Prolegomena
Cybercrud flows in our age with different modes, new frequencies that render its waves nearly imperceptible to our senses: It has become an occult force that affects us from a distance, as does Newtonian gravity, with no perceptible mechanical body of affect. That is, there is no body that purely facilitates the affections of bodies (and, thus far, so too with Einstein.) It makes one ask what is in the "web," the machines and technology that affects us from afar, that which we're gravitated toward within the medium, a middle, a milieu, a marrow and spirit of a hidden machinic bone as a metaphysis (literally "beyond" the "changing")? By what hidden forces are we moved, intuitively and experientially out-of-joint with the rationally understood layers of protocols, in the same way we still say the "sun rises," an excess appearing to appear within the surface interface of the applications themselves?
The concept of cybercrud was first formed by Ted Nelson (a cyberchud?); it moves one, or another, through sensuous signs that short-circuits compliance (at least local forms of political power) via computer jargon to ignore lingering vapidity or incompetence. I.e. someone says, "the computer says so," and it would seem in complying one is doing so appropriately to a higher impartial authority.
But which one says and which one speaks? Media and tools do not speak for themselves, which is Nelson's point (even if "the medium is the message," we can make our own medium more easily than ever these days.) The voice that speaks is the artists, scientists, the script writers etc.—the creators. Thus one easily finds oneself trapped in their collective worlds, the thick underlying froth of codes and scripts that operate in the background of one's milieu (though, not necessarily intentionally), a condemnation to what appears as an Absolute Knowledge. But it often only appears so because one is complicit in surrendering one's freedoms, to never peer at the underlying structures out of a sense of safety and familiarity, and most haven't even reflected on this fact. Even with the "death of the author," the script writers continue to speak beyond the grave—not the obscenities of their representations that resemble them yet have uncanny movements (of thought or otherwise), but that their work quietly operates in the background, perhaps an idea influences some new scripts here and there, some combine into packages, collections, resold, reworked, updated, etc.
One then has a genealogy of problems becoming solutions, the calling forth a people who have been afflicted with the same sorts of wounds, who must peer behind the scenes by some force that compels them. Perhaps they were too sensitive to some encounter, they coupled to strongly with the world, seeing something they were never meant to see. Perhaps they were lied to by something beloved, by unkept promises (for who else searches for Truth than the one who has suffered the lies of something beloved?) They are moved by the same sorts of forces to the depths from the seemingly sanitized and heavily curated world of pristine surfaces, that appears utterly fake, populated by those that seemingly have never felt any of it. Those called forth nonetheless define a lineage, a movement of spirit, those that get the gist and catch their drift. For this, we should understand that an oeuvre need not be a corpus, as they have differing sense—to equate them would be akin to saying the morning star is the evening star (both materially being the light of Venus), thereby closing oneself off to the experience of others, and thus how they're moved by the two stars providing differing senses as appearing at separate ends of days, an uncanny indistinguishability between the lights of life and death (a life goes in both these directions at once, the differing sense between stating one is "living" or "dying"). For a corpus emphasizes a body whereas an oeuvre emphasizes the activity of a life, the work—evidently their difference doesn't go all the way to the point of contradiction (the body is produced by the work, and the point of the work is the body, they are inseparable). But because they blur together does not mean they we cannot found a difference in kind between things in the creation of new ideas. That is, the former, corpus, may be selected by those interested in pursuing the dream of an original intention and meaning (or as we may more transparently say—passively picked up from somewhere—"dissecting dead bodies"), whereas the latter is of interest for those who do the labor (of love or hate, etc.), or to do as they've done. Then the question for the genealogists is, could Nietzsche be closer to Plato for his project of "overthrowing Platonism" (as Socrates overthrew "Pre-Socratic" Athens) than all of their followers who attempt to find and stick to the letter of their law? Would writers of scripts have more akin to the writers they compete with than the script-kiddies and customers who use the scripts to the of letter of their laws? Are we all so dangerously close to everything we're against and could never fathom understanding, a secret complicity in being defined by being against one another?
Evidently, the old explicit form of cybercrud still exist today in the demands of institutions on members or constituents to adopt arbitrary protocols—regardless if one knows if the protocols are arbitrary or not. If known the ironic distance allows one to enjoy the combat, the joy of complaining; for the complaint is negative in that it negates one's negativity, the release of a tension built up before its exhalation. Nonetheless, such enjoyment allows one to release the energy to be effectively moved by the demands as if one didn't know they were arbitrary, all the same. New forms of cybercrud now flows from the blind adoption of defaults—that's more invisible than ever (be they application settings or applications themselves), as it's functionally identical to compliance to directives demanding use of arbitrary protocols. That is, from the perspective of inputs and outputs, i.e. (control) systems, one ends up complying and interacting with some particular application in either case, entering into a reciprocal relation with it. In the same way one encounters an idea behind the text, like an open source piece of code that can be tweaked, modified, improved, ignored, to see what the body of ideas can do (how does it work).