The Meme Machine

UNIVERSAL DARWINISM 21
Have you spotted it? The virus described does not make sense – and does not
exist. The real virus is the warning. This is a very clever little memeplex that
uses both threats and appeals to altruism to get you – the silly, caring victim – to
pass it on. It is not the first – ‘Good Times’ and ‘Deeyenda Maddick’ used a
similar trick. ‘Join the Crew’ is slightly more damaging, warning ‘do not open
or look at any mail that says RETURNED OR UNABLE TO DELIVER. This virus will
attach itself to your computer components and render them useless.
Immediately delete . . . there is NO remedy.’ Anyone who does not spot the trick
will presumably delete all those messages they had sent to people whose
addresses have changed or whose e-mail systems were temporarily unavailable.
A little bit of self-replicating code, using a combination of humans and
computers as its replicating machinery, can have annoying consequences.
What will happen next? As people become familiar with these viruses they
may learn to ignore the warnings. Thus the original type of virus will start to
fail but it might let in something worse, as people start ignoring warnings they
ought to heed. But then again, if ordinary old-fashioned chain letters still work,
perhaps things will not change so very rapidly.
All this talk of viruses makes me wonder just why we call some pieces of
computer code a virus and others a computer program. Intrinsically, they are
both just lines of code, bits of information or instructions. The word is, of
course, taken directly by analogy from biological viruses and probably based on
the same intuitions about the way these bits of code spread. The answer is not
so much to do with the harm they do – indeed some really do very little – but to
do with their function. They have none apart from their own replication.
Bacteria are more complex than viruses and can be positively helpful as well
as harmful. Lots live in symbiosis with us and with other animals and plants.
Many do important jobs inside our bodies. Some have been co-opted to make
special foods for us and so on. Viruses do little else than replicate themselves –
and then only by stealing other organisms’ replicating machinery. So the
comparison with today’s rather simple computer viruses is apt.
Might we build the equivalent of computer bacteria? Perhaps this would be a
better term for some existing programs that are deliberately used to infect
computer systems and run around doing jobs like updating databases or seeking
out errors. Dawkins (1993) imagines useful self-replicating programs that might
carry out market research by infecting many computers and then, as occasional
copies got back to their starting place, providing useful statistics on user habits.
Simple robotic programs, or bots, are already designed to roam around