Cyberia

Bulletins from the trenches

Death in the Center Ring

Timothy Leary's Ultimate Trip 08/1996

"That's probably the worst place in the house to leave those," Tim barks at a beautiful young assistant as she clears a pile of videocassettes from the path of his oncoming electric wheelchair. Then he stops short. "What are they, anyway?"

—"Dead Man. Walking, Nixon, Babe, some documentary," the purple-haired girl reads off the labels on the tapes.

—"Susan gave me those, you know," Leary says, referring to longtime friend Susan Sarandon, who has been smuggling him the special promotional tapes sent to Academy Members. "Take whatever you want. I've seen them all already."

—He stares at the writing on one of the cassettes, drifting into deep thought.

—"Oliver Stone's here," the assistant reminds him. "Out on the back porch."

—"I know that!" Tim says, as if he didn't care who it was. "So, let's go."

—His bandaged hand (bleeding cancer sores) nimbly manipulates the chair's joystick, sending Leary careening through a strobe-lit bedroom doorway into the powder-blue faux-fur-lined corridor that leads to the rest of Leary's rented Beverly Hills home. Paintings too numerous to display lay on the floor while plastic, mirrors, and fabric cover every other surface, even the windows. The house is a day-glo catacomb.

—Tim crashes into a signed Kenny Sharf, then stops short again.

—"Is Kenny coming this week? We have to make sure to put it up! Somewhere nice." Tim likes visiting artists to see themselves on the walls.

—He gets distracted again, and slowly reaches up towards a light switch. The movement makes him grimace, but he's committed to the task, and carefully flicks the switch on and off again, waiting around for a light to respond Nothing.

—"Go find a lightbulb."

—"We're out," the assistant answers, sheepishly fingering the small silver hoop in her navel. "We'll get some more tomorrow."

—"Oh well," Tim says, nearly running over the girl's foot with the tire of his chair as he barrels out towards the sunny living room.

— "Hi hi hi!" he shouts to the assembled guests. The movie director and two stars, some old Harvard pals, a rock musician and three newspaper journalists waiting for deathbed interviews all sit around the room making contacts drinking Leary's wine, smoking his pot, or holding onto something they want Leary to sign or otherwise legitimize. Everybody but Stone and a psychedelics expert from the Bay Area - who are deep into a conversation about a crack in the dashboard of Kennedy's limo - break off their activities and turn to Leary, crown jewel of a waning psychedelic empire.

—A stranger to the home is the first to greet Leary. The young man bends down and patronizingly spaces his syllables.

—"Hi Tim-o-thy," he says. "How are you?"

—"Dying," Leary responds without a pause. "How do you think I am?"

—Timothy Leary has been rehearsing his death for thirty years. As a longtime admirer and personal friend of Leary's for the past ten years, I was alternatively thrilled and disgusted by the circus attending him at his final departure For a man who invented the notion of 'set and setting' as the key prognosticated for the quality of a psychedelic session, Tim engineered an environment and mindset for this, his ultimate trip, that were at once inspiring and horrifying. —Leary always saw psychedelics as practice for the final process of de-animation that the rest of us call death One of his early books on LSD, The Psychedelic Experience is an adaptation of the ancient Tibetan Book of the Dead that Leary and his Harvard cohorts believed was a guide not only to the final exit into the post-life, but for the test-run of that journey experienced on LSD.

—Leary began his death act as a continuation of his lifelong stage show - a confirmation of his devil-may-care repudiation of obsolete social customs, from prosecution of drug-users to the persecution of smokers. On learning of his inoperable prostate cancer, he realized he was smack in the middle of another great taboo: dying. And once again, true to character, he wasn't about to surrender to the fear and shame we associate with death in modern times. No, this was going to be a party. A celebration. Our media-sawy cultural renegade was going to milk it for every second of airtime and column of newsprint it was worth. Timothy Leary, High Priest of LSD and Champion of Cyberspace was back.

—First, there was the "75th and Final Birthday Party', in October 95, at which Timothy and about 500 of his closest friends - ranging from Tony Curtis and Liza Minelli to Perry Farrel and Yoko Ono - consumed champagne, nitrous oxide, and a giant birthday cake meticulously designed from 1960's blotter-acid art into a mosaic of Leary's head. We praised him and then we ate him, all courtesy of a generous catering budget from film director Tony Scott. As the sun came up on the revelers the next morning, workmen on the bluff overhead bulldozed the last remains of the Sharon Tate house, where Charlie Manson's family had a party of a very different sort, giving Leary's vision of a psychedelic future for America a decidedly darker media spin.

—Then there was the Web site (www.leary.com) Tutankhamen in cyberspace. The thoughts, texts and images of Timothy's life uploaded into the datasphere for eternity. The next best thing to consciousness on a microchip, the web site was designed to live on long after his death, growing ever bigger as Leary's tremendous thousand-carton archive is scanned and digitized, and visitors contribute essays or converse in chat rooms. To promote the dying agenda, Leary listed his daily drug intake, both legal and illegal, as well as the status of his disease.

—A big book deal (which I packaged) soon followed. Design for Dying will be published by HarperCollins next Spring. In it, Leary argues for taking charge of one's own death process, from cryonic freezing of the brain to assisted suicide. A detailed appendix gives readers the chance to calculate their own 'Quality of Life Scorecards,' so that they may more accurately assess their desire to stay alive after losing various physical, mental, and social skills. David Prince a fast-rising music journalist and rave promoter from Chicago was enlisted to co-write the book based on Leary's extensive' outlines and long, late-night interviews.

—Most important, and most controversial, were Leary's decisions about how he was going enact his death-consciously, by suicide, and over the net for all to witness through live, CUSeeMe broadcast. He would 'do' death as he had done everything else: publicly, and in grand style No fear, and no apologies.

—The mainstream media was quick to seize on the spectacle. With Kervorkian still grabbing headlines in Michigan designer dying was a hot-button issue. Dozens of network news programs and national newspapers and magazines competed for morbid quotes from Leary. Remote video vans were parked in the driveway more often than not and journalists packed the living room to wait for their fifteen minutes of Qfi?A. Documentarians faxed contracts for exclusive film rights to the moment of death. Leary was ail-too happy to oblige. For a time.

—"This is just like it was at Millbrook," Rosemary Woodruff Tim’s fourth ex-wife, tells me as she peels potatoes in the kitchen. And she should know. A member of Leary’s upstate - New York LSD commune in the sixties, Woodruff went into exile with Tim after helping him escape from California Men s Colony, where he was serving a ten-year sentence for ten bucks worth of pot. Tim was recaptured in Kabul by U.S. DEA agents but later released during the pardoning Ford administration. Ironically, even after Tim was released for his own crimes, the warrant on Rosemary, who evaded sentencing, remained in effect, forcing her to hide underground for more than a decade

—Rosemary knew Tim at the height of his popularity and the depths of his infamy. Though she paid dearly for Tim's transgressions against the State, it sounds like the peace of infamy was preferable to the zoo of popularity. The couple never had a moment alone - even when they went out camping together in the woods near the Millbrook Estate, Tim’s followers would wander out of their tent to the middle of the night to rap with the Great One. Rosemary would collect wood for the fire and cook for the surprise guests.

—She could barely tolerate it then, and she isn't going to tolerate it now. Sighing as she looks out at the mob scene in the living room, she decides to leave for her quiet bed and breakfast up north that night, just one day after she got here.

—Out on the back patio overlooking the panoramic haze of Los Angeles, Tim's hip helpers (a half-dozen young artists and computer whizzes who tend to his needs day and night) set up a video camera to record his interactions with Oliver Stone But the young man who clumsily introduced himself to Leary out in the living room is so annoyingly persistent that Tim decides to process him first and be done with him. -The boy tells a circuitous tale about his father, who was a graduate student at Harvard when Leary was conducting his LSD sessions. The student was strongly opposed to psychedelics use, and when he wandered into one of Leary s private, off-campus parties, he was scandalized by the goings-on.

—"So what?" asks Leary, annoyed. "Why are you telling me this now? I know all this." Leary impatiently drags the boy to the conclusion of his story. Leary has much bigger fish to fry.

—"My father went to his own therapist," the boy explains, "and told him what he saw. It was the therapist, not my father, who told the faculty about the party and the drugs. -Leary could care less about soothing the conscience of a detractor from thirty years ago, especially through a boy one-generation removed. The long letter that the boy's father sent Tim detailing the whole ordeal had sat unread on the imitation Keith Haring dining room table for the past two

—"Fine," Leary says, dismissing the supplicant and turning to Stone for the real business of the afternoon.

—"Oliver," he calls across the circle of lawn chairs. Stone is deep in another conversation about the effects and availability of DMT - a short-acting psychedelic joyride of epic proportion - and doesn't respond to the first summons.

—"Oliver " Tim repeats, a bit louder, as he hands off his glass of white wine for a refill. (Glasses with stems have been outlawed in the house because they topple over too easily )

—Stone finally turns to Timothy and smiles. The power of the entire entertainment industry seems to sit in his chair with him Tim's autobiography, Flashbacks, has been optioned by Interscope several times now, and Stone's frequent visits to the house may herald his interest in signing on as the movie's director - finally giving the project a "green light" Tim isn't sure he wants to become remembered as just another Stone icon, but after Larry Plynt dropped in yesterday and said what a good job Oliver was doing producing his biographical film, Tim warmed up to the idea.

—"What can I do for you, Tim?" Stone asks casually. His face is bright red from the heat of the sun, in stark contrast to his snow-white Nautica windbreaker. Tim doesn't mince words He didn't sleep well at all last night, and he's spent a day's worth of energy getting dressed, into the wheelchair through the sycophants, and out onto the porch. Tim's pretty sure Stone is here to make a deal so he takes a gamble.

—"Are you interested in making a movie about me?" Leary asks bluntly. There are at least a dozen of us on the patio and we are all in hushed attention. We are witnesses to the transaction, and both men know it.

—"What?" Stone asks. He is stalling for time, I assume He must have understood what Tim asked.

—Tim repeats himself boldly. "Are you interested in making a movie about my life or about one of my books?" In other words, put up or shut up.

—"Urn, right now? No," Stone says. "I'm not thinking about doing that now."

—"Than, why are you here? Do you want something?"

—"No, Tim." Stone says. "I'm just here to visit. Just as a friend."

—"Well, good," Tim responds without a second's hesitation I don t want anyone to make a movie."

—We are all shocked. It's all Tim has been talking about for weeks. He even did an interview about the film with the LA Times. Then it hits me. How else could he respond and save face?

—"Really?" stone pursues where perhaps he shouldn't "Why not?"

—"I just don't want that right now."

—After a bit of Smalltalk, Leary maneuvers himself off the porch and back inside. The owner of a small book company gets Leary to sign a few dozen copies of a reprinted work. Each signature will add value to the stash. As he signs each book Tim asks hopefully "Who is this one to?" only to be reminded, each time, that he should just sign his name. It's business, not personal.

—Before leaving with his entourage, Stone procures the number of someone with connections to exotic psychotropics, and gives his own number to a photographer selling fundraising portraits of Tim. A fair exchange.

—Later that afternoon, most of the strangers have left and Tim sits with his loyal assistants - the grad students of Leary U - going through boxes of photos, signing the back of each one and identifying the subjects. It's as if he wants to fill his brain with the images of his own life - load up his cerebral ram chips so that at the moment of death he'll be taking everything he has experienced with him to the other side.

—"Who's that?" a beautiful blonde girl in a satin halter asks. She shows Tim a picture of a man in a strange uniform holding a drink.

—"That's Captain Al Hubbard," Tim answers, squinting at the photo.

—"Who was he?" asks another.

—"He, uh " Tim accesses his cerebral hard drive, "he stole all this LSD from the CIA and gave it out in San Francisco." He thinks back a bit further. "I remember he had Sheriff's badges from all over the country, and diplomatic immunity. Strange fellah."

—These quiet moments are the best time - other than 4am in his bedroom - to glean what's really going on inside the dying man's head. I wait for a pause to tread on delicate turf.

—"What did you mean," I eventually ask, "when you told Oliver that you didn't want anyone to make a film?"

—Tim doesn't say anything. I backpedal.

—"He kept coming around acting like he wanted to make one," I offer.

—"I said I didn't want him to and I meant it," Tim answers.

—"But what if he walked in with a briefcase with $ 100,000 and said, "here, let's make the movie."

—"Well." Tim replies, "first, it doesn't happen like that. It would be much more complicated than that."

—"But you said you didn't want it."

—"I don't want anything," Tim pierces me with his gaze. He's still here, all right. "That's all I meant. I don't want. I wasn't asking him to do something because I wanted it." After a few more minutes of photo-gazing, Timothy goes back to his bedroom to work on some felt-pen word-paintings with Los Angeles artist-photographer Dean Chamberlain. These sketches are about the only creative expression Tim still has the patience to complete and, according to the wild-eyed bleach-blonde artist egging him on, the paintings could be worth a lot someday. If nothing else, their execution affords Tim some privacy.

—Everyone else spends the rest of afternoon decorating the apparatus that the cryonics people have brought to drain Timothy's blood at the moment of his death as preparation for freezing his brain. It's pretty morbid stuff: large plastic tubes and bottles for collecting blood, nitrogen for cooling it buckets, needles, catheters, worklights, and. at the center of it all, an aluminium gurney where the body will rest.

—By the time the artists and web designers are done with it the equipment has been transformed into a pagan shrine to ' Timothy. The gurney has been filled with items Tim might desire on the other side, such as wine, pot, a bong, Tylenol balloons for nitrous, the poetry of Allen Ginsburg, a book by William Burroughs, photos of Tim's friends, and junk food Where Tim will lie rests a shiny mylar mannequin with Yoda mask affixed to the top. The lights have been gelled blue and red, and strings of beads hang over everything else. A picture of Tim, adorned with flowers, sits in front of the whole installation.

—They should probably be working on that web site instead Despite almost a year of effort, the four or five kids assigned to the Leary.com project have gotten frightfully little done The skeleton of the site is ingenious - a tour through Timothy's real house, where clicking on doors brings you into different rooms. But so far the rooms are still empty. Each bookcase and cabinet, though neatly labelled 'archives' or 'unpublished works' just brings you to an empty page apologizing for being 'under construction'.

—Tim's older friends and patrons - mostly part-time visitors - have been grumbling for weeks that the kids, while sweet to the core and dedicated to Tim's well-being, are just slackers The patrons resent that Tim has put the kids on salaries, and that the money they have 'loaned' Tim during these lean years is leaking out faster than it goes in.

—What they don't see is that these kids are with Tim 24/7 changing his linens, responding to his whims, and jumping into action whenever he shouts "Hello????!!!!!" only to find him collapsed, bleeding, and disoriented. If it looks like they're just sitting around rapping and smoking cigarettes, it is because they are shell-shocked. These kids are right there with Tim in the piss and blood-soaked trenches of his losing battle against death. And just when they need their mentor the most - to explain to them how to take all this in stride -he is slowly fading away. It's a traumatic experience.

—Meanwhile, the kids watch each of Tim's weekend guests with wary eyes. Everyone has a 'deal' to make with Tim, and nobody is to be trusted. In most cases this is justified - the sharks visit every day - but sometimes it's pure reflex. Danny Goldberg, of Gold Mountain (Nirvana) fame and a longtime supporter of Timothy's career, has gotten Tim to agree to a record deal for a tribute album. He believes he can get stars like Madonna to record songs that use passages of Tim's writings or samples of his voice. But the kids from the house also have ideas about releasing their own tribute album using lesser-known but 'cooler' artists.

—They pore over Goldberg's contract after he has left, objecting to points of law and tiny stipulations - partly out of concern for Tim's welfare, but just as concerned for the competition this deal could create for their own project. However earnestly they attempt to separate their own interests from Timothy's, the conflict is inevitable. Tim is both the greatest friend to them in the world, and their best shot at personal growth and successful careers. Love mixed with aspiration mixed with fear mixed with guilt.

—None of us at the house can help ourselves from checking the huge monthly calendar on the wall for advance notice of which celebrity is going to show up when. Bam Dass and Balph Metzner on Sunday afternoon attracts the rising psychedelics scholars, while Larry Flynt catches a budding journalist's eye. We all take note of Wynona Rider and William Burroughs' names, though the latter won't be arriving until mid-July, which will turn out be too late.

—Worse yet is the fate of the archives. What happens when Tim dies? Will the archives get sold to Stanford? Will the IRS - who has agreed to leave Tim's estate alone until after he's gone - jump in and take everything? Does the film company have rights to them? Where's that contract? What about the electronic rights?

—Tim is no help in sorting these questions out. Like a guru with competing devotees, Tim entertains everyone's visions and then lets them fight it out amongst themselves. He just' says 'yes' to everything, leading each of us to believe we alone are exercising Tim's true will. If only we heard him - "I don't want anything!"

—By evening Timothy is back in bed with a fresh Fentanyl patch on for pain relief, and a nitrous balloon in his hand Everyone siphons off a balloon of his or her own from the fresh tank next to Tim's bed with a loud SHHHHHH!

—Tim winces at the sound.

—"You can tell a lot about a person by the way he fills a balloon," Tim complains.

—Dave Prince, Leary's co-writer, comes in with a belligerent fax from a biographer named Peter O. Whitmer. Apparently Whitmer believes he is Leary's official biographer based on an agreement he and Leary signed back in the seventies while Leary was in jail. Whitmer wants to know how Leary could now be making biography agreements other people (including me).

—But Leary has gone cold on Whitmer. who wrote a scathing biography of Hunter S. Thompson and reportedly posed as flower deliveryman to get access to Hunter's moms house Leary declares that the writer's insolence must be avenged -and in style. After attempting to conceive a few practical jokes of his own, he has Prince send a fax to Hunter. "I'm being mugged by a literary scoundrel," Leary dictates praising Thompson for his ability to "deal with this rascal" and asking him for help crafting a cunning scenario to "punish him and his ilk." Thompson eventually responds with a phone call, and outlines a plot to invite Whitmer to Leary's house on the pretense of working out a deal; Thompson would be waiting at the door with a shotgun and scare the poor writer away. While the payback never comes to pass, the cordial conversation allows two old friends to connect one last time.

—Everyone who comes by has his or her own way to say goodbye. Yoko Ono opts for a relatively private audience in Tim's bedroom - a chaotic mess of articles and photos, blood-stained sheets, pill bottles, empty glasses, a few roaches and old balloons on the nightstand, and a huge isolation tank humming ominously in the corner. Art by friends - some great and some just weird - hangs everywhere, even on the ceiling. All four seats in the room are wheelchairs, so Yoko clears a place for herself on the bed next to Tim. A giant, 5x6 foot photo of Timothy with John and Yoko at the 'bed-in' recording of 'Give Peace a Chance' just happens to hang on the wall.

—"You were a great man," she tells him, patting his knee.

—"Was?" he responds. "We're still broadcasting!"

—They laugh over the gaff. After she's gone, Tim tells us, "She comes only when she wants to. On her own terms." I look at Tim, ready to diss her. "But that's just fine," he says. "I love her so much. Isn't she just so lovely?" Nothing makes Tim happier than to hear his friends praised. Too bad he had to do most of it.

—William Burroughs calls later that afternoon. Timothy extols the virtues of his pain-relieving fentanyl patch, and then takes down Bill's mailing address. The old beat wants to try one on. Tim is honored to be turning on 'the Bill Burroughs' to a new opiate. We send it to Kansas by Federal Express.

—John Lilly visits a few nights in a row to share some of his favorite drug, Ketamine. He administers a syringe to Timothy and then one to himself, and the two old friends lie on the bed together as the dissociative anesthetic draws them out of their failing bodies for a time. It is Timothy's first experience with the chemical - now snorted in smaller doses as a club drug - and he doesn't have the best trip.

—"The whole universe had turned into a book," he tells me at about 3 the next morning. "But the binding had come out and the pages were floating free. I knew it would take some work to find out which page to climb back onto."

—All Tim's friends say farewell in their own ways - some by getting something, and some by giving something. Timothy accepts and receives with the same graciousness.

—"Everyone sees their own Timothy Leary," he tells me, then drifts off to what looks like sleep. He suddenly stirs, stares at me, and asks, "what do you want?"

—"I don't want anything," I joke.

—He laughs. "You got me! Now you know how I feel!"

—It has been a long night, but Tim gets one of his second winds and we are all sucked in. He makes us take him to two parties, and then the Viper room for a quick listen to an LA band whose members are friends. On the way back, he directs us as we steal huge round driveway mirrors from the mansions on Benedict Canyon Drive. We put them up all over his bedroom - the deanimation chamber - so he can see around the whole room without moving his head.

—"Are you scared of dying?" I ask him after the last mirror is fixed in place.

—"Not a bit."

—"And you're going through with the freezing of your head?"

—"It can't hurt."

—"But what if you're already dead, going through the Bardos you wrote about in the Psychedelic Experience, and then all of a sudden you're stuck - frozen in the process?"

—"Well," he says, looking away for a moment, "I don't think it works like that. I hope not."

—I am suddenly overwhelmed by guilt. How dare I try to pull him into a bad trip? Why did I feel the need to project my own fear of death onto him? Because for me, like everyone else, he's just a mirror for my own unfinished business

—While I don't believe my questions caused him a moment's doubt, a few days later one of the 'Cryocare' representatives comes to visit with a covert photographer, and something in Timothy snaps. He kicks them out of the house so they dismantle the shrine and take back their equipment. Timothy later spun the story for the media: "They were so serious I was scared I'd wake up and there'd be all these people standing around me with clipboards." I still think it had more to do with the 'strings attached' to his cryonics deal They wanted to exploit their access to his dying and freezing for a photo spread in Wired. Tim would rather just die than be reanimated with someone else's spin.

—In the next couple of weeks, Timothy becomes more protective of his private space. A photographer who has known him for years is stunned to tears when he tells her she is too demanding and to leave. Several people are banished this way. Then he begins granting interviews only to those he knows, or those who pay. His stepson Zach returns from school, and Tim begins to treasure his family and friends over everything else.

—The hospice nurses tell us that his level of pain is extraordinarily high, and that we shouldn't be surprised by new behaviors. But what surprises us all the most is his final decision not to go out as he had originally planned. He says he doesn't want to implicate any of us in an assisted suicide legal charge, and then cancels the online death.

—The next week, after a string of Ministry concerts that he, John Barlow, and some of the kids attend in a wheelchair convoy, Tim becomes too weak to make any real decisions at all. No one has been fully entrusted to make the suicide decision for him, and we realize that Timothy Leary will end up dying pretty much like the rest of us: quietly succumbing to the inevitable. Besides, he realizes that he likes life so much, that he can't even conceive of ending it. He would endure any amount of pain for the pleasure of another day.

—Rosemary, the kids at the house, and Tim's stepson Zach are at his bedside in the last moments. It is an intimate and loving finale, where the politics, personal issues, and media hoopla surrounding him finally give way to the deep love and respect all Tim's friends have in common. A hi-8 camcorder records the final hours.

—Just before losing consciousness for the last time, he asks "why?" The room goes silent. Is he afraid? Does he feel forsaken? Then he smiles and says, "why not?" He repeats, "why not?" about fifty times in fifty different voices - a performance meant to reassure his onlookers while psyching himself up for the final curtain. In this paradoxically dignified fashion, Tim provides the comic relief at his own death. By dawn, helicopters are already swooping in to capture aerial footage of the house; but Leary has left the building.

—While some see Tim's final retreat into the solitude of death as a lack of conviction, or a submission to the same forces that seem to conquer everyone else, I think he has more than proved his point. He died the way he wanted to, even if his chosen method and expression changed over time. He didn't owe it to us to die spectacularly online any more than he owed it to consensus culture to die shamefully in a hospital.

—Just as in the 1960's, when he was jailed for telling us to turn on, it is those of us around him who are unable to let a free soul to do as it pleases. Timothy Leary has been imprisoned twice by a culture incapable of seeing who he is through its own fears and prejudices.

—It is we, and not Timothy Leary, who have failed to meet the challenge.

Electronica: The True Cyber Culture 07/1998

—What do you think of when you hear the word 'cyberculture'? The most popular answers I received in my informal poll this week were:

—1) the nerds of Silicon Valley

—2) conspiracy theorists

—3) old men pursuing children for sex or married people conducting sex chats

—4) suicidal Web cults

—But none of these stereotyped groups truly represent a culture. They are simply the kinds of people we imagine to be spending a lot of time online.

—We don't limit our views on the members other cultural revolutions to such tightly defined profiles. Rock and roll culture, literary culture, and Hollywood culture (if you use the word 'culture' loosely), represent much more than longhair guitar players, lonely authors, and beautiful starlets Rock music created the modern teenager. Literature gave rise to the humanities. Movies generated what we now call popular culture.

—Cyberculture, too, has given rise to a social and artistic community whose members may have never touched a keyboard, yet finds its very foundations in the computer It is called Electronica.

—Culturally speaking, it was the California 'bohemian' communities that first embraced the computer as a tool of artistic and spiritual expression. As early as the mld-1970's psychedelic renegade Timothy Leary was appearing in documentaries predicting that someday in the future, all of us would be exchanging messages electronically through our 'word processors'. The visionary Whole Earth Review editor Stewart Brand announced to his hippy, environmentalist following that computers should be seen as aids to positive social and spiritual transformation. West Coast rock musicians like the Grateful Dead and Todd Rundgren were the first to popularize colorful, swirling computer graphics on concert tickets and video projections during shows.

—Maybe this is why the first major impact of computers and the Internet on our culture has been in the music and club communities of young people. Cheap micro-processing technology put high-quality sound synthesizers and mixing studios in the hands of musicians who never had access to professional recording equipment before. These young musicians, generally members of the countercultural communities who had already embraced computer technology, were profoundly changed by their ability to manifest in sound almost anything they could imagine.

—By the late 1980s, a global community of young people had formed around this music and the gatherings at which it was played. Some say it started in England or the island Ibiza, others credit the 'techno' clubs of Detroit. Wherever it began, 'rave' had become a cultural phenomenon as big as rock and roll. Literally thousands of kids would drive to remote locations, usually outdoors, ingest mild psychedelics and dance until morning to electronic music made by young people a lot like them.

—Although rock and roll enthusiasts considered this early rave music dull and repetitive, the kids who danced to it appreciated it deeply. As democratic as the Internet itself, rave music could be produced by almost anybody. Moreover, it was composed of digitally recorded samples of music and sounds from around the world: the South American shaman's drum beat could ride under the sound of industrial machinery. The bleeps of a videogame could accent the vocals of a Pakistani chant. This was a global community at least as diverse as any Usenet newsgroup.

—Ten years later, rave music and the other genres it spun off are finally hitting the headlines as a 'new' category of dance music called 'Electonica', and the world's major record labels are desperate to join in. Why is it suddenly finding such popularity? Partly, because the music is, quite frankly, better. Ten years has seen at least three waves of musicians develop new and more intricate styles of composition and instrumentation. The other reason Electronica is becoming so popular is that the rest of our culture is finally catching up with the electronic vanguard. Our appetite for electronic music was whetted by our participation in an electronic society.

—As with the Internet, however, Electronica has a lot of people, mostly businessmen, seared. Unlike rock concerts raves don't focus on the stars. There are no rock heroes to worship, only records and CD's by relatively anonymous artists. Just as the Internet tends to destroy the illusion of authority, electronic music removes the cult of personality from the music scene, and this makes it a marketer's nightmare.

—But whenever businessmen are afraid, chances are something positive is happening. Electronic music embodies and amplifies the core values of the original Internet community: there is no boss, anyone can participate, and the more contributions from around the world, the better. The object of a rave dance is to join a large group together, at least temporarily, into a single, joyful, coordinated being How much closer to the Utopian dreams of the Internet can a cultural movement get?

—Most surprisingly, this first real cultural outgrowth of the computer revolution did not turn out to be the solitary, non-physical experience that many had feared. If anything, it is a reclamation and assertion of the body in the face of our seemingly mechanized computer lifestyles.

—There is most definitely a thriving cyberculture gaining influence around the world. You just have to get off the computer and out of the house to experience it.

Extra Life 10/1098

—Those of us who can remember writing BASIC programs in makeshift high school 'computer labs' no longer need to think of ourselves as nerds. We're simply old.

—In what might be fondly termed the 'golden age' of programming, high school kids interested in computers weren't taught how to use software or upgrade RAM. We weren't even taught programming, exactly. Instead, we explored the workings of these new machines with well-intentioned and underpaid math teachers at our sides. We had no PC's - just a couple of 'dumb' terminals hooked up to the Board of Education or some other nearby mainframe. By the time we were seniors, we generally understood the machine better than the adults who used it full time. In fact, one of us - an alpha nerd who had demonstrated absolute mastery of the system - who would be entrusted with the highest security codes, and be charged with maintaining the entire machine.

—A new book, Extra Life by Wired writer David Bennahum (BasicBooks), gave me the opportunity to reminisce about those good old days when kids had free reign of the networks. Now, those kids are the adults responsible for everything from Netscape to the Palm Pilot. By giving us the keys to the kingdom, our teachers (perhaps unwittingly and by necessity) gave us the best sink-or-swim computer education we could have asked for. They - and the proliferation of Tandy, Commodore, and Atari equipment that required a true understanding of programming to operate -bred a generation of computer geeks who played with the basic building blocks on which today's communications infrastructure is built.

—As Bennahum puts it, these early machines were "untamed, undisciplined by 'serious' uses, like accounting and word processing ... What they were for was not up to marketing experts and advertising agencies to decide. It was up to us." —After reading this poignant coming-of-age story, I spend a week in dreamy nostalgia that ended only when I thought to compare the computer education afforded us lucky pioneers with what is available in most public schools today. Although our best schools now have rooms filled with Apple computers and Internet connections, our children are taught how to use computers rather than how to build or program them. It amounts to an education in the current state of software -the kinds of things we adults learn about reading WordPerfect for Dummies or a Windows 98 User's Manual.

—Call me a fundamentalist, but this sorry state seems to me the equivalent of learning how to organize a master's thesis without ever finding out how to construct a sentence. Or how to make sentence without learning how to spell. Perhaps spell-checkers have rendered such basic textual skills unnecessary the same way that modern software has precluded the need for programming know-how. But I have a sneaking suspicion that computer literacy, like verbal literacy, should mean more than understanding how to operate commercial software. Our 'competitive advantage' in industry and defense might be depending on it.

—In the United States, our tremendous leap forward in space exploration during the 1960s and 70s was the result of a government mandate. In 1961, fearing Soviet domination of the orbits, President Kennedy declared that America would get a man on the moon within the decade. School curricula were altered to include calculus and advanced physics and American students devoured the new subjects as they quested for the stars. The Space Shuttle and Mars Rover would not have been possible without this forward-thinking educational effort.

—Today's explosion of computing technology is a result of a less-mtentioned but equally magnificent renaissance in educational opportunities. It didn't cost a lot - less in fact than outfitting schools with personal computers - and it required a lot of equipment sharing and waiting. But working together on the old mainframe taught us to see our computing time as a valuable resource, and instilled in us the community ethic and social responsibility that allowed for the development of Internet standards and networking etiquette.

—More importantly, learning computers meant learning computing: how these things work, and how to write code that makes them do cool and important stuff. The reason I whine so curmudgeonly about every new Microsoft release is that I have a basic, if limited, understanding of how inefficiently most of it is put together. I hate to think about the future of computing if it is directed by people who grow up without any intimate knowledge of lines of code they are compiling.

—As governments seek to maintain an edge over terrorists -US computer security experts claim our cryptography is currently about six months ahead of our 'enemies" ability to crack it - they will be depending on the children of today to serve as the code warriors of tomorrow. Developing state-of-the-art information defense capability means developing children now who will someday be capable of coding better than the other guys' children.

—For any nation to maintain the ability to compete in the Information economy of the future, it will need to take similar steps to promote computer literacy now. Ironically, in addition to hiring teachers who can explain the intricacies of code to young minds, we will have to exercise less, not more control over the machines and networks on which this education is performed.

—We'll have to accept the fact that if young people are someday going to understand computers better than we do, we have to let them, even encourage them to burrow past the ready-made interfaces we're so comfortable teaching them how to use today.

Losing the Plot:

How Rave became Business 11/1999

—My first exposure to rave culture, back in 1988, was perhaps the most significant dose of pure possibility I had experienced since my psychedelic initiation ten years earlier. Too young to have any direct contact with whatever the 1960s may have heralded, I was convinced we had stumbled upon something truly novel: a social scene capable of transforming the greater world around it.

—In a room or field with no agenda other than a 120 beat-per-minute pulse, a few thousand intimates could liberate ourselves from conventional closed-mindedness and aspiration-induced unconsciousness for long enough to touch something else. While we had many names for this 'other' - from the strange attractor to God herself - it all boiled down to experiencing ourselves and one another in a new way: as a collective, in motion, and evolving. Blindly but boldly, we would go where no man or woman had gone before - save, maybe, some indigenous tribe that didn't have the electronic gear to broadcast their findings, or the presses to provide a map point to others.

—Somewhere along the way, it seems, we lost the plot. Except for the few places around the world where rave is still brand new. the vast majority parties I've been to in the past several years have lacked the cohesive and unifying spirit that defined the 'movement' when it began. Whither the heart?

—I resisted even mentioning my suspicions for several years. How dare I? I remember so well the ex-60's who stood on the periphery of my own first raves, complaining that we were a mere carbon copy of the real drive for group consciousness that they had launched decades earlier. If the raves of the late 90's didn't meet up with my expectations for what a rave should be, I thought it best to keep my mouth shut. Everyone gets the party he or she needs, and who am I to tell them they're not doing it right?

—I withdrew and started a novel instead. The Ecstasy Club was to be an indication of the road home. I wanted to create characters so earnest in their efforts to forge a new template for our culture that they wouldn't fail the same way we had But the characters wrote another story. They showed me how such a scene can only implode when it doesn't have a clear sense of the values it hopes to impart.

—See, the beauty of the ecstatic experience, whether you're using Ecstasy (MDMA) or not, is the very freedom it offers from value systems. On E, everything is delightfully up for grabs. What distinguished the 90s Ecstasy kids from the 60s acid generation was just this. The hippies picked up signs and fought the war, their parents, and the system. The 'man' was seen as real, and someone who needed to be brought down. Eight the power. Make love not war.

—By the 1990s, and perhaps thanks in part to the efforts of the love generation, these enemies could no longer be held as real. In the United States, the president that most of us grew up with actually resigned his office in disgrace. In the UK, well, the monarchy had been deconstructed by Monty Python and then reassembled using bits of their own illicit phone conversations in the tabloid press. It seemed as if the establishment's faulty foundations would crumble under their own weight. Just turn up the bass a little to speed up the process.

—All we had to do is dance, and the rest would take care of itself. As we told ourselves with our music, everybody's free to feel good. We believed in the power of love, and cheered as watched everything from the Berlin Wall to apartheid topple in its wake.

—So much for letting us middle class white kids run the show.

—The problem with having no agenda is two-fold. First, you have no way to gauge your progress. Liberation of neither the soul nor the oppressed comes as surely as dawn does at the end of the party. We'd have these terrific times, and mean truly terrific times, but it wouldn't add up to much except an occasional knowing wink in the street from a kid who you saw at that great party last week. Second, and worse, you're open to the agendas of others. The scene can be co-opted.

—I understand why we strove for rave not to be about anything in particular. If it got too grounded in one or another brand of politics or religion, the scene would lose its healing levity. Besides, politics and social issues were all part of the fixed and needlessly heavy scene that had trapped our forefathers. None of the distinctions - right left, rich poor, black white, gay straight - were even real. The sooner we understood that, the better for all.

—Government cast itself as the enemy to our intentions, ill-defined though they were. The Criminal Justice Act in the UK and over-zealous police forces in the US made it clear to us that the people who make the laws were the most threatened by our dissolution of their arbitrary absolutes. Although we had a sense that it would diminish a certain something, we took our parties indoors to commercial venues. Who cares, I remember thinking, as long we have the music and the people? A few extra bucks to the police let us keep the right chemicals in the mix, and a few more to the club owners kept the power on through morning.

—But now we were becoming part of the system we had so successfully evaded for so long. When we were off the map, we could keep our bearings. Traveling three hours to a rave and having to spend the night in an open field forces an intentionality all its own. The trip requires a commitment, and the event itself is a tribute to pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps.

—Today, you can find something calling itself a rave almost every night of the week at a pub within walking distance. Some of these parties are taking place in the very same rooms where your parents went every Friday night after a long week of work to let off steam - with booze and boogie instead of tryptamines and Tricky. By current estimates, a million hits of E are consumed every weekend in the UK. If that's really true, then why is club culture so devoid of everything that E appeared to herald?

—For one, because E just doesn't work if you take it every week. Sure, the chemical has effect. But when taken in weekly closes, the empathic qualities quickly give way to simple stimulation, There's simply not enough serotonin in the brain to support this much induced bliss. The drug tends to act more like speed, provoking the same sorts of hooliganism that everyone else succumbs to on their weekend binges.

—More significantly, rave deteriorated because we allowed the movement to become part of business as usual- a weekend release, no different from the pub crawls that characterize the experience of any other worker who, given a break to blow off some steam, can go back to work on Monday morning without complaining.

—No, it wasn't entirely our fault. Even in America we were getting busted for throwing parties anywhere but in a sanctioned club. Mainstream culture did not have the apparatus for dealing with a non-commercial social phenomenon as big as rave was getting. But we are all to blame for failing to figure out exactly which parts of the rave experience were most important to bring indoors.

—Rave parties had been part of what could only be considered a gift economy. Collectives would form spontaneously collecting enough money to rent a sound system and print up some flyers. If there were extra cash from a successful event the money would go to pay for a few meals for the organizers and the rest towards the next party.

—While the cops and government officials hated the idea of kids doing drugs and making noise in abandoned spaces and remote fields, business hated it even more. The young people who should be buying alcohol, top-forty records, and paying for admittance to the disco were instead participating in an alternative economy - dropping psychedelics, exchanging remix tapes, and driving to the country.

—When rave became a club event, it merged this gift economy with the business of nightclubbing - and this is where it all went bad. We all know the story by now Clubs make money selling drinks, but kids at a rave ingest E not booze. The solution? Sell bottled water to the dehydrated trippers. To insure this lucrative business, club owners began confiscating any water that the kids brought themselves and shutting off the water in the bathroom. Thus, the first vastly publicized deaths due to 'ecstasy overdose', which were really just cases of simple dehydration. The kids weren't killed by the drugs, but by the water sellers.

—The rise of the commercial rave also compromised the very real but unstated ethic of the gift economy that had ruled until then. Rave promoters, initially forced to raise their prices to pay for venues, learned that a few more dollars added to the price of ticket could yield tremendous profit. Promoters who were used to breaking even found themselves tens of thousands of pounds or dollars richer by morning. This drew new legions of would-be promoters into the ring, whose glossy flyers would compete with one another for attention at the record shop.

—What had been a spontaneous expression of community turned into good old-fashioned American free market competition. With five or more separate clubs competing for the same audiences on the same nights of the week, distrust and ill-will between rave posses ruled. D J's who used to be anonymous became headliners, who performed on stage under spotlights. The number of gigawatts of bass became an advertising pitch. Promoters worked hard to prove through their graphics and slogans that they were the exclusive purveyors of the 'original' integrity that defined the great raves of '88. But no matter how good the sound, the lights, the DJ or the drugs, the commercial parties were missing the ingredient that used to hold it all together: community.

—By reducing its participants to mere consumers, rave lost its claim to the sacred. As economic and business forces became the driving force of the culture, the imperative to have profound experiences was replaced by a financial imperative to sell more tickets in less time to more people. We no longer took weeks to prepare both practically and mentally for the ritual. As with psychedelics, this lack of preparation reduced sacred experiences to mere entertainments - appropriately listed alongside concerts and movies in the weekend newspaper.

—In retrospect, what made rave so revolutionary was its economics. The reason we felt so removed from the workaday reality is that we had disconnected ourselves from the cycle of consumption and production that degrades and dehumanizes so much of the rest of our daily experience. Just as Wired magazine reduced the community-inspiring Internet to a shopping mall called the World Wide Web, commercial interests reduced of the rave movement to an Mectronlca' category in the record shop.

—It was not our existence outside the law that made rave so special, but our separation from corporate culture and the market economy. Like a Sabbath, the rave was a holy day during which no one bought or sold anything - and if they did, it was in a manner absolutely at odds with the gross national product.

—The absence of an agenda was not our agenda at all. We were positively striving towards a celebration of the sacred Instmctually, we realized that this sacredness would be compromised by business and politics as they were currently being practiced. Government made our chosen rituals illegal and business made us pay for sacred space.

—Business used the power of government's enforcers to drag our parties indoors, and while we managed to hold onto our stashes, we didn't hold onto much else. We simply didn't know enough about what we doing to fight for the part that mattered.

—Make no mistake: there are still parties and posses doing it right and who care more about the process than the profit But it s up to us to find them, support them or, if we can't ' find them, become them.

Nowhere to Run: Y2K Survivalists 12/1999

-"They'll come at night - especially if you've got an electric lamp glowing somewhere, a dead giveaway," warned one member of an online survivalist conference.

—"I've got an order in on a 500 gallon water tank " explained another, "I'll give you the UBL."

—"Won't a tank that large be visible from the road?" asked the first.

—"No. I'll be keeping it underground."

—I had intended to spend the week finishing research for a column about the Millennium bug - that software and hardware glitch that will prevent computers from successfully recognizing the year 2000. But a vast majority of the information and speculation I found has little to do with fixing the problem. No, most people appear more concerned with surviving an inevitable crisis of biblical proportions, by any means necessary.

—Although fans of apocalypse have always looked for any excuse to expect the worst, the millenium bug has provoked an unprecedented amount of doomsday scenario planning from otherwise sane people. And this time they have a technological rationale for their rantings.

—The millennium bug does pose two distinct threats. Many operating systems and programs, from the COBOL code running giant databases to most copies of Quicken in use today, cannot calculate four-digit dates. The year SOOO will appear simply as '00', leading the program to treat any post-millennial date as a repeat of the 1900s. While teams of engineers are busily combing key software - like the programs running banks and stock exchanges - for such problems, the likelihood that they will find and correct every line of code within the next twenty months is fairly remote.

—Even if they do, however, there's another potential problem: embedded chips. Unlike software, the microchips running everything from nuclear power plants to offshore oilrigs cannot simply be rewritten. Like the chip inside your VCR or microwave, these devices are not accessible. The commands are physically burned onto the chip. The only way to update a non-compliant power plant or robot-filled automobile factory floor is to determine which chips will malfunction and then replace each one individually. In the case of an offshore refinery, it means sending divers hundreds of feet under the ocean surface. StiU, there's some disagreement about whether or not most of these chips use date functions at all.

—The Central Intelligence Agency has accepted the fact that there will be numerous failures of such systems around the world But instead of focussing on the technological side of the crisis the CIA is already collecting data on what their ^ 'Y2K' chief calls the "social, political and economic tumult that could result. That is, the agency is evaluating individual societies to determine how disruptions in electric power, banking and other essential services might affect them.

—The CIA predicts that newly developed nations, like those in Asia and Latin America, will be the hardest hit. While the US, Britain, and Australia have had enough time to head off the worst disruptions, as well as a fairly stable social fabric many other nations who only recently adopted computer technology do not now have the money to invest in diagnosing all their systems, nor the political climate to insure public safety.

—But many Americans, who have always had something of a penchant for bomb shelters and militia compounds, are busy preparing for the temporary paralysis of the technological infrastructure. They send me email telling me I better leave Few York 'before it's too late'.

—In his new book, Strategic Relocation: Worth American Guide to Safe Places, security consultant Joel Skousen outlines instructions for storing food, creating alternative power, as well as building secret hiding places and storage facilities to thwart hostile intruders and hungry neighbours

—Unlike Skousen, who believes neighborhood support groups and food cooperatives would crumble under the pressures of a real crisis, a number of more community-minded survivalists are already developing 'safe haven' real estate. In South Dakota, Colorado, and Virginia, several firms are offering leases on plots of land within larger year-2000 collectives, all with access to private generators, fresh water and farmland. We can only imagine the measures that will be taken to defend such installations when the clock strikes

—In truth, the Y2K crisis - if there is one - will probably be fueled more by this sort of panic than lapses in technology Even if the banking system were to shut down for a week most everyone could survive on what they have. An extra' trip or two to the cash machine before New Year's Eve is all it would take. But the fear of such a disruption could easily lead to a rush on the banks and a collapse of the savings and loan system. Likewise, the hoarding of water, gasoline and other fixed resources would lead to far worse calamity than a day or two of power outages in scattered districts.

—The real opportunity here is to resist the temptation to withdraw - not just from banks but from society itself Although technology has fostered a networked culture and a vast set of interdependences, a disruption to the system need not send us running to the hills. We could much more easily educate the public about the potential risks to business-as-usual, and help one another prepare for a few days of inconvenience.

—Ironically, those preparing for - and, I'd argue, fostering -an apocalypse scenario, are the very people who understand enough about technology to foresee the coming crisis and help us prepare for it. Unfortunately, they don't understand enough about people to engineer a cooperative, instead of a mercenary style of social management. Maybe the current climate of hi-tech selfish Capitalism that replaced the fledgling Internet community has something to do with this.

—In a sense, the CIA has the right idea. This isn't about computer programming at all, but about the real values infusing what we like to think of as our civil society. With any luck, we'll come to understand that there's more to survival than meets the 'I'.

See No Evil: A Self-Censored Internet 07/2001

—Media is a consensus. It's one of the ways we establish what's going on in the world around us. That's why it's so important that the mediaspace remain open and free of censorship. We should all have a say in what it is we think is happening, and a chance to contribute to the conversation. The Internet provided us with just such an opportunity -particularly because it was free of the kinds of legal and business pressures that restrict more mainstream and broadcast media.

—Demonstrative, martyr-making arrests of hackers and college-age Napster users notwithstanding, the greatest enemies to free expression on the Internet are not paranoid law enforcement, a greedy recording industry, or even an elitist ICANN board, but us. The emergence of new, interactive mediaspace offers us an opportunity to redefine the very language of power. Sadly, our readiness to accept the tools we are given in the form they are given as well as the rules they come with, reduces our role to passive consumption, and threatens to end the digital revolution before it has even begun.

—The ability to dictate what we think about is controlled, to some extent, by the people who decide on the content of our media - which headlines will be printed, which groups will win recording contracts, and which stories will appear on the evening news. The ability to dictate how we think is controlled by the people who produce the tools of media - the browsers, file-sharing programs, and networks through which all this content is disseminated and, with any luck discussed.

—For a long time, the content and context of our media served to maintain the status quo. Interactive media - from computers to camcorders - posed a threat to both. They gave us the ability to fill newsgroups, web pages, and even cable television channels with our own stories, images, and ideas A gossip columnist like Matt Drudge was now in a position to force Newsweek's hand during the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal and thousands of young programmers were free to imagine ' new ways for people to communicate with one another - and then create them. It seemed as if no one could control anything, anymore.

—Those of us who were worried about censorship focused on government as the main threat to progress. We successfully thwarted their early efforts at limiting the spread of 'objectionable' content, and declared the Internet beyond the province of any government agency. The problem with suppressing the role of government, however, is that it gives business free reign. It's like using antibiotics to combat bacteria; when the bacteria is killed, fungus grows unabated.

—As a result, the Internet became a privatized zone and altogether more insidious forms of censorship emerged.

—The first, stoked by fear of hackers, spam, and Internet porn, was the mass migration towards the Internet's safe havens. Many people still believe that using America Online or another corporate-branded ISP as their access provider protects them from email viruses. These users succeed merely in shielding themselves from the kinds of content that unseen corporate censors feel is dangerous. Like people who buy edited versions of their favorite music CD's at WalMart, they'll never know what they're missing. And all this, of course, is completely legal.

—Likewise, the slow conversion of a public telecommunications infrastructure into a privately controlled direct marketing platform turns it into a territory where the only meaningful currency is cash. Ideas spread based on their ability to generate revenue, more than interest or thought The ultimate broadcasting tool is the business plan, and while certain media pranksters - like Btmark.com and Etoy com - are learning to create performance art pieces that exploit this principle, the bottom line on the Internet is the

—This is why most forms of online activism concern issues of market. The Napster phenomenon is a consumer revolt. While it may eventually influence the way artists and record companies sign their contracts in the future since, whenis our role as a public voice to negotiate on behalf of Britney Spears? In the best light, Napster users are fighting for their right to distribute data that one of them has paid for. It s a business angle, and the more it's fought for, the more like businesspeople its advocates become.

—So much for the content of new media providing new ways of understanding the world. We're fighting over distribution of the top 40.

—On an even more fundamental level, the tools we use to navigate and even create the landscape of new media make many assumptions for us, of which we are increasmgLy unaware. The Internet's functional standards are set by companies like Microsoft, through processes that are anything but transparent. Participating in the Internet through a web browser is like experiencing the outdoors through a screen door. Our choices are filtered, and our participation is limited to typing in our credit card numbers and clicking “buy”.

—Artists deliberately censor themselves by using programs lake Adobe Photoshop to create graphics, Dreamweaver to design web pages, or Macromedia Director to make interactive environments. Most university courses, understandably, teach students how to use such software (often made by their own donors) rather than how to recognize its underlying agendas. Students graduate with a fine understanding of the media landscape, but haven t a clue that it was assembled quite arbitrarily.

—Lest we forget, the Internet was a mediaspace before it was a marketplace. Now that monetary values are assigned to our Ltoe activities, there's much less room for alternative value systems to be entertained.

—These days, we get very few reminders that computers are modeling systems, and that the market-driven Internet itself is just one of the models they can create. The efforts that do break through our complacency are usually destructive hacks on corporate web sites, or viruses that make our email programs go crazy. We unilaterally condemn such attacks because they cost real people real money. They threaten what we think of as the very lifeblood of the Internet.

—But the people who launch these attacks are demonstrating, however maliciously, that the code is not yet set in stone, and that model itself is still up for grabs. It's the only way we can still hear that message. I'm not sure whether this speaks worse of them, or of us.