As I followed the explosive progress of the love bug around the world, I had to admit that I was rooting for the virus. Partly, it was just the little gremlin in all of us that likes a good story, wants to read something surprising in the paper.

But part of it was a certain residual anxiety and hostility I have toward information technologies. Don't get me wrong; I also use these technologies. I order all my books and cds on the web. I've done something I thought was inconceivable: stopped buying the newspaper. I read the Inquirer and the Washington Post on the web every morning. I'm an email freak.

And so it's certainly true that I don't want some worm infesting my hard-drive gnawing on my files. And I was relieved (even if just a tad disappointed) that I never saw the thing in my in-box.

But there's something about the hyper-clean world of cyberspace that I find a bit disturbing. As machine logic and information become ever-more pervasive in our experience, the world seems increasingly controlled and hyper-clean, like a chip factory.

And the oppressive potential of the internet is scary. Governments and corporations build up unbelievable supplies of information on all of us. They use it to sell us things, but also to keep track of us, tax us, find us, arrest us, and so on.

It's a commonplace that the net was once the domain of geeks, hackers, and cowboys, but that it's now dominated by AOL/Time-Warner and Microsoft. It's ever-more corporate, consolidated, systematic, controlled.

That's why the idea that a student squatting in some old apartment building in Manila could mess up the whole thing is kind of reassuring. There's still a human presence on the net, still a sort of wild anarchic expertise that can interrupt the hyper-systematic nightmare that is the Pentagon.

The attack of the virus is an explosion of the individual into the corporate, an explosion of irrationality into the binary logic of the computer, an explosion of the human into the world of silicon.

And in that sense it's reassuring. As we enter into an era in which, more and more, our interactions are mediated by software, in which our relations with machines become more and more intimate, and those machines themselves become more and more powerful, it's reassuring that we ourselves haven't yet been perfectly machined, perfectly programmed.

One idea that has been floated is that the release of the virus, which may have been originally designed as a master's project, a way of subverting corporate control of internet access, was released accidentally. I like that idea even better than cyber-sabotage. It makes the love bug problem seem even more human, the net seem even more flawed.

And that the net is indeed flawed is an important thing: it is after all a human creation, and has the same imperfection that we ourselves have. Even at this late date, the net is a mess.

It's almost like a natural system, an ecology. The corporate and governmental systems that want to control and utilize it are analogous to developers in an ecosystem: they want simultaneously to break the environment and turn it to use: they want to turn it to use by breaking it.

But even a perfectly paved and climate-controlled environment can be blown away by a big enough storm. And really no environment can be perfectly controlled if it's still inhabited by messy mammals like ourselves.

And that's true of the net as well: we're still animals even in the pristine silicon environment. So there's still the possibility of the natural disaster; there are still zones of impossible profusion or uncontrollable reproduction. There's still love and still death: viral and beautiful and impossible to control. Thank God.