2.6. The Biology of Cyberspace: Digital Creatures in a Virtual World

Beings - and the meaning of beings - in humanist culture was understood on the horizon of time. The meaning of non humans was understood on the horizon of the causal and linear Newtonian space time.[..] But today's virtual culture has a new horizon, the (post)Einsteinian cosmology of speed, against which we come to know non humans (virtual objects) as signals, as the information attached to radio-magnetic particles. - Scott Lash

Nature today is not an easy term anymore. There is the actual nature, rough and wild, a second nature, artificially build and manipulated by humans and even a third nature, a mediated reality, the reality of media.

This differentiating point of view sees technology as a mean to redouble nature and therefore establishes simulacra of different order. Quite the opposite direction takes radical mediatheory. When the medium is the message, everything becomes a medium. There is nothing except/outside of media. This is a controversial statement, but offers some analytical advantages. Every object of nature is at the same time also a medium, which transmits meaning. A tree can be seen as a medium, transmitting data about the strength of wind and the pollution of air. Radical mediatheory claims there has never been a state of objects outside of media.

Whether you take the atoms or DNA as source of all being and life or the binary digits 0 and 1 as source, it all comes down to information. Atoms, DNA or Bits, they are all just different modes in the continuum of matter and information.

After all it is no wonder that the binary based functioning of the media-sphere becomes described in pretty the same way like biology describes ecology. "Today's activists understand media as extension of a living organism. Like ecologists comprehend the life on this planet as part of a single biological organism, media-activists view the data sphere as a circulatory system for information, ideas and pictures of the day." (Rushkoff 1995: 12 -transl. S.J.) This 'deep insight' into the way media work, became known as 'information-ecology' and became very popular especially in the Cyberpunk-movement. The understanding of the mediasphere as an ecological system is strongly based on chaos theory, the Gaia-hypothesis by Lovelock and memetics.

News and ideas in the media-sphere become according to this view spread like viruses with different memes. The term meme and the concept of memetic originally comes from the British biologist Richard Dawkins. "Dawkins claims in The selfish Gene (1976), that all living beings are basically only tools of inherent dominating genes, whose only aim is to reproduce and spread."(ibid.: 237 -transl. S.J.) Any kind of news or idea or peace of software, when it enters the media-sphere behaves just like a meme. Its only aim seems to be to reproduce and through repetition and recycling even small ideas can have enourmous effects in the media-sphere and through there also in actual reality. Information-ecology or memetics is therefore the information-theoretical idea, underlying software-weapons like viruses, worms, trojan horses etc.

Memetics or (information-)ecology became therefore a theory of evolution, competing with Darwin's ideas. And similar to Darwin's ideas it can be applied not only to biology, but in the same way to describe cultural development through the spread of news or the development of artificial life (AL).

While entering cyberspace nowadays you have to realise that this space is not only populated by humans in form of their digital narratives but also by several forms of artificial life, digital creatures that live an almost independent life. There are many forms of artificial intelligences (AIs) and artificial lifes roaming along the information highway, viruses, worms, trojan horses or information-butlers (also called infobots or knowbots). "Computerized agents that simulate biological life-forms have artificial life, or a life. Such agents reproduce, evolve and carry out the dynamic processes of organic life." (Heim 1993: 148) Quite often AIs are hard to distinguish from humans when you meet them in the internet. As the Turing-test gets passed by more and more AIs and in a better and better way, it is hard to decide in a keyboard-based communication whether you are communicating with a carbonbased human or just a clever artificial intelligence. Famous for this became JULIA (http://fuzine.mt.cs.cmu.edu/mlm/julia.html), who is often logged on in MUDs (multi user dimension or dungeon).

We have to realise that we are not the only forms of living populating the internet, but ALs also live there. So far viruses are the most common and also most feared under normal PC-users and "The fear of viruses, the PC-proletarians are talked into by the world-government [..] The virus creates via delete and overload for a short time a free space, which was occupied by data-communication before. The virus is full member of the democratic community and takes part in all discussions. It is not a disease but an experimental form of argumentation.[..] The virus turned away from common sense and defected to the paranoid pole which wants the anti-production, the absolute datafree communication. The virus is the prayer of the computer."(Bilwet 1993: 94f. - transl. S.J.) So it is just normal that metaphors of the normal world become also introduced into cyberspace and that means to see an analogy with the AIDS-virus that "many variable contacts of network-users become sexually charged and obtain the obligation of Safer Hack." (ibid: 95 -transl. S.J.)

Viruses are far from being just an annoying 'disease' of a computer. Viruses combined with AI offer enormous economic perspectives. With the help of little selfreplicating programmes, AL researcher like Tom Ray hope to be able to create complex software-programmes which could be exploited commercially. Of course this 'natural' software-evolution cannot mean that a programme debugs itself or produces automatically the next upgrade of an already existing programme, but independent software-evolution in computernetworks can help developing fuzzy application like pattern-recognition or could be used for the invention of totally new application nobody ever thought of before, just like the natural evolution brought species with an astonishing creativity to life.

AL-researchers like Tom Ray demand therefore the creation of a biotope for digital beings in the internet:
"Netlife- the creation of a jungle in the internet
[..] New Experiments in the area of Artificial Life have lead to the astonishing result that life in cyberspace can exist. [..] These considerations have lead to the suggestion to create a big and complex ecological protectorate for digital organisms. With its size, its topological complexity and its dynamically changing structure and conditions the global computernetwork is the ideal biotope for the evolution of complex digital organisms."(Iglhaut et al. 1996: 118- transl. S.J.) His project Tierra seeks therefore to establish such a biotope.