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This article addresses cultural techniques of cognitive capitalism. The author argues that to understand the full implications of the notion of cognitive capitalism we need to address the media and cultural techniques which conditions its range and applications. The article offers an expanded understanding of the labour of code and programming through a case study of 'metaprogramming', a software related organisation practice that offered a way to think of software creativity and programming in organisations. The ideas from the 1970s that are discussed offer a different way to approach creativity and collaborative and post-Fordist capitalism. The author brings together different theoretical perspectives, including German media theory and Yann Moulier Boutang’s thesis about cognitive capitalism. The wider argument is that we should pay more attention to the media archaeological conditions of practices of labour and value appropriation of contemporary technological capitalism as well as the cultural techniques which include 'ontological and aesthetic operations' that produce cultural, material situations.

espanolEste texto aborda la materialidad del polvo, trazando una ruta transversal que va de los procesos de encerado de las fundas de iPAD en las fabricas chinas a un argumento teorico mas amplio que examina la materialidad de los medios, de las rocas a las sustancias quimicas. En pocas palabras, este nuevo materialismo se interesa por la diversidad de tiempos, duraciones, entrelazamientos y distribuciones de una amplia gama de agencias, algunas de ellas no humanas. De ahi que nos veamos obligados a reflexionar sobre los contextos del nuevo materialismo de una forma novedosa, ligeramente mas fluida que simplemente asumiendo que la especificidad relativa a las bases tecnologicas y cientificas de la cultura de los medios es automaticamente material. En efecto, la materialidad no concierne solo a las maquinas, ni tampoco afecta unicamente a los solidos o a las cosas, ni tan siquiera a los objetos. La materialidad se filtra en multiples direcciones, tal como demuestran los residuos electronicos o los efectos de la contaminacion electromagnetica. Es transformacional, ecologica y multiescalar. catalaAquest text s'ocupa de la materialitat de la pols, tracant una ruta transversal que va des dels processos d'encerat de les fundes d'iPad a les fabriques xineses fins a un argument teoric mes ampli que examina la materialitat dels mitjans, de les roques a les substancies quimiques. En poques paraules, aquest nou materialisme s'interessa per la diversitat de temps, durades, entrellacaments i distribucions d'una amplia gamma d'agencies, algunes de les quals no humanes. Per aixo ens veiem obligats a reflexionar sobre els contextos del nou materialisme d'una manera nova, lleugerament mes fluida que no pas simplement assumint que l'especificitat relativa a les bases tecnologiques i cientifiques de la cultura dels mitjans es automaticament material. En efecte, la materialitat no concerneix solament les maquines, ni tampoc afecta unicament els solids o les coses, ni tan sols els objectes. La materialitat es filtra en multiples direccions, tal com demostren els residus electronics o els efectes de la contaminacio electromagnetica. Es transformacional, ecologica i multiescalar. EnglishThis text considers the materiality of dust. It maps a transversal route of considering dust, from the processes of polishing iPad covers in Chinese factories to a wider theoretical argument for a media materiality that starts from rocks and chemicals. In short, this kind of new materialism is interested in the various times, durations, entwinements and distributions of a whole range of agencies, several of them non-human. Hence, we are also forced to think about the contexts of new materialism in a slightly more fluid, novel way than just assuming that specificity concerning the technological and the scientific underpinnings of media culture are automatically material. Indeed, materiality is not just about machines; nor is it just solids, and things, or even objects. Materiality leaks in many directions, as electronic waste demonstrates, or the effects of electromagnetic pollution. It is transformational, ecological, and multiscalar.

Acknowledgements Introduction: Understanding the Digital Humanities D.M.Berry An Interpretation of Digital Humanities L.Evans & S.Rees How We Think: Transforming Power and Digital Technologies N.K.Hayles Digital Methods: Five Challenges B.Rieder & T.Rohle Archives in Media Theory: Material Media Archaeology and Digital Humanities J.Parikka Canonicalism and the Computational Turn C.Bassett The Esthetics of Hidden Things S.Dexter The Meaning and the Mining of Legal Texts M.Hildebrandt Have the Humanities Always been Digital? For an Understanding of the 'Digital Humanities' in the Context of Originary Technicity F.Frabetti Present, Not Voting: Digital Humanities in the Panopticon M.Terras Analysis Tool or Research Methodology: Is There an Epistemology for Patterns? D.Dixon Do Computers Dream of Cinema? Film Data for Computer Analysis and Visualization A.Heftberger The Feminist Critique: Mapping Controversy in Wikipedia M.Currie How to See One Million Images? A Computational Methodology for Visual Culture and Media Research L.Manovich Cultures of Formalization: Towards an Encounter Between Humanities and Computing J.van Zundert, A.Antonijevic, A.Beaulieu, K.van Dalen-Oskam, D.Zeldenrust & T.Andrews Trans-disciplinarity and Digital Humanity: Lessons Learned from Developing Text Mining Tools for Textual Analysis Y.Lin Index

In his recent French Theory lecture series, also available on the Internet in MP3-format, media theorist Alex Galloway starts his introduction on October 25 with a parallel to Karl Marx. Galloway reminds how Marx is often described as a product of the intellectual debates in Europe of his time, three to be exact:British political economy, German idealism and French socialism. Galloway’s parallel continues with the Europe of today, its intellectual debates stemming to a large extent from three distinctive directions of German media theory,Italian political theory, and French philosophy. Whereas Galloway continues in his lecture series outlining the last of these three – French philosophy and its current trends, through figures such as Catherine Malabou, Bernard Stiegler, and Quentien Meillassoux – we can continue to elaborate on the parallel or the comparison with a further idea. Cognisant of the history of humanities as critical theory of the twentieth century, Marx’s synthesis of these three forces –and, one might add, the synthesis of Marx together with Nietzsche and Freud –cannot be underestimated, and if one wants to quantify it as is so often necessary in the culture of digital economy, just count the amount of undergraduate and graduate courses directly or indirectly linking up with Marxist or post-Marxist philosophy.

“We may no longer be able to trust technology. A computer program could, without warning, become an uncontrollable force, triggered by a date, an event or a timer.” (Clough and Mungo 223) Introduction In 1991 the Information Security Handbook noted how “society is becoming increasingly dependent on the accurate and timely distribution of information” (Shain 4). This dependence, however, exposed the society to new kinds of dangers, accidents that have to do with information disorders – viruses, worms, bugs, malicious hackers etc. In this essay, I focus on digital viruses as disorderly elements within the digital culture. It is due to certain key principles in computing and computer security that viruses and worms have acquired their contemporary status as malicious software, that is, malware – elements of chaos, accident and disorder. According to my claim, the fear of viruses does not stem just from the contemporary culture of digital technology. It is part of a longer genealogy of modern computing, which has emphasized issues of control, reliability and order. Viruses and worms threaten the conceptual ontology of digital culture in a similar fashion as epidemic diseases have been figures for social disorder throughout Western history. Unlike AIDS or other deadly biological viruses, computer viruses have not been known to cause casualties to humans, yet they have been treated the last years as the “killer viruses of digital culture”, connotating the seriousness of the threat. A “viral perspective” to digital culture reveals how underlying articulations of order are used to construct an all-too-harmonious picture of computers in modern society. Reliability Anti-virus manuals, guidebooks and other such publications have especially contributed to our understanding of viruses as threats to the orderly digital society. The editorial of the first issue of Virus Bulletin (July 1989) sees viruses as a cunning form of vandalism and an indication of ”sabotage mentality”. Viruses destroy information and produce uncontrollability: Rather like Hitler’s V1 ‘flying bomb’, no-one knows when or where a computer virus will strike. They attack indiscriminately. Virus writers, whether or not they have targeted specific companies or individuals, must know that their programs, once unleashed, soon become uncontrollable. (Virus Bulletin 2) Computer viruses mean unreliable and unexpected danger: they are a chaotic element within a system based on security and order. According to a widely embraced view computer security means 1) confidentiality (the privacy of sensitive information), 2) integrity (authorized information and program exchange) and 3) availability (systems work promptly and allow access to authorized users). (E.g. Shain 5). Viruses and other forms of malicious code are, consequently, a direct threat to these values, part of the modern episteme in general. This is what I will here define as “a computational way of thinking”. The concept refers not only to the epistemological and ontological presuppositions in actual computer science discussions, but also to the larger cultural historical contexts surrounding the design, implementation and use of computers. Of course, one has to note that computers have never been those reliable and rational dream-machines they have been taken to be, as they are exposed to various potentials for breaking down of which viruses and worms form only a minor part. Yet, interestingly, reading professional and popular depictions of digital viruses reveals that these sources do consider computers as otherwise integrated, coherent and pristine machines of rationality, which are only temporarily disturbed by the evil occurrences of external malicious software. Control The virus researcher Vesselin Bontchev acknowledges how issues of trust and control are at the heart of computing and the virus threat: “a computer virus steals the control of the computer from the user. The virus activity ruins the trust that the user has in his/her machine, because it causes the user to lose his or her belief that she or he can control this machine” (31). This definition resonates with broader cultural trends of modernization. Zygmunt Bauman has expressed the essence of modern science as an ”ambition to conquer Nature and subordinate it to human needs” (39). Bauman understands this as ”control management”: the moulding of things to suit human needs. The essence of modern technology proceeds along the same lines, defined through values of progress, controllability, subordination of chaos and reification of the world. From the 19th-century on, technology became closely associated with advances in science. The values of order and control were embedded in the machines and technological systems, and with time, these values became the characteristics of modern technological culture. In this vein modernity can be defined as a new attitude towards controlling information. Capitalism and digital culture as historical phenomena share the valuation of abstraction, standardization and mechanization, which were already part of the technological culture of the 19th-century. Similarly, Turing’s universal machine was above all a machine of ordering and translation, with which heterogenous phenomena could be equated. This idea, concretised in typewriters, conveyer belts, assembly lines, calculators and computers served the basis for both digital machines and capitalism. The concrete connection was the capitalist need to control the increasingly complex amount of production, circulation and signs. Rationalism – as exemplified in Babbage’s differential calculators, Taylor’s ideas of work-management and cybernetics – was the image of thought incorporated in these machines (Gere 19–40). Rationalism In general, first order cybernetics fulfilled the project of modern abstract rationalism. In other words, notions of control and order play a significant role in the archaeology of information technological security, and these themes are especially visible in the thinking of Norbert Wiener, the pioneer of cybernetics. Wiener’s cybernetics touches, most of all, upon the question of understanding the world as communication circuits and controlling them via successful feedback loops that maintain the stasis of a system. This theory relates closely the problem of entropy, a classical notion in statistical mechanics from the 19th-century: “Just as the amount of information in a system is a measure of its degree of organization, so the entropy of a system is a measure of its degree of disorganization; and the one is simply the negative of the other” (Wiener 11). Wiener and the modern era share a respect for control and security. As products of modernity, cybernetics, systems theory and information theory are all in a way theories of order and cleanliness. This is the main theme of Stephen Pfohl’s essay “The Cybernetic Delirium of Norbert Wiener”, in which he describes the cultural historical background of modern cybernetic culture. To Pfohl, cybernetics does not mean a purely academic discipline but “a term connoting the most far-reaching of ultramodern forms of social control.” Pfohl delineates the genealogy of cybernetics from the early projects on anti-aircraft artillery to the functioning of the contemporary capitalist media culture. For Pfohl, Wiener’s theories connect directly to the power structures of modern society, sacrificing other ways of being, restricting other possible worlds from emerging. Paraphrasing Pfohl, cybernetics regulates and modifies the dynamic flows of the world into fixed, stabilized and controlled boundaries. Noise The engineering problem of logical calculation and communication of signals without noise expands towards the more general cultural fields of power and articulation. I would especially like to pick up the notion of noise, which, as understood by Bauman, means undefinability, incoherence, incongruity, incompatibility, illogicality, irrationality, ambiguity, confusion, undecidability, ambivalence, all tropes of “the other of order” (7). For cybernetics and early computer pioneers, noise meant a managing problem, objects in the way of transmitting signals. Noise as the most important problem for the rise of modern discourse networks was not solved once and for all in any historical phase, but remained part of the communication acts ever since, and the only resolution to the problem of non-communication was to incorporate it within the system (Kittler 242). Computer viruses can be understood as contemporary instances of this notion of noise. They are software that short-circuit the “normal” operations of a computer and connect themselves to the basic functioning of the machine. Viruses mean short-term wiring of noise to the components of a computer. By definition, viruses have been conceived as a threat to any computer system for a) virus activity is always uncontrollable, because the actions of the virus program are autonomous and b) viruses behave indeterminately and unpredictably (Lamacka 195). In a much more positive vein, this coupling of computing order and viral disorder has been noted by recent net art projects. According to the net artist Jaromil the digital domain produces a form of chaos – which is inconvenient because it is unusual and fertile – on which people can surf. In that chaos, viruses are spontaneous compositions which are like lyrical poems in causing imperfections in machines ”made to work” and in representing the rebellion of our digital serfs. Jaromil takes noise as the starting point and articulates how viruses function also as forms of resistance to the contemporary informational capitalist ideology of the digital. Charlie Gere’s analysis of the connections between modern technology and capitalism is apt in this regard as well: the abstract, standardizing and mechanizing machines of modernization serve the basis for both the cult of the digital and contemporary capitalism in a way that makes these two almost siblings. Thus, also accidents of this techno-capitalist culture are not solely technical, but social in that they are articulated on a plane of society and cultural interaction. Viruses can thus be understood as those “unwanted bads” that are a by-product of post-industrial culture of production of goods (Van Loon), as well as they can be viewed alongside other mass mediated apocalyptic monsters threatening the order of contemporary Western culture, as Luca Lampo from the net art group _[epidemiC]_ suggests: We feel that “The Virus” is the “stranger”, the “other”, in our machine, a sort of digital sans papier—uncontrollable diversity. Once Hollywood, like Empire, finished killing “Indians” and the “Soviet Russians”, the Hollywood propaganda machine had to build other anti-Empire monsters to keep alive the social imaginary of 2001: aliens, meteors, epidemic… so many monsters. In this light, while being technical bits of code that from time to time cause trouble for users, viruses act also as social signs which can be activated in various contexts. For representatives of the official computer culture viruses and worms are signs of disorder, chaos and crime that undermine the presumed reliability of digital culture, which would otherwise function “normally.” Yet, according to some commentators, viral disorder should not mean solely anarchy but a space for variation and experimentation that resist the one-way ideology of computer rationalism. (See Sampson; Cohen; Deleuze.) For some, that ideology has been crystallized in the figure of Microsoft, a popular target for virus attacks. This view accentuates that the genealogy of computers and rationalism analysed above is but one potential history. There is always the possibility to write the counter-memory of the disorderly, accidental, probabilistic and contingent nature of technological culture. Hence, viruses might prove out to be also intellectual tools, with which to create new concepts and viewpoints to digital culture and the cultural history of computing and technology in general. Already Martin Heidegger (§ 16) proposed that modern technology reveals itself at the moment of its breaking. In this sense, viruses reveal the functioning of a certain ideological or micro-political constitution of digital order. The challenge is not to take any notion of a “healthy” cultural network without disturbances as the starting point, but to see elements of break-up as part and parcel of those systems. Even if we are used to thinking of systems as orderly and harmonious, “[i]n the beginning there was noise”, as Serres (13) notes. This emphasizes the conceptual space we should give to the parasites who reveal the networks of power that otherwise are left unnoticed. References Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and Ambivalence. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995 Bontchev, Vesselin. “Are ‘Good’ Computer Viruses Still a Bad Idea?” EICAR Conference Proceedings 1994, 25–47. Clough, Bryan and Mungo, Paul. Approaching Zero: Data Crime and the Computer Underworld. London & Boston: Faber & Faber, 1992. Cohen, Fred. It’s Alive! The New Breed of Living Computer Programs. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1994. Deleuze, Gilles. “Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle” In: Pourparlers 1972–1990. Paris: Les éditions de minuit, 1990, 240–7. Gere, Charlie. Digital Culture. London: Reaktion Books, 2002. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Albany: New York University Press, 1996. Jaromil. “:(){ :|:& };:” ‘I love You’ – exhibition catalogue, 2002, http://www.digitalcraft.org/index.php?artikel_id=292> Kittler, Friedrich. Draculas Vermächtnis: Technische Schriften. Leipzig: Reclam Verlag Leipzig, 1993. Lamacka, Pavel. “Harmless and useful viruses can hardly exist.” Virus Bulletin Conference Proceedings 1995, 193–8. Lampo, Luca. “When The Virus Becomes Epidemic.” An Interview with Luca Lampo by Snafu and Vanni Brusadin, 18.4.2002, http://www.epidemic.ws/downJones_press/THE_THING_ Interview_files/index_files/display.forum> Pfohl, Stephen. “The Cybernetic Delirium of Norbert Wiener.” C-Theory 30.1.1997 http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=86>. Sampson, Tony. ”A Virus in Info-Space.” M/C Journal http://www.media-culture.org.au/0406/07_Sampson.html>. Serres, Michel. The Parasite. Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. Shain, Michael. ”An Overview of Security”. Information Security Handbook. Eds. Michael Caelli, Dennis Longley & Michael Shain. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994 (1991). Van Loon, Joost. Risk and Technological Culture: Towards a Sociology of Virulence. London & New York: Routledge, 2002. Virus Bulletin, “Editorial”, July 1989. Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. 2nd edition. (1st edition 1948). New York & London: The M.I.T. Press and John Wiley & Sons, 1961. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Parikka, Jussi. "Viral Noise and the (Dis)Order of the Digital Culture." M/C Journal 7.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> . APA Style Parikka, J. (Jan. 2005) "Viral Noise and the (Dis)Order of the Digital Culture," M/C Journal, 7(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from .