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The latest virus isn't on your computer--it's in your mind. Beware the sneezers!
If it were possible to rank words in terms of their degree of inherent threat, "virus" would come somewhere near the top of the list. Viruses may be as old as history, but they seem to embody a uniquely contemporary danger. As if the global AIDS epidemic wasn't an alarming enough health crisis, experts issue regular warnings about the devastating potential of Ebola, Hanta, and Marburg--the virus so contagious and deadly that scientists locked it up in the laboratory and threw away the key. Every computer user lives in fear of the day a computer virus--Melissa, Chernobyl, or the charmingly monikered Back Orifice 2000-- turns the contents of their hard drive to useless mush.
For William S. Burroughs, the image of the virus was one of the central metaphors in his influential cult novels. Viruses were control systems, an alien conspiracy to take over humanity. The suggestion that this parasitical process could have a positive side was unthinkable. "The virus gains entrance by fraud and maintains itself by force," he wrote. Viruses use the cellular material of their hosts to make copies of themselves and this is almost invariably damaging to the carrier. Burroughs believed that words were a form of virus, and that images were just as bad. "Word begets image and image is virus," he said. This was such a memorable idea--we'll return to memorable ideas in a moment--that, in 1980, Laurie Anderson made a weirdly catchy song about it, "Language Is a Virus from Outer Space." In the 1990s, British designer Jonathan Barnbrook dubbed his type facility the Virus Foundry. "Welcome to the cult of Virus," says his type catalog. "Virus is the language you use to speak to others."
Bambrook intended this as a kind of millennial satire, yet even as he crafted his catalog, the virus idea was slowly mutating from an unambiguous threat into something that seemed--at least in some people's eyes--to be rather nifty. In 1997, a marketing man,...