WELCOME to a food campaigner鈥檚 nightmare. Beneath the prairie鈥檚 sheltering
sky stretch endless fields of a single alien corn. It鈥檚 all from the same
supplier, it all has the same genome鈥攐ne great humongous clone as far as
the eye can see. It鈥檚 not, when it comes down to it, a very good crop. But it鈥檚
easy to buy, and agribusinessmen are convinced there are great economies of
scale involved in having all their produce built from the same biochemistry.
One of these economies, they claim, is flexibility: the corn鈥檚 genome can be
reprogrammed remotely with the help of a little horizontal gene transfer. Rather
than trying to resist the insertion of foreign DNA, this corn welcomes it with
open arms. When a company-designed virus comes along with update instructions,
the plant鈥檚 cells helpfully usher the new information into their nuclei, make
room for it on their chromosomes and allow it to re-regulate all their other
genes.
Such an agricultural system would attract two types of fan. The people who
profit from it, and the viruses that would leap on it with a trillion little
yelps of delight, exploiting its lack of an immune system to the hilt, spreading
themselves from plant to plant faster than wildfire and all thanks to the
generosity of the crop鈥檚 designers.
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As far as I know, no producer of genetically modified foods has been foolish
enough to suggest making its wares reprogrammable in this way. But Microsoft
thinks that it鈥檚 fine and dandy to ship out computer operating systems which
behave more or less like this. These operating systems sit in great corporate
monocultures鈥攁nd elsewhere鈥攈appily running programs sent to them by
third parties and about which their users know nothing. Windows allows these
programs to send out mass e-mails, to redesign start-up routines, to rename
large numbers of files in its registry without so much as a by-your-leave.
Understand this and the surprise is not that the viruses can spread across
the world in the blink of an eye, but that it doesn鈥檛 happen constantly. The
fact that Love Bugs have been reasonably rare may be a heart-warming comment on
human nature, but that鈥檚 cold comfort. The information infrastructure should not
sit there like Blanche DuBois, reliant on the kindness of strangers.
Worst of all perhaps is the undercurrent in some of the commentary and some
Microsoft statements that the fault lies with the users who have the temerity to
find a message saying 鈥淚 Love You鈥� irresistible. Had I received such a message I
might well have clicked on it (not that it would have mattered, since I use a
Mac). If such clicking makes you a careless fool, then the fact that Microsoft鈥檚
own corporate system was infected suggests that there are a fair few fools there
too, as the science writer James Gleick has pointed out鈥攚riting, to its
editor鈥檚 credit, in Slate, a website owned by Microsoft.
Being attracted by proclamations of love is neither sad nor culpable.
Culpability and sadness lie with the sinners who exploit our curiosity to mess
with computers鈥攁nd with the people who make computers so easy to mess
with.