‘Tis spring, a time when a young computer hacker’s fancy has turned to thoughts of love. As a result–Whammo!–hundreds of thousands of computers around the world have been bollixed up with an “I love you” e-mail.
Surely you have heard the warnings by now: If you receive an e-mail that says “ILOVEYOU” in its subject line, delete it. Otherwise, you may be looking for love in one of the wrong places.
The wicked little “Love Bug” virus, as it has been nicknamed, will eat your files, steal your passwords and try to mess up the lives of everyone you ever cared enough about to put into your address book.
In other words, it will behave the way a lot of real-life lovers do.
I usually don’t pay much attention to computer virus stories. In a modern variation on my late, sainted mother’s advice, I do not open e-mail attachments from strangers.
But this particular virus shows more fiendish brilliance behind it than most. The mischievous brain behind it knew not only about the power of computer bugs, but also about something far more powerful: love.
Diane Ackerman, author of “A Natural History of Love,” agrees. After she was victimized by the virus, she told The Washington Post, “I would love to know what person devised this and was so shrewd as to realize how well it would work.”
So would the FBI. The Love Bug is one of the most disruptive computer viruses in history. It spread even more quickly than Melissa, an earlier record-holder that accessed only the first 50 addresses in each user’s address book. The Love Bug sends itself to every address in the user’s book, zapping itself to thousands of other computers in a flash.
But the Love Bug’s real genius is not in its technical power but in its emotional punch. You need a big punch to break through the firewall of resistance that e-mail users have built up against junk offers of money, weight loss, pornography and sure-thing stock tips. To break through that wall, do any words carry more of a nuclear punch than a simple “I love you?”
Breathes there a man or woman with heart so dead that they would not to themselves have said something like, “Hmmm … could it be from that cute babe in the human resources office who wears the cranberry lipstick?” Or, “Gee, maybe it’s that mailroom guy with all of the piercings in his ear?”
Yes, for a fleeting moment, at least, in the midst of a dull work day hunched over one’s video screen, the Love Bug recipient can feel that most glorious of ecstasies, the feeling that somebody, somewhere, thinks they are hot.
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Which must make you feel left out, if you are a Love Bug wallflower.
Think about it: You’re all wired up and no wants to crash your system? How are you supposed to feel?
You even may succumb to a condition one of my office colleagues calls “Love Bug envy.” It hits you when you realize you have no “I love you” notes in your e-mail while everyone around is receiving theirs.
It can make you feel like the only kid in class to not receive cards on St. Valentine’s Day.
What, you may wonder, does it say about you?
In a world where everyone is theoretically no more than six degrees of separation from anyone else, should not every e-mail user have been hit in the first 24 hours?
Are you so unpopular that you can’t even get infected by the Love Bug? Are you a cybernetic Rodney Dangerfield? A wallflower in the Global Village?
You could even find yourself fibbing to cover up. (“The Love Bug? Oh, yeah! Sure! I got dozens of them! Wiped out my whole hard drive!”)
Sad. Even sadder is that nagging suspicion that lingers in your mind after you have zapped that ILOVEYOU message off your screen: What if it was legit?
You do have to wonder about the diabolical mind that came up not only with this devilish virus but also with its hard-to-resist come-on. What made him or her so demonically cynical about love? Was it a sour love affair? Will it be a made-for-TV movie in a couple of years?
Maybe the Love Bug’s creator was trying to teach us some sort of twisted lesson, Unabomber-style, about letting our keyboard fingers do all of our talking for us. Indeed, the Love Bug does show us how, in affairs of the heart, you can get burned just as easily over the Internet as in face-to-face contact.
Whoever the Love Bug vandal may be, I hope he or she is nabbed and prosecuted. As a current series of credit card commercials might put it, the damage in dollars has been billions. The cost in emotional letdown: Priceless.
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