Several months after speaking with Thackery, I get a phone call late at night. She is crying; she's furious and needs someone to listen.
''Phiber's been busted again! Dammit!'' She goes on to explain that the Secret Service in New York, along with the FBI and the Justice Department, have just arrested Phiber and several of his friends, including Outlaw and Renegade Hacker – the famed MOD (Masters of Deception) group. She takes it as a personal defeat:
''I always think when we catch these kids, we've been given a chance to show them a better way to spend their lives,'' her voice cracks in despair, "to finish school, get real jobs, stay out of trouble because it's a big bad world out there. Now Phiber's gonna go to jail. A kid's going to jail! I thought we made a dent but we blew it! I saw it coming.''
What Gail had observed was undue media attention and praise for a boy who deserved better – he deserved scorn and derision. According to Gail, the positive reinforcement bestowed on him by reporters, computer-company owners, and sixties' heroes since his first arrest steered him toward more crime and antisocial behavior.
''Phiber was the only hacker to go on Geraldo. Where's Geraldo now? Nowhere! The kid's an embarrassment to him now!'' Gail is fuming – "flaming,'' as they say on the WELL. Looking at it from a cyberian vantagepoint, Phiber became a victim of the fact that observers always affect the object they are observing. Media observation – from the likes of Geraldo or even me – threw Phiber farther off course than he already was. His problems were iterated and amplified by the media attention.
''What really irks me,'' adds Gail, "is guys like Kapor [Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus] and Jobbs [founder of Apple] misleading these kids by not scolding them for hacking. They shouldn't pat them on the shoulder! Kapor has no idea what's really going on out there today. When he was hacking, things were very different. It was a few pieces of code or a university prank. They're scared to tell these kids the truth because of their liberal guilt.''
She calls them hypocrites: ''These guys certainly protect their own software. The money that's funding the EFF is the same money that's paying for Lotus's attorneys, and they protect their proprietary rights, believe me! Guys like Kapor and Jobbs are fighting an old sixties' battle, and getting kids put in jail with their misleading touchy-feely rhetoric. The kids shouldn't be made to fight these battles for them. It's the kids who are on the front line!''
Gail explains that the young hackers blindly follow the wisdom of the original computer hackers – but that this is a logic no longer appropriate on today's violent computer frontier. Organized crime and Colombian drug cartels now hire young hackers to provide them with secure, untraceable communications and intelligence.
''Now these kids are being used by drug dealers! They are being prostituted, but it's the kids who go to jail! Where's the EFF now?''
Cyberia is not real yet, but the problems facing it are. On one hand, fledgling cyberians are still rooted in the political activism and cultural extremism of the 1960s and 70s, and eager to please the people they consider their forefathers – Tim Leary, Steven Jobbs, Mitch Kapor, William Burroughs – by wholeheartedly embracing their lifestyles and priorities. Kids who attempt to emulate William Burroughs will probably become addicted to drugs, and kids who take Steven Jobbs's words at face value may end up prosecuted for computer crime. On the other hand, the technologies and pathways that young, brilliant cyberians forge are irresistible both to themselves and their would-be exploiters. Ego invades hyperspace.
Maybe the detractors are right. Maybe the cyberian technologies are not intrinsically liberating. While they do allow for cultural change through principles such as feedback and iteration, it appears that they can almost as quickly be subverted by those who are unready or unwilling to accept the liberation they could offer. But others present convincing arguments that the operating principles of Cyberia eventually will win out and create a more just Global Village.
Chapter 17
The New Colonialism
As we slouch farther toward the chaos attractor at the end of time, we find most of our networks, electronic or otherwise, working against their original aims or being diverted toward different ends. Subnetworks and metanetworks grow like mold over the original medium. Be it a symptom of social decay, cyberian genesis, or both, the growth of new colonialism around and within our old systems and structures brings a peculiar sort of darkness-before-dawnishness to the close of this millennium.
Compare our subculture of cyberians to Hogan's Heroes carrying out rebellious acts under the noses of guards and through underground tunnels in the prison camp. Perhaps the most telling sign of our times is that the United States has a greater percentage of its population in jail than does any other country, and is breeding a criminal subculture further and further removed from accepted social scheme.
It was in prison that legendary phone phreaque Cap'n Crunch (who got his name for using a two-note whistle he found in a box of Cap'n Crunch cereal to make free long-distance phone calls) was forced to join the ranks of the criminal subculture. His real name is John Draper, and I find him at Toon Town operating with a computer-video interface.
After several meteoric climbs to the top of the programming profession, Draper is in the low phase of an endless rags-to-riches-to-rags curve that has defined the past twenty or so years of his life. It seems as though every time he develops a brilliant new program, an investigation links one of his friends, or friends of his friends, to something illegal, and then Draper's equipment – along with his livelihood – gets confiscated, delaying his progress and costing him his contract. The large, gray-haired, bespectacled cyber veteran suggests that we duck into the brain-machine room to speak about his prison experience.
''In order for me to survive in jail, I had to make myself valuable enough so they wouldn't harass me or molest me. So I had to tell everybody how to make calls, how to get in to the system, and what to do when they got in there. We'd have little classes. Out of pure survival I was forced to tell all and, believe me, I did.''
Draper believes that thousands of telephone and computer crimes resulted from his prison classes. When his technologies got in the hands of inmates serving time for embezzlement or fraud, they in turn developed some of the most advanced industrial hacking done today.
Draper's experiences mirror the ways in which cyberian counterculture movements form in society at large. For intellectual, emotional, or even physical survival, clusters of people – not always linked by geography – form posses characterized by the specific networks holding them together. This, then, initiates a bottom-up iteration of cyberian ideals.
One startling example is the growing community of ''Mole People,'' who inhabit the forgotten tunnels of New York's subway system. The New York City Transit Authority estimates that about five thousand people live on the first level, but that accounts for only one-third of the tunnel system. Other officials estimate that closer to twenty-five thousand people live in the entire system, which goes much farther down than police or transit workers dare trek, and consists of hundreds of miles of abandoned tunnels built in the 1890s. The ash-colored denizens of the subways elect their own mayors, furnish their underground apartments, find electricity, and in some cases install running water. Sounding more like an urban myth than a real population, mole people claim that their children, born in the tunnels, have never seen the light of day. Others speak of patrols, organized by mole leaders to prevent their detection by making sure that outsiders who stray into their campsites and villages never stray out again. Whether or not this is an exaggeration, we do know that numerous television news crews who have attempted to reach the lower tunnels were pelted with rocks and forced to retreat.