The Accidental Topology of Digital Culture: How the Network Becomes Viral

Abstract

Drawing upon recent empirical studies carried out in the field of complex networks and Deleuzeguattarian assemblage theory, this article argues that by grasping the composition of what appears to be an increasingly accidental topology, we can enhance our understanding of digital network culture. Contrary to those authors who have pointed to the cold war origins of the Internet (a manifestation of network power) as an essential property that seemingly structures network identity, this article explores the role of the unessential in the open-ended evolution of network culture. By doing so, the author sets out to challenge the causality afforded to essences by considering the role of unforeseen emergent properties and the mode in which the action of subsequent future events and accidents can inversely impact upon the unity of network identity.

The article initially situates viral vulnerability as an unforeseen emergent property, which evidently destabilises the axiomatic robustness of the network. According to assemblage theory, such topological properties can emerge from the symbiotic interactions that can occur between the material and expressive components of an assemblage producing new territories, which in turn interface with the assemblage – decoding, deterritorializing and transforming its topology. It is argued here that network vulnerability is actualised within the complex topological interactions that occur between capitalist network power and a social multiplicity (the multitude). In this process of transformation novel topological properties emerge that can trigger seemingly anomalous future events and accidents, like viral contagion and spam pollution. These events and accidents are as much a part of the network composition as the planned events found in its militarised history. In this way, they replace essential causality with a mode of fuzzy intermediate determinism described by DeLanda as “laying between the two extremes of a complete fatalism, based on simple and linear causal relations, and a complete indeterminism” (Deleuze and the Open-ended Becoming of the World). Indeed, Deleuze argues that the divergent actualisation of topological forms “takes place entirely within the unessential” (Difference and Repetition 189). It is this machinic process that ensures that the identity of capitalist network power is never absolutely guaranteed.