
Mike Davis
☝ FAULTY TRANSMISSION
For those of us in the neo-Luddite resistance to the Information Millennium, the most reassuring development in 1995 was the outbreak of the FIRST COMPUTER SUPERVIRUS. The plague, which appeared at the beginning of September, infected unprecedented numbers of PCs throughout Europe and North America when users attempted to read documents created by Microsoft’s popular Word program. Although deliberately benign, the Word virus contained an ominous but inert macro entitled “payload.” It was an exemplary philosophical warning. Indeed, experts worry that future epidemics, more