Richard Dawkins is surely one of the world’s foremost authorities on how the spread of information and ideas may have more than mere similarities with the evolution of viruses, having, amongst other things, coined the term meme in passing.
Guardian Unlimited, Richard Dawkins: Apple of my eye:
“Nothing in my 20 years’ intensive experience of programming and using computers had prepared me for the Mac. It wasn’t an evolutionary advance on its predecessors; it was a macromutational leap into the future. It is that future we are now living in, whether we use a Mac or a virus-compatible PC.”
Dawkins once dismissed the world’s fastest growing virus of the mind, Catholicism, as being based on the mistranslation of the Hebrew word for a young girl as ‘virgin’. He has a wonderful knack for stating things that are controversial but provably true as a given – ‘a virus compatible PC’ – no discussion, no timid assertions because billions of dollars of market share are at risk.
A couple of months ago, the New York Times was working on a piece on the idea doing the blog rounds that the Windows software monoculture is more dangerous when computers are networked together. The piece never ran, because it wasn’t authorative rather than any lack of temerity by the Times with respect to Microsoft. But then a major report suggested the same, and the author of the report had to resign over the assertion.
Dawkin’s has mentioned it as a given – that Windows is virus ‘compatible’ – he should elaborate.