Bad Networks: From Virus to Cancer in Post-Cyberpunk Narrative

Since the 1990s, post-cyberpunk narratives from the US and the UK have reworked the trope of the computer virus so that it looks less like a biological virus, and more like the contemporary medical understanding of cancer. These fictional viruses have moved beyond their instrumental purposes — either as an “exploit” for liberation-minded hackers or as a strategy to exercise state or corporate biopower. By contrast, the Matrix films (in the US) and Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts (first published in the UK) portray threatening viral growth as originating not from foreign infectious agents, but rather from the very survival impulses that help the networked body-politic thrive. Their new “info-cancer” schema turns a critical eye on both the political domain of techno-capitalism, and on the cyberpunk aesthetic practices of the late twentieth century.