Legacy Russell

I am finally at one with this spectacle. —Édouard Glissant, from Sun of Consciousness1

Buss it, buss it, buss it, buss it / Is you fuckin’? Two shots, fuck it —Erica Banks, from “Buss It” (2020)

Maybe this is a love story.

In May 2000, a 24-year-old college student in Manila named Onel de Guzman engineered a computer worm with the intention of stealing the passwords of other users. De Guzman, priced out of paying for his own Internet access locally, felt that access to the Internet should be a human right. To de Guzman, stealing was not a true theft, rather a correction to a structural problem. The worm— what became known as ILOVEYOU or more colloquially, the Love Bug2—would allow de Guzman to log in to other people’s paid Internet accounts without having to pay for Internet service himself. Built to target Windows systems, the worm was spread via an email message, the subject line read- ing ILOVEYOU with the attachment LOVE-LETTER- FOR-YOU.txt.vbs. Users on the receiving end would misinterpret this as a standard text file (a love note) from someone they knew, open it, and, in doing so, would trigger its spread on their machine, along with automatically sending a replica of itself to contacts listed in the user’s address book.

De Guzman’s belief that the Internet should be a human right was radically before its time and, as such, remains incredibly prescient. It shed light on “digital divide[s]”3 as a socioeconomic dilemma, making visible the infrastructural troubles of “digital poverty”4 long before discussions about digital privilege entered the mainstream as symptomatic of access to networked information. Credited in the media as “the man behind the first major computer virus pandemic,”5 de Guzman’s rejected thesis proposal at AMA Computer College in the Philippines6—a precursor to ILOVEYOU— was titled Email Password Sender Trojan. His thesis introduced a “Trojan horse program” that was “not a virus [but rather a] complete application” that would allow “the Trojan” (the hacker) “to spend more time on [the] Internet without paying.” While initially programmed to work exclusively within Manila, de Guzman eventually removed restrictions around geography, which allowed the malware to travel internationally.

As a modern “love story,” it feels to me a most epic one, perhaps just as epic as Virgil’s Aeneid, the early source of the Trojan Horse trope, here presented with a newfangled twist. ILOVEYOU as malware (dis)embodies wildness: monstrous and uncontained, a contaminate interuption within the machines as it touches and travels through them. De Guzman’s worm employs a sort of social engineering, too, baiting the delightful discovery of being loved, what naming that love can do, all the hopes bound up in a simple click, what it can cost, and what it is worth. By surfacing the power dynamics of the machine and, via extension, of machinic technologies both on and away from our screens, ILOVEYOU forces us to consider who is the user and who is being used. De Guzman’s demand for a certain kind of networked intimacy dissimulates a deeper desire for networked equity: to remain in unbridled telecommunication free from the offlining strictures of communicative capitalism. The Love Bug dazzles in its flex as an impressive subterfuge of capital, a rebellious counter-theft as formed via accidental damage and then repair: buggy rebellion in the name of reparation. It is estimated that the Love Bug resulted in damages between $5.5 and $8.7 billion, impacting approximately ten percent of all Internet-connected computers at the time7 and disrupting operations at major national entities such as the US Pentagon and the British Parliament.8 De Guzman shows us the potential success of machinic failure, how to deftly break what’s broken, skirting paywalls and passwords to do the complex work of just simply staying connected.

There is also something here that brings into view broader tensions of translation, transmission, and the anxiety of contagion bound up in machinic mutiny. In his essay “Machines, Humans, and Robots,”9 curator and art historian Andreas Broeckmann cites the “big plants of the industrial age” and the technologies therein such as “the mechanical lever” as being “systems [of] the ‘first machine’”; “the cybernetic machine which…controls…processes, without mechanically executing them” as being the mark of the “second machine”; and the “third machine” as being defined by “the technical and bureaucratic structure of the state.” De Guzman scrambles these definitions and the labor enacted therein, transforming the user into the lever or “first machine,” an unwitting co-conspirator to the Love Bug’s “second machine” Trojan cybernetics, installing a collective resistance against the “third machine” of the state. What ILOVEYOU translates as is unique to whomever reads it and so the transmission—a copy of a copy, as it worms worldwide—is a volatile valentine, a reach for joy that jolts as it infects a machine’s memory and the user’s ways of working, remembering, within it.

Still, perhaps it’s worth it. Poet Natalie Diaz writes: “I confuse instinct with desire—isn’t bite also touch?”10 The perverse instinct to sometimes injure the ones we love is an ineffable, counterintuitive sting, snaking up out of the darkness of our being. It bites, seeking blood. Conversely, in an increasingly networked world, through and beyond the digital, we find ourselves constantly navigating how to care for those we cannot see, whom we do not know, and negotiate what we perhaps feel entitled to take from them. The wild disorder that comes with this illegibility, that which we cannot read or define or articulate but must trust, requires a certain leap of faith. In a moment bound up in alienation and steeped in synthetic media, perhaps ILOVEYOU is a reminder to keep caring through the chaos. The risks taken there are great but the chance to be loved—even for an instant—is the essential interruption, a balm to the bite.