SoBig—So What?

When I was growing up, an editorial cartoon from the local newspaper hung in my family’s kitchen. Published around 1992, just after a minor storm had knocked out power to most of the area, it depicted a house submerged in a 100-foot snowbank, all of its wires out of commission. A plaintive voice rose from beneath the icy tomb: “Another ferocious blizzard! No power! No TV! No computer! We’re totally cut off from the information superhighway!” A second speaker replied, “Isn’t it wonderful?”

But a little over a decade later, we rely so heavily on the Internet—once quaintly likened to a freeway—that we are unable to appreciate the respite afforded us by the occasional traffic jam. When the SoBig worm had its way with our inboxes last month, many reacted with near-horror. I awoke one morning to find that a number of friends and family for whom e-mail is normally something like oxygen had despaired and gone underground—logging out for what seemed like the first time in years just to get away from the automated onslaught.

To be sure, the inane messages and destructive executables that filled so many accounts were annoying. But SoBig never really did much more than frustrate most of us. The virus emails announced themselves far too obviously to be mistaken for anything else—SoBig’s biggest crime was pushing a few telnet accounts over quota.

And the worm’s e-mails could even be endearing, in their way. It warmed my heart to receive an utterly unprompted flood of notes from administrators of the Divinity School expressing their “Re: RE: Re: Thanks” and Harvard minsters inquiring my opinion of “FWD: Re: That Movie! (fwd),” even if the messages themselves were brief. When it wasn’t Harvard officials brightening my day in Pine, I discovered a slew of messages from people as far away as Germany—and who doesn’t like a foreign pen pal? Suddenly, people with my name somehow in their address books—as well as the people in their address books—were contacting me for no particular reason other than to talk about “RE: Subj: Your Details.” At last, someone really cared! SoBig had enlarged my social circle, if only fleetingly, like a steroid-frenzied Friendster.

Perhaps the virus affected Harvard students’ ever-bemoaned social lives in a more tangible way, too. As the march of the virus continued to make oh-so-convenient online communications an interminable chore, maybe SoBig moved a few to ignore their natural tendencies. At a school where many choose to hide away in cramped dorm rooms and conduct all interpersonal communications via a keyboard and an LCD screen, is it so lamentable if the bug’s author pushed a few ivy-leaguers out of their caves?

Around the same time as SoBig struck, feds descended on the teenage author of another virus like Elliot Nesses for the Matrix age, and one righteous New York Times letter-writer went so far as to compare that young coder to a fanatical terrorist. The creators of SoBig remain at large, and may well strike again, but one thing is certain: whoever they are, they are most likely neither Al Capone nor Muammar el-Qaddafi. Everyone whimpering about the destruction SoBig has caused should take a deep breath and learn to enjoy a little chaos.

—Simon W. Vozick-Levinson is an editorial editor.