On bad taste

George C. Smith, Ph.D., Editor-at-large
Wednesday, 19 September 2001 I AM DISMAYED by how quickly people have reverted to form in virus-land. It is as if nothing much has happened, a fundamentally bad sign of the rot of basic decency, not counting virus-writers, within the system.

The air travel industry, a complex network of networks, stands to be substantially destroyed as we know it as a by-product of being the unwitting and unwilling instrument of the Hun.

Has or does the Net face substantial destruction as a result of being an instrument for the transmission of ... computer viruses?

"The usual crock of bull ... I'll never get my name in lights unless I become a Snake Oiler." — Rod Fewster, Australia Anti-virus, on the insulting hype and orgy of business-as-usual conduct in the trade media and computer security industry regarding Nimda

Paradoxically, it is hard to write about such things for Vmyths with the same supercilious vigor. Post September 11, none of it matters in the same way. Although I cannot give my gut beliefs born of experience to you, I can set Vmyths aside knowing computer viruses won't topple anything important no matter how many virtual mountains of exaggeration, news conferencing, or P.R. push up. I can't set aside the anxiety that gnaws at me over an absent loved one who faces the formerly taken-for-granted but now frightening experience of flying back to me over three thousand miles of air space. In the past, there have been many words expended over how computer viruses, or some other manner of "cyber-terror," if unchecked, will undermine confidence in the Internet and thereby somehow, in a kind of domino effect, shake the confidence of America's business. The air travel industry, a complex network of networks, stands to be substantially destroyed as we know it as a by-product of being the unwitting and unwilling instrument of the Hun. Has or does the Net face substantial destruction as a result of being an instrument for the transmission of ... computer viruses? A better challenge: Raise your hand if you would trade the Internet for September 11. A couple thousand Code Reds? Submit an estimate. In opening, I mentioned a decay within the business of our little system. One symptom is the narcissistic obsession with the phenomenon of computer viruses and the granting them of more power than they merit. Computer virus events are not historical hinges. But when we pass through a September 11, a hinge of fate — to borrow from one famous statesman, within the dislocations both physical and psychological, everyone faces an opportunity to move beyond old ways.
NO ONE WILL call you upon the carpet for saying "Stop!" to numbing process, for deviating from the ritual of petty call and response, for breaking the cycle in bad taste, for pushing off from existence as a stenographer or salesman of corporate pabulums, platitudes, predictions and jargon like "infrastructure," "global information grid," "asymmetric threat," "exploit," or "W32.Nimda.A@mm." Would it hurt so much to pull out of the tyrannical mire of the rote and expected?