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19th century forefathers of contagion theory

Gustave Le Bon Gabriel Tarde

Contagion Theory• 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

ImitationRays

This Lecture1. Although metaphors and

analogies are part of recent viral discourse, network contagion exceeds them. Virality has a universal physics!

2. Viruses are part of the fabric of network society. Part of its emergence.

3. How viral is viral marketing? – Following the claims of memetics, viral marketers and network science, can virality be predicted and steered.

4. What is the future of virality?

The Viral Metaphor

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

Images of Contagion

Metaphors are powerful

They can transform the way we think about an object

Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980)

Metaphors of contagion are a powerful rhetorical tools

How this becomes this

Contagion metaphors arise from analogical reasoning

The biological analogy

• 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

Biological analogy in computer virus research

1. To name, categorize and order something novel… Cohen’s PhD in 1984

2. To build immunological and epidemiological defences at IBM in 1990s –Digital Immune System

3. To metaphorically “transform” a playful and destructive code into a disease, a security threat, a “bad object” (Parikka, 2007).

How computer viruses were transformed from objects of interest and play to…

Bad Objects

It all began with Viral Computer Games??

Virus games as “bad” objects

Demonstration of Darwinia Darwina

Is it Alive?Legitimate Question

Can 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)

Neo-Darwinist Richard Dawkins

John von Neumann’s work of self-reproduction

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

•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

Core War & Redcode

Bell Labs and Parc Xerox• 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”

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)

Good Virus/Bad Virus

• A Case for Benevolent Viruses

Fred Cohen

• Are 'Good' Computer Viruses Still a Bad Idea?

Vesselin Bontchev

• Viruses Are Good for You Spawn 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

Fred Cohen’s Benevolent Viruses

• Benevolent Symbiosis

And Tom Ray’s Tierra

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

Helmreich’s analysis of network security threats

Rhetoric of HIV/AID used in computer security industry discourse

The Rhetoric of Contagion• SAFE SEX • SAFE HEX

(hexadecimal)

• See Parikka’s Digital Contagions, 2007

Safe Hex = no hex with strangers

“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 The Computer 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).

Network Controllers Shut Down the Virus

• 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

Universal Virality:From network vulnerability to

network threats

Virality in Network Science

New Science of Networks establishes that networks are both…

1. Robust and flexible

2. Vulnerable and susceptible

Robust and vulnerable?

Nodes

Links (Edges)

Hubs (Clusters)

80/20 Rule

Robust & Vulnerable?

The Internet

Too much connectivity & universal contagion

1. Global network of air transport = vulnerability to biological disease

2. Internet = computer viruses and worms

3. Cultural contagions (enhanced by Internet) – spreading of conformity, cults, fads

4. Financial contagion

Jan Van Dijk, The Network Society (London: Sage, 2006) p. 187

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.

“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)

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

This Deadly Virus‘Like all cults, the cult of suicide bombing feeds

upon itself. Log on to the Internet or visit a militant Islamic bookshop and within a few minutes you will find enough inspiration in CDs, ranting sermons, DVDs, for a hundred suicide bombs. It swirls across the Islamic world as an expression of rage against the West for the invasion of Iraq, support for Israel, and for Western dominance of the world economy… The only real solution lies within Islam itself. It is only when the vast majority of law-abiding Muslim societies reject the cultural virus of suicide bombing and cease to glorify it that this plague will burn itself out.’

Robert Baer (a former CIA agent) “This Deadly Virus”. The Observer newspaper, Sunday August 7, 2005. Online version: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1544124,00.html (accessed December 10th 2007) .

‘Epidemics ignite public fears with great ease, in part because the ‘enemy’ is often undetected, and therefore potentially everywhere. But more than this, it is the alien, nonhuman character of epidemics that incite public anxiety – there is no intentionality, no rationale, no aim…Living Dead NetworksEugene Thacker, http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue4/issue4_thacker.html

The Unspecified Enemy

Financial Contagion.

Tulips & Financial ContagionForeword to The Spam book: On Viruses, Porn and Other Anomalies of Digital Culture (Cresskill, NJ:

Hampton Press, 2009).

17th Century Holland

MacKay 1850s Sadie Plant

21st Century subprime bubble

Accidental Contagion

Just how viral is viral marketing?

viral marketing claims to steer the accident

Neo-Darwinism

meme/gene analogy

Memetics is a genocentric approach to contagion

Picture of selfish gene

How far a meme spreads depends on a struggle for survival (of the fittest)

“… while it may appear accidental, it’s possible to dramatically increase the chances your idea-virus will catch on and spread.”

the memetically encoded viruscircumnavigates the “tyranny” of transparently marketing to people whooften resist being marketed to by tapping into the “invisible currents thatrun between and among consumers.”

Memes, computer viruses and viral marketing

• Esther Dyson claimed back in 1999 that while “most right-thinking people hear about Melissa the virus and shudder,” there have been a “few politically incorrect marketers” thinking about how marketing messages might be attached to such a virus.

Memes, computer viruses and viral marketing

• Melissa virus like a chain letter – infects address books

• LoveBug - I Love You - social engineering

Memes and computer viruses

• ‘Any cynic familiar with the theory of selfish genes and memes would have known that modern personal computers, with their promiscuous traffic of floppy discs and e-mail links, were just asking for trouble’

Dawkins’ Viruses of the Mind http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Dawkins/viruses-of-the-mind.html

Virality in the New Media

Lonelygirl15

• First blog• Third blog

• Response blog

Fake Exposed

• ‘wow... thats messed up.... I honestly dont know what to think.... huh..wow’; ‘seriously are these “scripwriters” that sad they have to cheat people to think that there watching something real i mean come on can u get more sad’; ‘holly fuck it was a friggen escapade! she REALLY will be a lonely girl’ who can take her seriously after this?’; ‘she’ll always be known as a fake and a phoney baloney from now on’; ‘can some[one] pleeease tell me what this is all about?? why has she got fans, and why is she a fake? is she normal? some1 please tell me what she is trying to do!’ [i]

• [i] See YouTube Comments & Responses to Lonely Girl 15 REVEALED video. • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XSld5qwqjQ (accessed April 20th 2007)

imperfect crime

“Viral marketing is an imperfect crime, because the identity of the criminal needs to be circulated along with the act itself..” (Fuller and Goffey, in The Spam Book, 2009)

Influentials versus the Accidents of Influence

Influentials versus the Accidents of Influence

• Gladwell’s epidemiological approach points to the predicable “stickiness” of so-called influentials: a few promiscuous elites who pass on

trends to less significant others.

• Watt’s powerful computer simulations of contagion suggest accidental and unpredictable environmental factors at play in the pass-on power of consumer influence.

Gladwell’s Epidemiology

Accidents of Influence• “… small events percolate

through obscure places by happenstance and random encounters.” These events can trigger “a multitude of individual decisions . . . yet aggregating somehow into a momentous event unanticipated by anyone.”

• “… if society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one—and if it isn’t, then almost no one can.”

Going Viral is like Winning the Lottery

• Investigated influence of 1.6M Twitter users by tracking 74 million diffusion events...

• Unsurprisingly, the largest cascades tend to be generated by users who have been most influential - Lady Gaga or Barak Obama

• http://videolectures.net/wsdm2011_mason_iit/

• Predicting virality like trying to predict airplane crashes.

• The most cost-effective marketing targets “ordinary influencers”—individuals who exert average or even less-than-average influence.

The future of virality?

mirror neurons

Tarde’s Contagion as a Neurological Contagion

• “… a plausible neurophysiological explanation for the means by which the existence of the other is etched into the brain so that we are able to intuit what the other is thinking—we are able to “mind read”—not only because we see others’ emotions but because we share them.”

• Nigel Thrift, “Pass It On: Towards a Political Economy of Propensity,” Published in Matei Candea, ed., The Social after Tarde : Debates and Assessments (London: Routledge, 2010), 248–70.

Mirror Neurons• Process the sharing of feelings and mood, or empathy. • Human to human “wireless communication” • Innate imitative human relations occurring between infants and• adults.• Located in an area of the brain called f5, which fires in response to

the affects of others. • Mirror neurons function best in face to face encounters, when there

is a need to comprehend or “mind read” the “intentions of others.”

• Neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran • http://anguishedrepose.com/2011/01/11/mirror-neurons-inspire-a-

dawn-of-self-awareness/

Virality uber Alles

“Going viral has gone viral. Social media have become the obsession of the media. It's all about social now: What are the latest social tools? How can a company increase its social reach? Are reporters devoting enough time to social? Less discussed - or not at all - is the value of the thing going viral. Doesn't matter - as long as it's social. And viral!” Virality uber Alles: what the fetishisation of social media is costing us allhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/media-network/media-network-blog/2012/mar/12/virality-fetishisation-social-media-cost

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