As the millennium approached, the online world would become increasingly centralized and consolidated, with both governments and businesses accelerating their attempts to intervene in what had always been a fundamentally peer-to-peer relationship. But for one brief and beautiful stretch of time—a stretch that, fortunately for me, coincided almost exactly with my adolescence—the Internet was mostly made of, by, and for the people. Its purpose was to enlighten, not to monetize, and it was administered more by a provisional cluster of perpetually shifting collective norms than by exploitative, globally enforceable terms of service agreements. To this day, I consider the 1990s online to have been the most pleasant and successful anarchy I’ve ever experienced.
I was especially involved with the Web-based bulletin-board systems or BBSes. On these, you could pick a username and type out whatever message you wanted to post, either adding to a preexisting group discussion or starting a new one. Any and all messages that replied to your post would be organized by thread. Imagine the longest email chain you’ve ever been on, but in public. These were also chat applications, like Internet Relay Chat, which provided an immediate-gratification instant-message version of the same experience. There you could discuss any topic in real time, or at least as close to real time as a telephone conversation, live radio, or TV news.
Most of the messaging and chatting I did was in search of answers to questions I had about how to build my own computer, and the responses I received were so considered and thorough, so generous and kind, they’d be unthinkable today. My panicked query about why a certain chipset for which I’d saved up my allowance didn’t seem to be compatible with the motherboard I’d already gotten for Christmas would elicit a two-thousand-word explanation and note of advice from a professional tenured computer scientist on the other side of the country. Not cribbed from any manual, this response was composed expressly for me, to troubleshoot my problems step-by-step until I’d solved them. I was twelve years old, and my correspondent was an adult stranger far away, yet he treated me like an equal because I’d shown respect for the technology. I attribute this civility, so far removed from our current social-media sniping, to the high bar for entry at the time. After all, the only people on these boards were the people who could be there—who wanted to be there badly enough—who had the proficiency and passion, because the Internet of the 1990s wasn’t just one click away. It took significant effort just to log on.
Once, a certain BBS that I was on tried to coordinate casual in-the-flesh meetings of its regular members throughout the country: in DC, in New York, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. After being pressured rather hard to attend—and promised extravagant evenings of eating and drinking—I finally just told everyone how old I was. I was afraid that some of my correspondents might stop interacting with me, but instead they became, if anything, even more encouraging. I was sent updates from the electronics show and images of its catalog; one guy offered to ship me secondhand computer parts through the mail, free of charge.
* * *
I MIGHT HAVE told the BBSers my age, but I never told them my name, because one of the greatest joys of these platforms was that on them I didn’t have to be who I was. I could be anybody. The anonymizing or pseudonymizing features brought equilibrium to all relationships, correcting their imbalances. I could take cover under virtually any handle, or “nym,” as they were called, and suddenly become an older, taller, manlier version of myself. I could even be multiple selves. I took advantage of this feature by asking what I sensed were my more amateur questions on what seemed to me the more amateur boards, under different personas each time. My computer skills were improving so swiftly that instead of being proud of all the progress I’d made, I was embarrassed by my previous ignorance and wanted to distance myself from it. I wanted to disassociate my selves. I’d tell myself that squ33ker had been so dumb when “he” had asked that question about chipset compatibility way back, long ago, last Wednesday.
For all of this cooperative, collectivist free-culture ethos, I’m not going to pretend that the competition wasn’t merciless, or that the population—almost uniformly male, heterosexual, and hormonally charged—didn’t occasionally erupt into cruel and petty squabbles. But in the absence of real names, the people who claimed to hate you weren’t real people. They didn’t know anything about you beyond what you argued, and how you argued it. If, or rather when, one of your arguments incurred some online wrath, you could simply drop that screen name and assume another mask, under the cover of which you could even join in the mimetic pile-on, beating up on your disowned avatar as if it were a stranger. I can’t tell you what sweet relief that sometimes was.
In the 1990s, the Internet had yet to fall victim to the greatest iniquity in digital history: the move by both government and businesses to link, as intimately as possible, users’ online personas to their offline legal identity. Kids used to be able to go online and say the dumbest things one day without having to be held accountable for them the next. This might not strike you as the healthiest environment in which to grow up, and yet it is precisely the only environment in which you can grow up—by which I mean that the early Internet’s dissociative opportunities actually encouraged me and those of my generation to change our most deeply held opinions, instead of just digging in and defending them when challenged. This ability to reinvent ourselves meant that we never had to close our minds by picking sides, or close ranks out of fear of doing irreparable harm to our reputations. Mistakes that were swiftly punished but swiftly rectified allowed both the community and the “offender” to move on. To me, and to many, this felt like freedom.
Imagine, if you will, that you could wake up every morning and pick a new name and a new face by which to be known to the world. Imagine that you could choose a new voice and new words to speak in it, as if the “Internet button” were actually a reset button for your life. In the new millennium, Internet technology would be turned to very different ends: enforcing fidelity to memory, identarian consistency, and so ideological conformity. But back then, for a while at least, it protected us by forgetting our transgressions and forgiving our sins.
My most significant early encounters with online self-presentation happened not on BBSes, however, but in a more fantastical realm: the pseudo-feudal lands and dungeons of role-playing games, MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games) in particular. In order to play Ultima Online, which was my favorite MMORPG, I had to create and assume an alternative identity, or “alt.” I could choose, for example, to be a wizard or warrior, a tinkerer or thief, and I could toggle between these alts with a freedom that was unavailable to me in off-line life, whose institutions tend to regard all mutability as suspicious.
I’d roam the Ultima gamescape as one of my alts, interacting with the alts of others. As I got to know these other alts, by collaborating with them on certain quests, I’d sometimes come to realize that I’d met their users before, just under different identities, while they, in turn, might realize the same about me. They’d read my messages and figure out, through a characteristic phrase I’d used, or a particular quest that I’d suggest, that I—who was currently, say, a knight who called herself Shrike—was also, or had also been, a bard who called himself Corwin, and a smith who called himself Belgarion. Sometimes I just enjoyed these interactions as opportunities for banter, but more often than not I treated them competitively, measuring my success by whether I was able to identify more of another user’s alts than they were able to identify of mine. These contests to determine whether I could unmask others without being unmasked myself required me to be careful not to fall into any messaging patterns that might expose me, while simultaneously engaging others and remaining alert to the ways in which they might inadvertently reveal their true identities.
While the alts of Ultima were multifarious in name, they were essentially stabilized by the nature of their roles, which were well defined, even archetypal, and so enmeshed within the game’s established socia
l order as to make playing them sometimes feel like discharging a civic duty. After a day at school or at a job that might seem purposeless and unrewarding, it could feel as if you were performing a useful service by spending the evening as a healer or shepherd, a helpful alchemist or mage. The relative stability of the Ultima universe—its continued development according to defined laws and codes of conduct—ensured that each alt had their role-specific tasks, and would be judged according to their ability, or willingness, to complete them and fulfill the societal expectations of their function.
I loved these games and the alternative lives they let me live, though love wasn’t quite as liberating for the other members of my family. Games, especially of the massively multiplayer variety, are notoriously time-consuming, and I was spending so many hours playing Ultima that our phone bills were becoming exorbitant and no calls were getting through. The line was always busy. My sister, now deep into her teen years, became furious when she found out that my online life had caused her to miss some crucial high-school gossip. However, it didn’t take her long to figure out that all she had to do to get her revenge was pick up the phone, which would break the Internet connection. The modem’s hiss would stop, and before she’d even received a normal dial tone, I’d be screaming my head off downstairs.
If you’re interrupted in the middle of, say, reading the news online, you can always go back and pick up wherever you left off. But if you’re interrupted while playing a game that you can’t pause or save—because a hundred thousand others are playing it at the same time—you’re ruined. You could be on top of the world, some legendary dragon-slayer with your own castle and an army, but after just thirty seconds of CONNECTION LOST you’d find yourself reconnecting to a bone-gray screen that bore a cruel epitaph: YOU ARE DEAD.
I’m a bit embarrassed nowadays at how seriously I took all of this, but I can’t avoid the fact that I felt, at the time, as if my sister was intent on destroying my life—particularly on those occasions when she’d make sure to catch my eye from across the room and smile before picking up the downstairs receiver, not because she wanted to make a phone call but purely because she wanted to remind me who was boss. Our parents got so fed up with our shouting matches that they did something uncharacteristically indulgent. They switched our Internet billing plan from pay-by-the-minute to flat-fee unlimited access, and installed a second phone line.
Peace smiled upon our abode.
5
Hacking
All teenagers are hackers. They have to be, if only because their life circumstances are untenable. They think they’re adults, but the adults think they’re kids.
Remember, if you can, your own teen years. You were a hacker, too, willing to do anything to evade parental supervision. Basically, you were fed up with being treated like a child.
Recall how it felt when anyone older and bigger than you sought to control you, as if age and size were identical with authority. At one time or another, your parents, teachers, coaches, scoutmasters, and clergy would all take advantage of their position to invade your private life, impose their expectations on your future, and enforce your conformity to past standards. Whenever these adults substituted their hopes, dreams, and desires for your own, they were doing so, by their account, “for your own good” or “with your best interests at heart.” And while sometimes this was true, we all remember those other times when it wasn’t—when “because I said so” wasn’t enough and “you’ll thank me one day” rang hollow. If you’ve ever been an adolescent, you’ve surely been on the receiving end of one of these clichés, and so on the losing end of an imbalance of power.
To grow up is to realize the extent to which your existence has been governed by systems of rules, vague guidelines, and increasingly unsupportable norms that have been imposed on you without your consent and are subject to change at a moment’s notice. There were even some rules that you’d only find out about after you’d violated them.
If you were anything like me, you were scandalized.
If you were anything like me, you were nearsighted, scrawny, and, age-wise, barely entering the double digits when you first started to wonder about politics.
In school, you were told that in the system of American politics, citizens give consent through the franchise to be governed by their equals. This is democracy. But democracy certainly wasn’t in place in my US history class, where, if my classmates and I had the vote, Mr. Martin would have been out of a job. Instead, Mr. Martin made the rules for US history, Ms. Evans made the rules for English, Mr. Sweeney made the rules for science, Mr. Stockton made the rules for math, and all of those teachers constantly changed those rules to benefit themselves and maximize their power. If a teacher didn’t want you to go to the bathroom, you’d better hold it in. If a teacher promised a field trip to the Smithsonian Institution but then canceled it for an imaginary infraction, they’d offer no explanation beyond citing their broad authority and the maintenance of proper order. Even back then, I realized that any opposition to this system would be difficult, not least because getting its rules changed to serve the interests of the majority would involve persuading the rule makers to put themselves at a purposeful disadvantage. That, ultimately, is the critical flaw or design defect intentionally integrated into every system, in both politics and computing: the people who create the rules have no incentive to act against themselves.
What convinced me that school, at least, was an illegitimate system was that it wouldn’t recognize any legitimate dissent. I could plead my case until I lost my voice, or I could just accept the fact that I’d never had a voice to begin with.
However, the benevolent tyranny of school, like all tyrannies, has a limited shelf life. At a certain point, the denial of agency becomes a license to resist, though it’s characteristic of adolescence to confuse resistance with escapism or even violence. The most common outlets for a rebellious teen were useless to me, because I was too cool for vandalism and not cool enough for drugs. (To this day, I’ve never even gotten drunk on liquor or smoked a cigarette.) Instead, I started hacking—which remains the sanest, healthiest, and most educational way I know for kids to assert autonomy and address adults on equal terms.
Like most of my classmates, I didn’t like the rules but was afraid of breaking them. I knew how the system worked: you corrected a teacher’s mistake, you got a warning; you confronted the teacher when they didn’t admit the mistake, you got detention; someone cheated off your exam, and though you didn’t expressly let them cheat, you got detention and the cheater got suspended. This is the origin of all hacking: the awareness of a systemic linkage between input and output, between cause and effect. Because hacking isn’t just native to computing—it exists wherever rules do. To hack a system requires getting to know its rules better than the people who created it or are running it, and exploiting all the vulnerable distance between how those people had intended the system to work and how it actually works, or could be made to work. In capitalizing on these unintentional uses, hackers aren’t breaking the rules as much as debunking them.
Humans are hardwired to recognize patterns. All the choices we make are informed by a cache of assumptions, both empirical and logical, unconsciously derived and consciously developed. We use these assumptions to assess the potential consequences of each choice, and we describe the ability to do all of this, quickly and accurately, as intelligence. But even the smartest among us rely on assumptions that we’ve never put to the test—and because we do, the choices we make are often flawed. Anyone who knows better, or thinks more quickly and more accurately than we do, can take advantage of those flaws to create consequences that we never expected. It’s this egalitarian nature of hacking—which doesn’t care who you are, just how you reason—that makes it such a reliable method of dealing with the type of authority figures so convinced of their system’s righteousness that it never occurred to them to test it.
I didn’t learn any of this at school, of course. I learned it online. The Inte
rnet gave me the chance to pursue all the topics I was interested in, and all the links between them, unconstrained by the pace of my classmates and my teachers. The more time I spent online, however, the more my schoolwork felt extracurricular.
The summer I turned thirteen, I resolved never to return, or at least to seriously reduce my classroom commitments. I wasn’t quite sure how I’d swing that, though. All the plans I came up with were likely to backfire. If I was caught skipping class, my parents would revoke my computer privileges; if I decided to drop out, they’d bury my body deep in the woods and tell the neighbors I’d run away. I had to come up with a hack—and then, on the first day of the new school year, I found one. Indeed, it was basically handed to me.
At the start of each class, the teachers passed out their syllabi, detailing the material to be covered, the required reading, and the schedule of tests and quizzes and assignments. Along with these, they gave us their grading policies, which were essentially explanations of how As, Bs, Cs, and Ds were calculated. I’d never encountered information like this. Their numbers and letters were like a strange equation that suggested a solution to my problem.
After school that day, I sat down with the syllabi and did the math to figure out which aspects of each class I could simply ignore and still expect to receive a passing grade. Take my US history class, for example. According to the syllabus, quizzes were worth 25 percent, tests were worth 35 percent, term papers were worth 15 percent, homework was worth 15 percent, and class participation—that most subjective of categories, in every subject—was worth 10 percent. Because I usually did well on my quizzes and tests without having to do too much studying, I could count on them for a reliable pool of time-efficient points. Term papers and homework, however, were the major time-sucks: low-value, high-cost impositions on Me Time.
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