by Rich Horton
They lost. The ACLU collected $102,000 in fees from them. The story of the victory was above the fold on Le Monde’s site for a week. Turns out that French people loathe Atos even more than the rest of us, because they’ve had longer to sharpen their hate.
Long story slightly short: we won. Atos “voluntarily” released our school from its contract. And Fight the Power went mental. I spent that summer vacation reviewing Github comments on Ftp as more and more people discovered that they could make use of a platform that made fighting back simple. The big, stupid companies were whales and we were their krill, and all it took was some glue to glom us all together into boulders of indigestible matter that could choke them to death.
I dropped out of Ashcroft High in the middle of the eleventh grade and did the rest of my time with home-schooling shovelware that taught me exactly what I needed to pass the GED and not one tiny thing more. I didn’t give a shit. I was working full time on Ftp, craig-listing rides to hacker unconferences where I couchsurfed and spoke, giving my poor parental units eight kinds of horror. It would’ve been simpler if I’d taken donations for Ftp because Mom and Dad quickly came to understand that their role as banker in our little family ARG gave them the power to yank me home any time I moved out of their comfort zone. But there was a balance of terror there, because they totally knew that if I had accepted donations for the project, I’d have been financially independent in a heartbeat.
Plus, you know, they were proud of me. Ftp makes a difference. It’s not a household name or anything, but more than a million people have signed up for Ftp campaigns since I started it, and our success rate is hovering around twenty-five percent. That means that I’d changed a quarter-million lives for the better (at least) before I turned eighteen. Mom and Dad, they loved that (which is not to say that they didn’t need the occasional reminder of it). And shit, it got me a scholarship at MIT. So there’s that.
Network filters are universally loathed. Duh. No one’s ever written a regular expression that can distinguish art from porn, and no one ever will. No one’s ever assembled an army of prudes large enough to hand-sort the Internet into “good” and “bad” buckets. No one ever will. The Web’s got about one hundred billion pages on it; if you have a failure rate of one-tenth of one percent, you’ll overblock (or underblock) (or both) one hundred million pages. That’s several Library of Congresses’ worth of pointless censorship, or all the porn ever made, times ten, missed though underfiltering. You’d be an idiot to even try.
Idiot like a fox! If you don’t care about filtering out “the bad stuff” (whatever that is), censorware is a great business to be in. The point of most network filters is the “security syllogism”:
SOMETHING MUST BE DONE.
I HAVE DONE SOMETHING.
SOMETHING HAS BEEN DONE.
VICTORY!
Hand-wringing parents don’t want their precious offspring looking at wieners and hoo-hahs when they’re supposed to be amassing student debt, so they demand that the Termite Mound fix the problem by Doing Something. The Termite Mound dispenses cash to some censorware creeps in a carefully titrated dose that is exactly sufficient to demonstrate Something Has Been Doneness to a notional wiener-enraged parent. Since all the other dorms, schools, offices, libraries, airports, bus depots, train stations, cafes, hotels, bars, and theme parks in the world are doing exactly the same thing, each one can declare itself to be in possession of Best Practices when there is an unwanted hoo-hah eruption, and culpability diffuses to a level that is safe for corporate governance and profitability. Mission Accomplished.
And so the whole world suffers under this pestilence. Millions of times every day—right at this moment—people are swearing at their computers: What the fuck. Censorware’s indifference to those moments of suffering is only possible because they’ve never been balled up into a vast screaming meteor of rage.
“Hey, there. Hi! Look, I’m here because I need unfiltered Internet access to get through my degree. So do you all, right? But the Termite Mound isn’t going to turn it off because that would be like saying, ‘Here, kids, have a look at this porn,’ which they can’t afford to say, even though, seriously, who gives a shit, right?”
I had them at “porn,” but now I had to keep them.
“Look at your tenancy agreement: you’re paying twenty-seven bucks a month for your network access at the Termite Mound. Twenty-seven bucks—each! I’ll find us an ISP that can give all of us hot and cold running genitals and all the unsavory religious extremism, online gaming, and suicide instructions we can eat. Either I’m going to make the Termite Mound give us the Internet we deserve, or we’ll cost it one of its biggest cash cows and humiliate it on the world stage.
“I don’t want your money. All I want is for you to promise me that if I can get us Internet from someone who isn’t a censoring sack of shit, that you’ll come with me. I’m going to sign up every poor bastard in the Termite Mound, take that promise to someone who isn’t afraid to work hard to earn a dollar, and punish the Termite Mound for treating us like this. And then, I’m going to make a loud noise about what we’ve done and spread the word to every other residence in Cambridge, then Boston, then across America. I’m going to spread out to airports, hotels, train stations, buses, taxis—any place where they make it their business to decide what data we’re allowed to see.”
I whirled around to face the elf, who leaped back, long fingers flying to his face in an elaborate mime of startlement. “Are you with me, pal?”
He nodded slightly.
“Come on,” I said. “Let ’em hear you.”
He raised one arm over his head, bits of rabbit fur and uncured hides dangling from his skinny wrist. I felt for him. I think we all did. Elves.
He was a convincer, though. By the time I left the room, I already had twenty-nine signups.
All evil in the world is the result of an imbalance between the people who benefit from shenanigans and the people who get screwed by shenanigans. De-shenaniganifying the world is the answer to pollution and poverty and bad schools and the war on some drugs and a million other horribles. To solve all the world’s problems, I need kick-ass raw feeds and a steady supply of doofus thugs from central casting to make idiots of. I know where I can find plenty of the latter, and I’m damn sure going to get the former. Watch me.
My advisor is named Andronicus Andronicus Llewellyn, and her parents had a sense of humor, clearly. She founded the Networks That Change lab three years ago after she fled Uzbekistan one step ahead of Gulnara’s death squad, but they say that she still provides material aid to the army of babushkas that underwent forced sterilization under old man Karimov’s brutal regime. Her husband, Arzu, lost an eye in Gezi. They’re kind of a Twitter-uprising power couple.
I’m the only undergrad in the lab, and the grad students were slavering at the thought of having a bottle-washing dogsbody in residence. Someone to clean out the spam filters, lexically normalize the grant proposals, deworm the Internet of things, get the limescale out of the espresso machine, and defragment the lab’s prodigious store of detritus, kipple, and moop.
Two days after telling them all where they could stick it, I got a meeting in AA’s cube.
“Sit down, Lukasz,” she said. My birth certificate read “Lucas,” but I relished the extra consonant. I perched on a tensegrity chair that had been some grad student’s laser-cutter thesis project. It creaked like a haunted attic, and its white acrylic struts were grubby as a snowbank a day after the salting trucks. AA’s chair was patched with steel tape, huge black cocoony gobs of it. And it still creaked.
I waited patiently. My drop was in my overalls’ marsupial pouch, and I stuffed my hands in there, curling my fingers around it and kneading it. It comforted me. AA closed the door.
“Do you know why my lab doesn’t have any undergrads?” she asked. I gave it another moment to test for rhetoricalness, timed out, then gave it a shot. “You don’t want to screw around with getting someone up to speed. You wan
t to get the work done.”
“Don’t be stupid. Grad students need as much hand-holding as undergrads. No, it’s because undergrads are full of the dramas. And the dramas are not good for getting the work done.”
“Andronicus,” I said, “I’m not the one you should be talking to—” I felt a flush creeping up my neck—“they—”
She fixed me with a look that froze my tongue and dried the spit in my mouth. “I spent four years in Jaslyk Prison in Uzbekistan. Three of my cellmates committed suicide. One of them bled out on me from the top bunk while I slept. I woke covered in her blood.” She looked at her screen, snagged her attention on it, ignored me for a minute while she typed furiously. Turned back. “What did your lab mates do, Lukasz, that you would like to talk to me about?”
“Nothing,” I mumbled. I hated being dismissed like this. Of course, she could trump anything I was inclined to complain about. But it was so . . . invalidating.
“Never forget that there is blood in the world’s veins, Lukasz. You’ve done something clever with your years on this planet. You’re here to see if you can figure out how to do something important, now. We want to systematize the struggle here, figure out how to automate it, but eventually there will always be blood. You need to learn to be dispassionate about the interpersonal conflicts, to save your anger for the people who deserve it, and to channel that anger into a theory of action that leads to change. Otherwise, you will be an undergraduate who worries about being picked on.”
“I know,” I said. “I know. Sorry.”
She held out a hand to stop me fleeing. “Lukasz, there is change to be had out there. It waits for us to discover its fulcrums. That’s the research project here. But the reason for the research is the change. It’s to be the bag of blood in the streets or the boardroom or the prison. That’s what you’re learning to do here.”
I didn’t say anything. She turned back to her screen. Her fingers beat the keyboard. I left.
I pretended not to notice three of AA’s grad students hastily switching off their infrared laser-pointers as I opened her glass door and walked back out to the lab. Everyone, including AA, knew that they’d been listening in, but the formal characteristics of our academic kabuki required us all to pretend that I’d just had a private conversation.
I pulled my laptop out of my bag and uncrumpled its bent corners. I’d only made it a week before, and I didn’t have time or energy to fold up another one. It was getting pretty battered in my bag, though; the waxed cardboard shell getting more worn and creased in less time than ever before. Not even my most extreme couchsurfing voyages had been this hard on my essential equipment. The worst part was that the keyboard surface had gotten really smashed—I think I’d closed up the box with a Sharpie trapped inside it—so the camera that watched my fingers as they typed the letters printed on the cardboard sheet was having a hard time getting the registration right. I’d mashed the spot where the backspace was drawn so many times that I’d worn the ink off and had to redraw it (more Sharpie, a cardboard laptop owner’s best friend).
Now the screen was starting to go. The little short-throw projector attached to the pinhead-sized computer taped inside the back of the box was misreading the geometry of the mirror it bounced the screen image off of, which keystoned and painted the image on the rice paper scrim set into the laptop’s top half. The image was only off by about ten degrees, but it was enough to screw up the touch screen registration and give me a mild headache after only a couple hours of staring at it. I’d noticed that a lot of the MIT kids carried big plastic and metal and glass laptops, which had seemed like some kind of weird retro affectation. But campus life was more of an off-road experience than I’d suspected.
I spent fifteen minutes unfolding the laser-cut cardboard and smoothing out the creases, resticking everything with fiber tape from an office supply table in the middle of the lab, and then running through the registration and diagnostics built into the OS until the computer was in a usable state again. The whole time, I was hotly conscious of the grad students’ sneaky gaze, the weird clacking noise of their fingers on real mechanical keyboards—seriously, who used a keyboard that was made of pieces anymore; was I really going to have to do that?—as they chatted about me.
Yes, about me. It’s not (just) ego; I could tell. I can prove it. I was barely back up and running and answering all my social telephones when some dudeface from Chiapas sat down conspicuously next to me and said, “It’s Lukasz, right?” He held out his hand.
I looked at it for a moment, just to make the point, then shook. “Yeah. You’re Juanca, right?” Of course he was Juanca. He’d been burned in effigy by Zetas every year for four years, and his entire family, all the way to third cousins, were either stateside or in Guatemala or El Salvador, hiding out from narcoterrorists, who were still pissed about Juanca’s anonymizer, a mix master that was the Number One, go-to source of convictable evidence against Zeta members whose cases went to trial. If it weren’t for the fact that Juanca’s network had also busted an assload of corrupt cops, prosecutors, judges, government ministers, regional governors, and one secretary of state, they’d have given him a ministerial posting and a medal. As it was, he was in exile. Famous. Loved. It helped that he was rakishly handsome—which I am not, for the record—and that he had a bounty on his head and had been unsuccessfully kidnapped on the T, getting away through some badass parkour that got captured in CCTV jittercam that made him look like he was moving in a series of short teleports.
“Yeah. You got the blood speech, huh?”
I nodded.
“It’s a good one,” he said. I didn’t think so. I thought it was bullshit. I didn’t say so.
We stared at each other. “Welp,” he said. “Take it easy.”
One of the early Ftp code contributors was now CTO for an ISP, and they’d gotten their start as a dorm co-op at Brown that had metastasized across New England. Sanjay had been pretty important to the early days of Ftp, helping us get the virtualization right so that it could run on pretty much any cloud without a lot of jiggery and/or pokery. Within a day of e-mailing Sanjay, I was having coffee with the vice president of business development for Miskatonic Networks, who was also Sanjay’s boyfriend’s girlfriend because apparently ISPs in New England are hotbeds of Lovecraft-fandom polyamory. Her name was Khadijah, and she had a Southie accent so thick it was like an amateur theater production of Good Will Hunting.
“The Termite Mound?” She laughed. “Shit, yeah, I know that place. It’s still standing? I went to some super-sketchy parties there when I was a kid; I mean sooooper-sketchy, like sketch-a-roony. I can’t believe no one’s torched the place yet.”
“Not yet,” I said. “And seeing as all my stuff’s there right now, I’m hoping that no one does for the time being.”
“Yeah, I can see that.” I could not get over her accent. It was the most Bostonian thing I’d encountered since I got off the train. “Okay, so you want to know what we’d charge to provide service to someone at the Termite Mound?”
“Uh, no. I want to know what you’d charge per person if we could get you the whole mound—every unit in the residence. All two hundred and fifty of them.”
“Oh.” She paused a second. “This is an Ftp thing, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s how I know Sanjay. I, uh, I started Ftp.” I don’t like to brag, but sometimes it makes sense in the context of the conversation, right?
“That was you? Wicked! So you’re seriously gonna get the whole dorm to sign up with us?”
“I will if you can get me a price that I can sell to them,” I said.
“Oh,” she said. Then “Oh! Right. Hmm. Leave it with me. You say you can get them all signed up?”
“I think so. If the price is right. And I think that if the Termite Mound goes with you that there’ll be other dorms that’ll follow. Maybe a lab or two,” I said. I was talking out of my ass at this point, but seriously, net-censorship in the labs at MIT? It was disgusting
. It could not stand.
“Damn,” she said. “Sounds like you’re majoring in Ftp. Don’t you have classes or something?”
“No,” I said. “This is basically exactly what I figured college would be like. A cross between summer camp and a Stanford obedience experiment. If all I wanted to do was cram a bunch of knowledge into my head, I could have stayed home and mooced it. I came here because I wanted to level up and fight something tough and even dangerous. I want to spend four years getting into the right kind of trouble. Going to classes, too, but seriously, classes? Whatever. Everyone knows the good conversations happen in the hallway between the formal presentations. Classes are just an excuse to have hallways.”
She looked skeptical and ate banana bread.
“It’s your deal,” she said.
I could hear the but hanging in the air between us. She got more coffees and brought them back, along with toasted banana bread dripping with butter for me. She wouldn’t let me pay and told me it was on Miskatonic. We were a potential big account. She didn’t want to say “but” because she might offend me. I wanted to hear the “but.”
“But?”
“But what?”
“It’s my deal but . . . ?”
“But, well, you know, you don’t look after your grades, MIT’ll put you out on your ass. That’s how it works in college. I’ve seen it.”
I chewed my banana bread.
“Hey,” she said. “Hey. Are you okay, Lukasz?”
“I’m fine,” I said.
She smiled at me. She was pretty. “But?”
I told her about my talk with AA, and about Juanca, and about how I felt like nobody was giving me my propers, and she looked very sympathetic, in a way that made me feel much younger. Like toddler younger.
“MIT is all about pranks, right? I think if I could come up with something really epic, they’d—” And as I said it, I realized how dumb it was. They laughed at me in Vienna, I’ll show them! “You know what? Forget about it. I got more important things to do than screw around with those knob-ends. Work to do, right? Get the network opened up around here, you and me, Khadijah!”