viruses have been primarily a phenomenon of time-sharing, networking, and, broadly speaking, connectivity . . . The more users on the same network, the more viruses as well. The more homogenous the ecosystem, the more vulnerable.”
Viruses, according to Parikka, are difficult to disentangle from the rhetoric around AIDS (which gained traction within popular consciousness around the same period), as what viruses inflict upon an informational infrastructure is considered similarly to what AIDS inflicts upon the body. Parikka moves onto discussing what he terms “viral capitalism,” or “capitalism as capable of continuous mutation and hereogenesis.” The argument here leads to how an entire economy has been built upon viruses and security, particularly within post 9/11 internet culture as virus-protection software has become a multi-billion-dollar industry.
The second section follows the computer virus as a way of considering embodiment, ultimately arguing that virality “became central cultural figures in the sense that tuberculosis had been in the nineteenth century and cancer was in the 1970s.” The virus reimagines the body as open and, as Parikka continually asserts, “leaky,” as it is susceptible not only to disease but to information. Importantly, the computer viruses are hugely indebted to a field of biological references: “CPUs are referred to as brains; system networks are environments; computers get infected and sick; and these diseases are countered with vaccines.” Here, Parikka invokes William S. Burroughs, who figured language itself as a virus, one that is self-replicating with a human host. The last section continues its focus on the biology of the computer virus. Parikka here argues that “technological evolution and the notion of self-spreading computer programs have much more widespread roots in the cultural history of modernity than the security-oriented notion of a computer virus implies.”
For my own work, a useful line of inquiry is the potential interchange between the logic of the computer virus and the contemporary poem. While Parikka does not go as far to read any of the viruses as themselves significant literary artifacts, this seems like a potential omission when the first heavily-reported computer virus (called “Elk Cloner” and programmed in 1981-1982 in Richard Skrenta) was, in fact, a poem:
Elk Cloner—the program with a personality
It will get on all your disks
It will infiltrate your chips
Yes it’s Cloner!
It will stick to you like glue
It will modify ram too
Send in the Cloner!
Viruses, much like most literary artifacts, are often defined by their circulation. The poem is, in fact, a limerick in near perfect trochees, a metrical unit that emphasizes the chantlike nature of the text, which is itself a mock advertisement. The title “Elk Cloner—the program with a personality” models this with its ironic use of a catchphrase, reminiscent of corporate branding initiatives, despite operating under the exact opposite logic: instead of trying to attract a consumer, the consumer is actively trying to get rid of the product that has non-consensually infiltrated their computer, making the advertisement taunting rather than beguiling. The virus’s metrical “catchiness, “via the chanting of the trochees, is itself reminiscent of its formal structure. The code “sticks” to the computer like glue in the same manner that the poem itself is meant to “stick” in your head. We might use the poem as the beginning of a larger history of viruses existing as literary artifacts: how do lines of code model the poetic logic of enjambment? How does the subversive infiltration of a foreign object, often in the spirit of deregulating information, offer a more active “form” than a simple unit of text on a page?
The 1980s, as Parikka notes, was a time in which programs were often “funny pranks or innocent tests” rather than actual malware. Another significant virus that borrows from the visual rhetoric of poetry is Cascade, which causes letters to fall to the screen. Parikka suggests that this marks a “breaking down of the new digital era, as well as the digital ontology of writing: good-bye to the discrete human-readable Gutenberg Galaxy of letters; welcome to the writing executed in code on screens. The machine code causes the visible surface layer of graphical user interfaces to crumble into pieces, underlining how language was no longer about meanings and natural languages; it functioned increasingly as the binary machine code (and the program language of intermediaries) that was more pragmatic and function oriented than semantic.” We also might consider Tommaso Tozzi’s experimental virus that displayed the word “Rebel!” and hacker art more generally. The Morris Worm would also be relevant here, and the media art of Zach Blas.
Follow my Substack here for more monograph reviews/recommendations as I (very slowly!) work through my graduate reading lists.
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