Dr Popp et la disquette Sida Sociologie d'une affaire hacker

In 1989 the affair of the "AIDS floppy disk" came to the fore. It is one of the first cases of an international scandal in the history of cyber piracy. Basing itself on interviews of the participants in the affair, on reconstructions of media reaction as well as on the the context of technological activism of the time, the paper explores the links between the imagination of the body, medical knowledge and political conflicts. It shows how much of our contemporary understanding of computer technologies is coloured by ideas of viral infection which took form at the end of the twentieth century.