The Exploit: A Theory of Networks - asounder

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argues that there cannot be A and not - A at the same time (e.g., if an
archer shoots an arrow and measures its distance to a tree by dividing
the distance in half each time, the arrow never reaches the tree. But
how can the arrow both reach the tree and not reach the tree?). There
must be a unity, a One - All behind everything that changes. In a sense,
our inability to totally classify biological or computer viruses serves as
a counterpoint to this earlier debate. If viruses are in fact defined by
their ability to replicate their difference, we may ask, what is it that
remains identical throughout all the changes? One reply is that it is
the particular structure of change that remains the same—permutations
of genetic code or computer code. There is a becoming - number
specific to viruses, be they biological or computational, a mathematics
of combinatorics in which transformation itself—via ever new
exploitation of network opportunities—is the identity of the virus.
If the computer virus is a technological phenomenon cloaked in the
metaphor of biology, emerging infectious diseases are a biological phenomenon
cloaked in the technological paradigm. As with computer viruses,
emerging infectious diseases constitute an example of a counterprotocol
phenomenon.
In this way, epidemiology has become an appropriate method for
studying computer viruses. Emerging infectious diseases depend on,
and make use of, the same topological properties that constitute networks.
The same thing that gives a network its distributed character,
its horizontality, is therefore transformed into a tool for the destruction
of the network.
An example is the 2003 identification of SARS (severe acute respiratory
syndrome). While there are many, many other diseases that
are more crucial to look at from a purely public health perspective,
we find SARS interesting as a case study for what it tells us about the
unhuman, viral perspective of networks.
The SARS case is noteworthy for the rapidity with which the
virus was identified. The World Health Organization estimates that
it took a mere seven weeks to identify the virus responsible for SARS
(and a mere six days to sequence the virus genome). 65 Compared to
the three years it took to identify HIV, and the seven years it took to