# The Accidental Topology of Digital Culture: How the Network Becomes Viral



## somnambulist (Jan 21, 2010)

By Tony Sampson

Introduction: The Essence, the Event and the Accident

It is well known that the Internet itself, perhaps the centrepiece of techno-boosterism today, emerged from the military’s attempts to develop secure means of communication amongst its members.

—— Robins and Webster, Times of The Technoculture 150

In the United States, the Pentagon, the very originator of the Internet, is even talking in terms of a "revolution in the military" along with a "war of knowledge", which might supersede the war of movement in the same way as the latter had superseded the war of siege… This will be the great accident of the future, the one that comes after the succession of accidents that was specific to the industrial age (as ships, trains, planes or nuclear power plants were invented, shipwrecks, derailments, plane crashes and the meltdown at Chernobyl were invented at the same time too...)

—— Paul Virilio “Speed and Information: Cyberspace Alarm!”

In the 1990s a number of authors argued that the essential qualities of digital network culture were to be found in the militarised objectives of the cold war (Robins and Webster; Wise). Many pointed to the central role of DARPA (the US Defence Department Advanced Research Projects Agency) in the early design of a distributed model of communication intended to withstand military attack and claimed it fashioned the ideological identity of the Internet. A few of these authors went on to describe how network culture itself is characterised by a dystopian, panoptic expression of militarised, cybernetic power; a culture symptomatic of the victorious spread of post-cold war capitalist sovereignty (Robins & Webster 111-130; Virilio). However, by the end of the decade, researchers working in the field of complex network theory discovered that the Internet’s topology had mutated into something quite different from what had been predicted by this particular analysis of capitalist network power. They found that the hypothetical robustness of the network, which purportedly emerged from its highly redundant distribution and random connectivity, is actually countered by increasing network vulnerability. In fact, researchers working in this field went on to argue that it is an enduring myth of Internet history that its topology was ever designed to simply survive a nuclear attack (Barabási 144; Buchanan 78-82). Their opinion on this matter is very well supported by the testimony of the often-cited engineer attributed with the design itself. In a recent interview, Paul Baran argues that “roadblocks” set up by the telecoms monopoly AT&T prevented his work for RAND on distributed networks from being fully integrated into the ARPANET project (Brand). According to Baran these obstacles arose from the failure of communication engineers to fully adapt to a new paradigm in technology. Subsequently, the implementation of packet switching into the fabric of the ARPANET project went ahead free of Baran’s full set of proposals, including a stipulation of a highly redundant and robust topological design similar to a fishnet (see figure 1).

sampson1

Figure 1 Baran’s feasibility study for RAND determined that a distributed network was the most redundantly connected topology and as such a robust defence against targeted attack. “The enemy could destroy 50, 60, 70 percent of the targets or more and it would still work” (Baran interviewed by Brand). 

In effect, rather than being the outcome of an essential military design, the dynamic growth of the Internet arguably reveals a haphazard becoming involving unanticipated future events and accidents. These include Baran’s misplaced plans and feasibility studies; obstructions caused by the failed relations between agencies such as the telephone monopoly, the military and its allies in research and development. But topological change has also occurred in conjunction with an open-ended technosocial involution, which exhibits spontaneous and emergent properties. In other words, the network has coevolved as much by way of the event and accident as it has by intentional design. Yet, arguably, the nature of these digital events and accidents is not best captured by the “generalised kind of accident,” which Virilio situates as the cataclysmic accident of all accidents – aka Virilio’s doom laden Information Bomb that outshines even Chernobyl (Speed and Information). On the contrary, vulnerability brings into play anomalies such as unexpected glitches or often-unwanted digital by-products and junk (viruses, worms and spam). These are not necessarily substantial accidents, but instead unsubstantial by-products of a largely unessential network milieu. 

ολόκληρο εδώ.


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