April 19, 1999 New Thinking:
Melissa and monoculture

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• There were 7,000 varieties of apples grown in the US at the turn of the century. There are now less than 2,000
• There used to be 30,000 varieties of rice grown in India. There are now only a few hundred remaining
• Half of the languages spoken in the world have been extinguished, and we are rapidly extinguishing the ones that remain

In agriculture, monoculture involves the intensive farming of one particular crop. Rather than using traditional farming methods of crop rotation and leaving fields fallow, monoculture depends on fertilizer and pesticides to allow this intensive farming of the same land to continue year after year.

Monoculture has a number of important benefits, certainly in the short-term. The crop, being uniform, is easier to manage. Greater densities of planting can be achieved, and there are generally high yields. Much of the ‘Green Revolution’ which started in the 1950s was based on monocultural methods.

Monoculture’s greatest strength – uniformity – is also its greatest weakness. If a disease or virus should become resistant to the pesticide, it will wreck havoc on the entire crop. “Monoculture is in trouble,” Michael Pollan wrote in The New York Times in 1998. “The pesticides that make it possible are rapidly being lost, either to resistance or to heightened concerns about their danger.”

The Melissa virus which infected the Internet in early April 1999, was a “friendly warning,” that exploited a Microsoft monoculture, James Cascio wrote in Salon Magazine. Melissa was an email with a Microsoft Word attachment. If you opened the attachment you would see a list of passwords to pornographic websites.

However, in the background, Melissa was checking if you had Microsoft Outlook, an email program. If you had, it sent itself to the first fifty people in your address book. These people would then receive an “important message” with your address on it. If they opened the attachment, Melissa would spiral onwards.

“The fuss was, at its root, about organizations mandating a certain operating system, word processor and e-mail program for all of their users,” Cascio wrote. “This has become increasingly common. For reasons of efficiency, entire offices – from receptionists to graphic designers to engineers – are moved to a "standard" platform. Everyone in the company uses the same system, regardless of whether it's the right tool for the job; no platform or software diversity is allowed.”

Standardization has definite advantages. If everyone in a large company is using different systems and software, then support becomes complex and costly. The organization of information so that it can become widely accessible also becomes extremely difficult. Even basic communication can be difficult.

The Internet has solved many of the above problems, creating a very open system for communication and organization of information. However, when you combine the Internet with a Microsoft monoculture, you get an environment that is open to attack, as Melissa proved so simply and dramatically.


Gerry McGovern


 

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