Decentralization vs. Malware/"Skips vs. Technology"

I was watching a Regular Show marathon with my son over the break when “Skips vs. Technology” came on. This particular episode follows Skips, a white gorilla who skips everywhere he goes instead of walking or running, as he displays his adeptness at fixing everything from an arm severed in a war to a hole in the floor of a gazebo. The one thing that he encounters that he can’t fix, that he can’t even understand, is a computer. “Skips vs. Technology” has ties to just about the whole lot of what we’ve been discussing in New Media Theory since the semester began: there are animals, cyborgs, techne, prostheses, the Internet and an allusion to the ascendancy of protocol decentralization, the last taking a little under-the-surface digging, but it’s there.

Through “Skips vs. Technology,” we can understand the advantage of working in a decentralized, distributed network, which allows us to prevail over something like an “Error 220,” or what we could identify as Galloway’s “autonomous agent who does not listen to the chain of command,” that could completely destroy a centralized network. (38) If we look at how malware works, specifically virus and worm codes, we can deduce that if networks were organized in the NORAD model, “a centralized, hierarchical network,” the military protocol, the malware would succeed in disabling any network in which it is introduced simply by attacking the “command center.” (29) The Doom-Ma-Geddon Virus wouldn’t need to “digitize” every object in existence to be victorious. It would only have to take the command center in order to, well, take command.

Mordecai and Rigby’s computer is but a single hub that was victimized by the Doom-Ma-Geddon Virus, but the attack on the world outside of the room in which the computer was set up is easily thwarted. If Pops has a computer in his room, or if Muscle Man and High-Five Ghost have computers, the attack is of no consequence to them because they don’t operate in the same network. What’s necessary for the malware to spread is infected removable or movable media— discs, thumb drives and emails—that allows the malware to become communicable, and even that method of infection would maintain the locality of the malware long enough to allow the technomancers to work their magic on it. An error that people make on behalf of malware creators is the sending of chain mail. We like to share what we find on the Internet. If we accidentally send an infected email to only a few of our email contacts, well, there is the possibility of only a few destroyed networks, granted email platforms are now programmed to find malware and antivirus software can kill it before it becomes an infection. (The potential is still there, though.) However, if we’re the type of people who have thousands of email contacts with whom we share everything that we find, there is the potential of thousands of destroyed networks, with some networks having more significance than others. There are six degrees of separation is what’s often said. Each of us may be six people away from a very important person. I think I'm important...at least a little bit important, so if you decide to click on the "Send" button on a chain letter, let’s make sure that I’m not one of the six people you send it to...