Now here he was starting a grassroots movement and already it was out of his hands. And not only was it out of his hands, it wasn’t empirically sound or meticulous. It was defined by its mercurial nature, by the fact of its quantity and chaos, its animosity and its anger. He tried to picture Cassie seeing the videos, what it would make her think of him, but he couldn’t even imagine it—and he couldn’t write her about it. He knew he had to be more careful than that, even while shielded by TOR. She wasn’t writing him, either, and that absence hurt even if he understood why she was ghosting him. Her own communications wouldn’t be encrypted like the folks from Silence’s were. And he hadn’t even heard from them. He’d not heard one thing about the actions, about anyone from Silence planning to launch videos or attacks, before it happened. He loved the actions themselves and he loved the sense of his having inspired so many—there was no question his actions here were inspiring further action—but the corresponding idea that he had no editorial power of any kind made him feel hollowed out, like there was no marrow in his bones. He signed on to TOR and was about to log in to the #hacro channel to ask Coyote or someone what was going on, but he couldn’t get his hands to move. He’d been a journalist long enough to understand that the FBI would already have begun to investigate attacks like these.
Even while using TOR he would have to be a lot more careful in the days ahead.
He hadn’t posted those new videos. There must have been hundreds, for all he knew thousands, of channels all over IRC he didn’t know about, didn’t log on to—the Dark Web and even just the kinds of chats he was having were so vast and so evanescent, there was no way he could be on them all, and once a single thread reached bottom, it disappeared: unsearchable, unarchived, uneditable, unfact-checkable.
Gone.
There was no LexisNexis search, no Google cache, that would turn up all he needed to know about what Silence was after, what was happening. There was no independent verification that it existed at all, let alone that any of what was posted online was true. Or grammatical.
As he sat in his parents’ basement he began also to think: Wasn’t this just what he was after? Real followers, if not adherents. Real action. And he hadn’t posted the action video himself, so no real culpability, and the protection of TOR encryption. He logged on to his IRC chat room of choice and instead of inquisitive, instead of nervous, he was, well, just a part of it:
No one responded for a minute, for another. Terror started to creep back but this time rather than succumb to it, Mark typed again, and this time:
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
MARK WATCHED AS ATTACKS from the first wave continued unabated throughout the last week in August and into September. Rolling Stone magazine’s website was DDoSed, Jann Wenner’s home address, e-mail address, and cell phone doxxed online. Someone hacked into the Eddie Bauer mainframe and reconfigured all their pricing software so that every item sold in every Eddie Bauer store nationwide was marked “$666.66.” A group of Boomer Boomers in David Crosby masks and wearing nothing else, their bodies like a Matthew Barney Cremaster installation glistening with Vaseline, ran through the LL Bean outlet in Freeport, Maine, spraying black spray paint and shouting, through vocoders worn under their masks, “Boom boom!” Police arrested one of them but he wouldn’t talk and because he was a minor—Mark saw it reported he was fourteen—his name was never released to the public. On the Comedy Central website, someone hacked into all The Daily Show with Jon Stewart video clips one morning and replaced all the thirty-second ad experiences—so, just ads—before all the clips on the site with a GIF of a VW bus driving off the side of a tight turn on PCH somewhere in Northern California.
No one was physically hurt by the attacks, but money was lost—millions of dollars lost and millions more now to be spent on web security as a result—privacy violated, the people who ran businesses and organizations robbed of their autonomy for an hour or a day or a week. Within days attacks were reported on 60 Minutes, at The Atlantic and The Daily Beast and RazorWire and Slate and Salon.com, in every major newspaper left in the country. The words “domestic generational terrorism” started to roll out of the mouths of newscasters and off the pens of pundits, op-ed writers, and journalists, to fall off the tongues of parents with their kids over dinner like they were pulled down by gravity.
And all of it drove more and more traffic to all the proliferating Boomer Missives, Isaac Abramson’s the most but not exclusively—sometime in September Missive #1 hit eight million views—all of which were by now encrypted, every video showing its speaker in a Crosby mask and his voice disguised, originating on an IRC chat room if detected at all, protected by TOR, the signal bouncing from his computer to computers in Europe, Asia, Australia, all over the U.S., before an IP address could be detected.
On social media people posted so many varied Boomer Missives from so many varied Boomer Boomers that in the chat rooms Mark frequented, heated arguments cropped up about what was an authentic missive and what was second-wave Boomerism, even faux Boomerism, poseur Boomerism, so-called Boomerism. People speculated on whether the name Isaac Abramson was the name of a single person or if it was a moniker adopted by Boomer Boomers all over the country, much like Silence. Long articles on the organization—many of them questioning if it was even an organization, given that it didn’t seem all that organized—ran on the websites of The New Republic, The Unified Theory, and The Nation, Le Monde and The Guardian. The landscape was changing so fast there wasn’t time to wait for the pieces to come out in each magazine’s print version.
Though many pundits speculated that it might mark a date for a new directive—and though Mark was careful to do a lot of listening and no posting on chat rooms that day—the anniversary of September 11 passed without further action.
The rest of the month was quiet.
In Baltimore the skies were as window-pane clear and blue as the morning a decade earlier when the attacks themselves happened. Then the first week in October a new Boomer Action was announced. It took Mark almost two days to recognize that he’d been invited to one of the main planning channels, #retirer, at the end of the thread when he got back on with Silence. It wasn’t possible to tell how many people were on the channel with him, as everyone just posted as Silence, but much was made there about how exclusive it was, and that only an admin of the channel could invite new users. Against his better judgment—he was a thirty-one-year-old man who’d held a job and an advanced degree, who had a 401(k) and bylines in a national magazine—Mark couldn’t help but feel flattered to be included. It felt less like being asked to sit at the cool kids’ table than like getting an assignment from a new magazine. He still spent less time chatting on the channel than reading and watching—the speed at which these Silence kids typed was so far beyond his own skills that even when he tried to chime in, he was booted out of central conversation before he could make his points. The group chose another of the Silence collective to make the video this time, and Mark couldn’t even make a case for him being the one to do so. Who would’ve thought that the most useful class he took in high school would have been typing, and that he’d be so far behind even after it, competing against kids who’d been writing code since they were seven.
Again this new action was set off by a video that found its way broadly onto the open web in a matter of hours. Again someone who was not Isaac Abramson, but who called himself Boomer2, posted a video, wearing a David Crosby mask. It wasn’t clear even after the chats on #retirer if this Boomer2 was the same person as the first Boomer2, or if they were just using the moniker
. This time the person said, “Boomer Action Number Two. Daily Show clips on ComedyCentral.com at exactly five P.M. today. View it. Then: Vandalize. Vandalize. Vandalize. Resist much, obey little. Boom boom.”
After it went live, the #retirer channel went silent. Mark spent the afternoon reading through all the IRC channels he knew but he didn’t see postings by Coyote or HHH or anyone from Silence. They might have gone dark or they may just be elsewhere, he realized at this point, and Mark vacillated between panic and peace, happy not to be leaving any kind of footprint—by now the FBI would be trolling some of these rooms, if not all of them. For all he knew everyone in Silence assumed he himself was FBI. That night, as the advertisements before every clip on the Comedy Central website, instead of the VW-bus-going-over-a-cliff ad, someone had hacked in and posted a three-minute video clip that was just a long list of addresses scrolling down the screen like the synopsis at the beginning of each Star Wars film, heavily copyrighted John Williams score blaring in the background.
Instead of a synopsis, the text contained the workplaces and home addresses of a series of the most recognizable figures in boomer iconography: Bob Weir’s address in Marin County, Garrison Keillor’s home address in St. Paul, Paul Simon’s summer home in the Hamptons, Oprah’s house in Chicago, Philip Roth’s home in rural Connecticut, Jorma Kaukonen’s ranch in central Ohio, Joni Mitchell’s birthplace in Ontario, Levon Helm’s address in central New York—dozens of addresses streamed down the screen for three full minutes, the biggest mass doxxing in Internet history. At the bottom it read, in block letters, in Star Wars typeface:
VANDALIZE.
What followed were attacks not only on private homes but on a slew of central baby boomer institutions. Mark watched it all stream through his Twitter feed in alternating waves of mirth and horror and ego fulfillment and abject fear as the attacks were flashed again and again down the screen on Twitter and Facebook, on the websites of every newspaper, reported on every news channel:
A group in David Crosby masks approached the WHYY studios in Center City, Philadelphia, and threw a trash can through the windows in front of Terry Gross’s production studio. A single Crosby-masked culprit threw a brick through the window of the Moosewood Café at the bottom of the hill in downtown Ithaca, New York. Someone spray-painted the words “Boom Boom” in red on the side of John Cheever’s home in suburban New York, where his name still adorned the idle mailbox at front. Someone used a drone to spill pigs’ blood all over the roof of Stephen King’s Bangor home. Boomer Boomers followed directions to the Cambridge address of the remaining Tappet Brother, Ray Magliozzi, and keyed all the cars on his block. Someone had found Barry Levinson’s Baltimore home and had thrown Betamax tapes of Diner through his windows.
Someone here in Mark’s own town of Baltimore, in Charm City, was participating in this wave.
Newspapers and websites published photographs of all the damage—aesthetic damage, superficial damage, but damage nonetheless, real vandalism terrorizing real humans.
This time the national response was far louder. In the weeks that followed the second wave of attacks, Mark watched as news organizations reported on the vandalism, damage in the United States—and beyond. Parisian news reporters were even at the scene just after someone knocked over Jim Morrison’s headstone and slammed it with a sledgehammer.
Not all the addresses that had been posted were accurate, but many were attacked. Every night the news was filled with interviews with the name doppelgangers of boomer heroes whose homes had been vandalized—every Robert Dillon and Jon Erving and Irving Johnson in America suffering for the sins of their homophonic namesakes, for the lack of attention to detail in the millennials who perpetrated them. In Baltimore alone a guy named Jonathan Watters had a series of pink lawn flamingos thrown through the bay window at the front of his house.
Mark watched in awe as Wolf Blitzer came on his television and suggested on a long CNN report that since the Boomer Missives—which were now broadcast in the corner of the screen as the news media reported on the attacks—a kind of tipping point had been reached in the three short years since the Great Recession. He had Malcolm Gladwell himself on the show to discuss it. The next day Malcolm Gladwell’s website was DDoSed, his info doxxed, a brick tossed through the window of his house. The same happened at William Bratton’s New York residence. Reports of groups wearing David Crosby masks throwing bricks through the windows of homes in Northern California, in East Hampton and Vail, in the Berkshires and throughout the valleys and south beaches of California, dominated news cycles.
In late October, a New York Times column by David Brooks went viral. It was entitled “Millennials Gone Wild”: “Where Islamist attacks drew our fear and ire.” Brooks wrote,
Something new has happened in our beloved country in recent weeks. Kids wearing Gallagher masks have begun to wreak their own variety of havoc in the days since the economic downturn.
While others have begun calling it “generational domestic terrorism,” I think it deserves its own psychological diagnosis: let’s call it Millennial Sociopathy. MLS.
Perhaps one day we’ll read about these hooligans in the DSM. I for one hope that’s the next and last time we hear from them. The new generation has finally lost its grip on reality, and we are suffering the consequences as a culture. One thing is for certain above all else: it is very, very dangerous.
Mark had edited a short piece by Brooks back when he was at the magazine and was surprised at the time to find him to be quite a nice guy—Brooks had asked him about his own work, and he was flattered. But now Mark felt outright disdain for the man. He watched as the column was posted and reposted on social media. The Times was forced to shut down the comments section under the piece after ten thousand responses were posted in the hour after it went live online. Someone DDoSed the Times website and Brooks’s own website in so synchronized a fashion that each played a GIF of Gallagher slamming his sledgehammer into a watermelon over and over. Instead of the watermelon someone had edited in a photograph of David Brooks’s face.
Both sites were back up and running in a matter of hours.
The afternoon the Brooks piece went up and then came down, two of Mark’s contacts popped up on the #hackro chat for the first time in a week under their old handles. He’d been searching all the channels he knew. He wasn’t going to start a thread—there was some danger in looking like he was trying to lead an anarchic organization—but the #retirer channel was now completely silent, and in each wave of elation and terror surging over him Mark longed at least to chat with someone about how to consider the success this new action was having, and the violence along with it:
d
And as would be the case so often in the months ahead, that was it for that thread. Mark thought better than to say anything more. He was frankly starting to sound even to himself like a narc, like Quentin Compson trying to deny his hatred of the South, that hatred growing clearer with each denial. The more he thought about it, the more he started to wonder … Well, why wouldn’t he think that they were narcs? He’d started to foment a revolution. Of course you couldn’t walk back a revolution. Who would want to even if they wanted to. He was all in now. It was full bore ahead.
CHAPTER THIRTY
IT WAS AS IF THERE WERE THREE LIVES Mark Brumfeld was living. The third life he lived was the one anyone could observe outside his house, surveillance or otherwise. While the opposite might have been true, in those days it was the component of his life that least felt in control. He had no choice, so he found a job as a barista at an independent coffee shop, and when he wasn’t chained to the screen in his parents’ basement began to return to the stores and restaurants he’d frequented when he last lived in Baltimore. The same Barnes & Noble in the same shopping center where Mark had worked at a TCBY when he was a teenager was still open.
One afternoon in mid-October he ventured out into this third life. He’d avoided Starbucks when he lived in the city, where there were fair trade beans at every corner, a Gorilla Coffee at the corner of Fifth Ave. in Park Slope where he would go out of his way to buy beans, websites where you could pick out not only a flavor profile but the country of origin of every bag of coffee you bought, blogs and commentary on every cup, links to conical burr grinders and French presses and cold filtration systems. But that was not one of the three lives he now lived—it was a life he’d left behind, and would continue to put behind him, not returning since that TUT party. Now here he was, inside a chain bookstore at a chain coffee shop, buying an iced grande caramel macchiato from a sixteen-year-old barista who’d just finished a long morning at the high school Mark himself had attended in the life before the life he’d put behind him.
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