Bugs: rethinking the history of computing

McKinney, Cait and Mulvin, Dylan ORCID: 0000-0002-8925-2460 (2019) Bugs: rethinking the history of computing. Communication, Culture & Critique, 12 (4). 476 - 498. ISSN 1753-9129

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Abstract

This paper argues that scholars of computing, networks, and infrastructures must reckon with the inseparability of “viral” discourses in the 1990s. This co-assembled history documents the reliance on viral analogies and explanations honed in the HIV/AIDS crisis and its massive loss of life, widespread institutional neglect, and comprehensive technological failures. As the 1990s marked a period of intense domestication of computing technologies in the global North, we document how public figures, computer experts, activists, academics, and artists used the intertwined discourses surrounding HIV and new computer technologies to explicate the risks of vulnerability in complex, networked systems. The efficacy of HIV as an analogy is visible in the circulation of viral concepts, fears surrounding interdependence, and emergent descriptions of precarity in the face of a widespread “infrastructure crisis.” Through an analysis of this decade, we show how HIV/AIDS discourses indelibly marked the domestication of computing, computer networks, and nested, digitized infrastructures.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://academic.oup.com/ccc
Additional Information:	© 2019 The Authors
Divisions:	Media and Communications
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science H Social Sciences > HE Transportation and Communications H Social Sciences > HM Sociology
Date Deposited:	29 Nov 2019 17:24
Last Modified:	14 Sep 2024 08:06
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/102712

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