The Exploit: A Theory of Networks - asounder

86 Nodes
is, in a way, an “animality” specific to the biological virus, for it acts
as a connector between living forms, traversing species, genus, phylum,
and kingdom. In the late twentieth century and the early twenty -
first, public health organizations such as the WHO and the CDC began
to see a new class of diseases emerging, ones that were caused by
rapidly mutating microbes and were able to spread across the globe in
a matter of days.
These “emerging infectious diseases” are composed of assemblages of living
forms: microbe-flea-monkey-human, microbe-chicken-human, microbe-cowhuman,
or human - microbe - human. In a sense, this is true of all epidemics: in
the mid - fourteenth century, the Black Death was an assemblage of bacillus -
flea - rat - human, a network of contagion spread in part by merchant ships
along trade routes.
Biological viruses are connectors that transgress the classification
systems and nomenclatures that we define as the natural world or
the life sciences. The effects of this network are, of course, far from
desirable. But it would be misleading to attribute maliciousness and
intent to a strand of RNA and a protein coating, even though we humans
endlessly anthropomorphize the nonhumans we interact with.
What, then, is the viral perspective? Perhaps contemporary micro -
biology can give us a clue, for the study of viruses in the era of the
double helix has become almost indistinguishable from an information
science. This viral perspective has nothing to do with nature, or
animals, or humans; it is solely concerned with operations on a code
(in this case, a single - strand RNA sequence) that has two effects—
the copying of that code within a host organism, and mutation of
that code to gain entry to a host cell.
Replication and cryptography are thus the two activities that define the
virus. What counts is not that the host is a “bacterium,” an “animal,” or a
“human.” What counts is the code—the number of the animal, or better,
the numerology of the animal.
We stress that the viral perspective works through replication and
cryptography, a conjunction of two procedures. Sticking to our ex -