sadie
plant
ENGLISH
DEUTSCH
FRANÇAIS
Foreword to The Spam Book
They may seem quintessentially Dutch, but tulips
came from far away: while the flat patchwork fields
of the modern tulip industry are an impressive sight,
it is still in the springtime gardens on the shores of
the Bosphorous that the flowers can be seen at their
best. When they were introduced to Holland, in the
early seventeenth century, tulips found an eager
audience in what was already a highly cultured world:
northern Holland has been described as Europe’s first
modern economy, and people certainly had the
money and the sensibility to pursue the exotic and
treasure the rare. The basic flower was attractive
enough. But when it came to cultivating tulips, the
plain, primary coloured varieties excited far less
interest than the frilly, multicoloured, streaked, and
patterned strains.
These varieties were also highly individuated and
difficult to cultivate: for reasons quite unclear at the
time, the strains could not be reproduced by
cultivating their seeds, and outgrowths from the bulbs
were unpredictable and slow, taking two or three
years to flower. There was also an element of
randomness: dramatic changes could occur in the
same bulbs from one season to the next.
All this and much besides meant that individual bulbs
began to attract extremely high prices: even in the
1620s some cost as much as 1000 guilders; by the
1630s, they were priced at 6000 guilders – more than
enough to buy a luxurious house. Trading was
frenetic, ridiculous even, as bidders raised prices
beyond all reason. Bulbs began to function as a
currency, and options were traded hundreds of times
on futures markets while they were still maturing in
the ground.
Of course, there was a crash, a day when someone
woke up and thought: why did I just sell my house for
the promise of a flower? What am I doing? I must be
mad! The crash, at the end of the 1930s, was sudden
and devastating, and remains one of the most
celebrated examples of economic collapse.
Tulipmania was an economic bubble that took much
of the Dutch and the wider European financial system
with it when it burst. And what had fuelled the whole
thing to such heights? In the 1920s it was discovered
that the exotic variations of what had become known
as “the flowers that drove men mad” were not the
result of careful genetic development, but the
consequence of a virus, an anomaly in otherwise
healthy, but less variegated plants. The multicolour
stripes and ornate patterns were symptoms of
disease.
Viruses are largely judged in negative terms. Like all
such oddities, they are seen as mistakes, spanners in
the works, bugs in the system, diseases, malfunctions,
irregularities. Viruses are only the beginning: the
digital world is awash with such anomalies - the spam
that fills inboxes, the worms that crawl around the
net, all the junk and detritus that flows through the
gutters of cyberspace. And yet it is clear that they can
often have extremely productive and creative effects,
as in the case of the infected tulip bulbs: their viral
contagion can indeed be said to have had many
beneficial consequences, at least in the context of
seventeenth century European aesthetics and
sensibilities. It went on to inspire a passion for tulips
which established the region as the world’s largest
bulb producer, and did much to determine later
Western tastes in ornamental flowers and their
representations as well. But such positive judgements
are as problematic as the negatives. The anomalies in
question are rarely purely destructive phenomena, but
nor are they heroic subversives locked in battle with
the forces of logos or the state, lively irregularities
capable of interrupting and destabilising a world of
conformity. They may sometimes play such roles,
just as they are sometimes uncompromisingly
damaging. More often, however, they are so mixed up
with the lives of their hosts that it is almost
impossible to judge them as anything other than vital
elements of the systems they traverse. Otherwise all
that can be said in judgement of an anomaly like the
seventeenth century tulip virus is that its effects were
variously and arguably both good and bad,
destructive and creative, positive and negative: the
flowers looked good, but the bulbs were sick; money
was made and lost as well.
Long after Nietzsche, the question of whether things
are good or evil, positive or negative, normal or
strange remains on the tip of the collective tongue.
But the exploration of cultural phenomena should not
be confined to judgements about rights and wrongs,
the purposes and meanings of processes and events.
And the search for significance seems particularly
spurious when one’s material is all the gloriously
meaningless junk, noise, interference, and seediness
that give the Net so much of its character. This does
not, however, render the content of all this
communication irrelevant: indeed, the contents are
often perfect expressions of the networks on which
they run. The underground routes, the back doors and
dark alleys of the Net play host to the same kind of
questionable deals and sordid offerings that move
through back doors and dark alleys everywhere. On
and off the Net, certain ways of dealing with
information and doing business tend to attract certain
kinds of service and commodity. And all the
temptations of money and porn that fill the inboxes of
the world, the promises of better financial or sexual
performance, penises, partners, or porn, are reminders
that digital networks do not stand alone, but are
always intimately implicated with their users and all
the plays of power and desire in which they are
involved.
It is, at first glance, quite amazing that the formal,
regulated, logical world of computing should have
spawned so many weird and wonderful forms of
digital wildlife. Of course, the very purity of the
logic, the smoothness of the system, tends to
exacerbate the effects of even the slightest
disturbance, and even to provoke it too: there is
always an excess in play. But once computers, and
their users, went on line, the networks that emerged
were highly complex and volatile. With complexity
comes a certain degree of instability and
unpredictability that can be fatally destabilising, but
also drives change and innovation by making
networks vulnerable, and so open to new influences
and opportunities.
They may make problems for the system, but they are
often necessary to it too, not least so that it can define
its own limits, establishing and policing the
boundaries between this information and that noise,
this logic and that nonsense. Even as it shuts them
out, it needs its anomalies: police and thieves stand
opposed to each other, but are also locked into close,
symbiotic relationships, and constantly evolve in
relation to each other too. They are neither simple
enemies nor dialectical partners, but tendencies at
work in all the countless scales and speeds of activity
in the complex system they become.
Perhaps it’s all a question of perspective and time.
The virus that is malevolent for the bulb is beneficial
in relation to the flower. The code that breaks through
one security barrier is also the incentive to develop
new lines of defence. Short-term anomalies can be
crucial to long-term stability, and vice versa: at least
eight percent of the human genome is composed of
retroviruses which would have threatened the body at
one time but are now simply part of the code. It
depends how far back one is willing to step: perhaps
the very fact of digital technology is an anomaly in an
analogue world; perhaps the earth itself is an
anomaly; maybe humanity, with all its technology,
was already anomalous in a tool-free world.
Tulipmania was certainly a great irregularity, a
malfunctioning of seventeenth century financial
markets causing the first such large-scale economic
crash. It was a kind of fever: the craze was as
infectious as the virus itself, a runaway sequence of
events triggered by the smallest of anomalies – which
was, as it happens, effectively repressed as soon as its
nature was known: once it was discovered, after
nearly three centuries, that a disease was the agent of
tulip variegation, the virus was eliminated by the tulip
industry. Modern striped, multicoloured, and frilled
tulips are the flowers of healthy bulbs, bred to
emulate those of their virally infected predecessors:
the effects remain, but the virus has gone. Order has
been restored.
And order was restored in the markets too, which
were nevertheless transformed by the experience. The
cycle keeps going - or rather countless cycles, all
interweaving and overlapping and operating at many
different scales and speeds, keep coming and going,
repeating themselves in networks that are
nevertheless never quite the same.
Digital anomalies are all things to all people and all
networks: they are subversive of order and complicit
in its maintenance; opposed and produced by the
systems they traverse. What can be said – and what is
brilliantly demonstrated in this book - is that the
study of the seedy, chaotic underbelly of what
otherwise appear to be smooth and highly regulated
systems is not only fascinating in its own terms, but
also crucial to an understanding of the networked
world and everything with which it interacts.
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