The Exploit: A Theory of Networks - asounder

Edges 115
but that, in the guise of anarchic ideology, it promotes computer and
network management skills. Again following Agamben, modern sovereignty
is based not on the right to impose laws but on the ability to
suspend the law, to claim a state of emergency. In a way, State of Emergency
is sovereignty through the back door: inside the screen - based
rioting, what is at play is the new sovereignty of networks, control,
and the fetish of information.
In this sense, forms of informatic play should be interrogated not
as a liberation from the rigid constraints of systems of exchange and
production but as the very pillars that prop those systems up. The
more video games appear on the surface to emancipate the player,
raising his or her status as an active participant in the aesthetic moment,
the more they enfold the player into codified and routinized
models of behavior. Only eight buttons (mirrored in eight bits) are
available for the entire spectrum of expressive articulation using the
controller on the Nintendo Entertainment System. A PlayStation
running State of Emergency supplements this with a few more channels
of codified input. Just as the school, in Foucault, was merely preschool
for the learned behavior necessary for a laboring life on the
factory floor, so games from State of Emergency to Dope Wars are training
tools for life inside the protocological network, where flexibility,
systemic problem solving, quick reflexes, and indeed play itself are as
highly valued and commodified as sitting still and hushing up were
for the disciplinary societies of modernity.
Fork Bomb I 17
#!/usr/bin/perl
while (print fork,” “) {
exit if int rand(1.01);
}
Epidemic and Endemic
One of the results of the American - led war on terror has been the
increasing implosion of the differences between emerging infectious
diseases and bioterrorism. Not so long ago, a distinction was made