SECRETS OF THE CYBERCULTURE COMPUTER COWBOYS ROAM THE TECHNO-UNDERGROUND SEEKING INFORMATION - OR JUST WREAKING HAVOC ARTICLE BY A. J. S. RAYL ® Something's happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear. There's apunk with a computer over there, tellin'me I got to beware....¯ It's a time-warp scene in some weird science-fiction story as I head down Telegraph Avenue just outside the Berkeley campus. The smell of patchouli wafts through the air, overwhelming other scents of burnings incense. The driving beat of the Doors' "Break on Through" pusates from a record store - a fitting soundtrack to the movie surrounding me. Sidewalk merchants are hawking everything from tie-dyed T-shirts to turquoise jewelry. Me? I'm on a mission -to meet my connectionin the counterculture. It seems conspucuously like the Sixties. But familiar sights, sounds, and vibes aside, things have changed. After all, this is the Nineties. Abbie Hoffman is dead. And no one is attempting to levitate the Pentagon anymore. But if you thought the revolution was over, think again - and read on. These days, a new breed of younf politicized radicals, known as cyberpunks, roam a techno-underground. Inspired and fueled in part by ideas emerging from science-fiction literature, these cyberpunks are computer cowboys riding the trails of cyberspace - a nether world of bitstreams and databases inside computer networks - circumventing software barriers in search of information and services or sometimes just to wreak a little mischievous havoc. They've got the equipment and, they say, the technical knowhow to slip into virtually any computer system and affect changes with global ramifications. With the tap of a key, they claim, they could effectively cripple the economy or shut down communications systems the world over. If that is true, then cyberpunks hold the potential for becoming the most powerful coundtercultural force ever. The government has taken them seriously. It has launched at least two major operations, one in 1990 called Operation Sundevil, to quash the movement. The problem: The consensus in the computer community is these government agents know considerably less about the technology than the computer experts and the cyberpunks, a charge government officials deny. As Secret Service Special Agent John F. Lewis put it, "There are some very talented infividuals who are unfortunately misdirecting their energies. But to say they're leaps and bounds ahead of law enforcement personnel isn't true." Still, so far their efforts, have seemed dubious at best, serving more to fan the flames of the socio-political fire now raging over the control of and individual rights in the electronic frontier. I duck into a coffeehouse and manage, with relative ease, to spot my connection - one of the hackers for whom the word cyberpunk was created. he's tall and slender, wearing black jeans and sporting a pair of John Lennon specs. He has a boyish, almost baby, face, which belies the brain power it so handsomely covers. His eyes are intese, at times piercing. Overall, he appears every bit the intellectual anarchist for which the Berkeley scene is perfect camouflage. He's known in the techno- underground as Michael Synergy. Twelve years ago, Synergy was your basic computer nerd. He spent his time exploring cyberspace, staging his own quiet protests by going where he wanted, when he wanted. Synergy became so adept at infiltrating systems that he's become a legend. Todat he remains something of an icon in the techno-underground. Synergy evolved - as did cyberpunk - from the late Seventies'hacker community. "There ware a lot of us playing with the phone systems, and then slowly we began to find our ways into other networks," says Synergy, as he takes a sip of tea, adjusts his Lennon specs, and leans back in his chair. "My whole reason for breaking into systems way back then was to become educated. At that time, there wasn't a C-compiler on microcomputers, so I broke into Bell Labs just to learn C." Most hackers used their talents then, Synergy says, simply to learn. For the most part, the original hacker crew was apolitical - more interedted in the machines than in the politics. As they began traversing software barriers into the secured systems of major corporations, governement, and military-industrial complexex, however, that began to change. They gleaned a lot of inside, top-secret information on just about everything, including covert military operations. At the age of 14, Synergy, now in his late twenties, managed to slip into a supposedly secure top-secret computer network run by the intelligence community and the Department of Defense. The DOD took him out of cyber circulation and brought him into their circle. He worked for nearly three years conducting "penetration testing and security design" for the national Security Agency, Secret Service, and FBI, as well as the DOD. Consequently, Synergy became politicized. "it used to be really hard to find things out, but nowadays systems are so well networked together, if you know which machine to talk to in the intelligence community, it's fairly simple to break in," he says. "The work I did for different government agencies gave me an inside view, and that strengthened my opinions. It made me very political and very antigovernment. Once you have access to the system, you begin to clearly see the bars of the prison we live in." While Synergy was being politicized, writers on the science-fiction front were at work writing about such youthful electronic frontier outlaws. They projected them into dark, desolate, not-so-distant futres where technology both rules and runs amok, and set them in adventures in cyberspace where data serves as the landscape and territories are traversed mathematically, not geographically or physically. The term cyberpunk was brainstormed back in 1980 by Bruce Bethkeas the title for a short story he'd written about a computer-hacker gang - bored suburban kids out to raise hell. Bethke had been hanging around, playing keyboards on the periphery of the punk New Wave music scene while working for Radio Shack. "I wanted a word that grokked these punk attitudes and the technologies," he says. The story, which was published in the magazine Amazing in 1983, remained obscure - but the title took seed, first in the science-fiction community and then in the media at large. The success of William Gibson's first novel, Neuromancer, published in 1984, actually launched the cyberpunk on the map of the collective public consciousness. Set in a future urban dystopia, the novel centers on Case, a software cowboy for hire. Burned by Japanese microbionics experts who bonded tiny sacs of a wartime Russian mycotoxin to his artery walls, Case is suffering a slow death. He finds a man who can cure him, provided, of course, that he is able to penetrate a highly secured computer system and acquire the key information. In order to get inside the various systems, Case links his brain directly to the computer, or, in the terminology of the novel, "jacks in to the net." While the word cyberpunk never appears in the Neuromancer text, it was the catch phrase that reviewers used to define his book ans the new genre that suddenly seemed to be everywhere. Other cyberpunk-oriented works by such writers as Bruce Sterling (Schismatrix, Islands in the Net), Pat cadigan (Mindplayers, Pretty Boy Crossover), and John Shirley (Eclipse coroca) captured SF fans. Gibson, whose own early inflences were such "subversive" rock-'n'- rollers as Lou Reed/Velvet Underground and Steely Dan, had been watching the puck-music scene with a certain enthusiasm. In fact, he says, the rebelliousness of puck served as the inspiration, and his own boredom as the fuel that motivated him to begin work on Neuromancer and numerous other cyberpunk short storied (many first published in Omni). Gibson wrote two more cyberpunk-oriented novels - 'Count Zero' and 'Mona Lisa Overdrive' - and garnered acclaim as the godfather of cyberpunk. It's not a title, however, that he's assumed. "It's really just an accident in history," says the author, whose roots go back to the counterculture of the Sixties. Gibson actually knew very little about computers and high technology: He pounded out his cyberpunk works on a 1938 manual typewriter while listening to early Bruce Springsteen albums. "I didn't set out to start a movement, but for whatever reason, "he says, "those books of mine have become a rallying point." Co-cyber writer Sterling agrees that Gison was in the right place at the right time. "to some extent, people always credit the messengers," says Sterling, whose first nonfiction work, Hacker Crackdown, about the government's efforts to stop hackers, was published this fall. "We write books for a purpose - not just to be cute. Science fiction is about making up weird ideas and throwing them out there. And now all that stuff we were writing about 'is' out there - loose in the world." What happened when cyberpunk science fiction hit was a case of life imitating art. "Suddenly, the concept of cyberspace took hold and inspired the real hackers, and they began to redirect their efforts in the technical arena. It gave us a vision of technology's potential," says Synergy. "most ocmputer enthusiasts and a lot of the hackers are very thechnical, but not very intouch with the world at large. The difference is cyberpunks are very technologically capable but at the same time very worldly, connected to reality and what's going on in the culture." In ssence, the cyberpunks are to the hackers as yippied were to hippied - political, savvy, worldly versions of the alternative culture. They don't hack out in places, but in cyberspaces, communing, often anonymously, on computer bulletin-board systems or through "zines" - electronic magazines. While there are several hardcopy magazines devoted to things cyberpunk - the most popular being 'Mondo 2000' - cyberpunks do their real business in the net. "Listen to these titles - Anarchy 'N' Explosives, Bootlegger, Clut of the Dead Cow Files, Freaker's Bureau International' National Security Anarchists, Phuck-in Phield Phreakers, Rebel's Riting Guild, and TAP (Technological Advancement Party) Online, which is actually the resurrection of Abbie Hoffman's old magazine," says Sterling, leafind through a compilation of computer sources recently sent to him. The vast majority of bulletin-board systems and zines, however, are legal and aboveboard. In 1985, 'the Whole Earth Review' created the 'Whole Earth Lectronic Link, known as the WELL. "While this electronic medium existed, there was no publicly available community," says founder Howard Rheingold. "The purpose was to create a public utility to enable people to build a community and do business online." Current WELL members include communications pioneers as well as SF authors like Sterling, and, of course, cyberpunks. Such above-ground efforts signify that cyberpunk is merging in pop culture, assuming meaning as a lifestyle, a way of thinking and, hence, a movement whose numbers - at least in terms of subscribers to the mindset - are beginning to grow. Central to the cyberpunk viewpoint is the belief that governments - nation states - are giving way to multinational corporations - global states. These entities are located not so much in one geographical location but throughout the world via global networks on the electronic frontier. In this electronic landscape, cyberpunks see a future where those who have information will be separated from thoose who don't. By disseminating information - be it corporate plans or top-secret government operations - they believe they can take on self-as-sumed roles that range from benign socioopolitical watchdogs capable of averting global opression to anarchists retaliating against corporate greed by wreaking havoc on computer systems - or as electronic terrorists ready, willing, and able to take out an enemy simply by shutting down systems. It comes as no surprise then that the governement is up in arms. In Secret Service and FBI circles - the government agencies charged with computer law enforcement - the term cyberpunk has almost come to mean computer criminal. And cases like the 1988 Internet "worm" have undoubtedly fed the crackdown fever. Created by 25-year-old Robert Morris, the worm shut down some 6,500 computers and caused an esimated $150,000 to $200 million worth of damages to computer systems nationwide. Because his defense attorneys were able to prove the destruction was unintentional, Morris was sentenced to a $10,000 fine and 400 community- service hours. Since then, there have been several instances of what the hackers clam are government attempts to suppress the cyberpunk media. Steve Jackson Games is a case inpoint. Secret Service agents raided this small Austin-based games manufacturer - publishers of fantasy-role-playing and board games - in March 1990. They seized computers and a stack of software disks and ransacked the company's warejouse. Some materieals seized in the raid, including the game GURPS Cyberpunk, have yet to be released, and Jackson has filed a civil suit against the government as a result. Spurred by this incident, the computer community rallied, holding a meeting on the WELL in late spring 1990. Mitch Kapor, creator of Lotus 1- 2-3; Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak; Sun Microsystems pioneer John Gilmore; and computer enthusiast and Grateful Dead soongwriter John Perry Barlow formed the Electronic Frontier Foundation to protect freedom of speech and expression in cyberspace. With the recent arrests of numerous hackers for illegal entry and data possession, the battles over control of the electronic frontier and hackers'rights are now being waged in court. One critical issue is whether information belongs to a given corporation or government or whether it belongs to the world. for those who are relaying information through computer networks and zines, here is also the question of First Amendment rights' or Hackers'Richts. How free is a free press in the electronic medium? This debate over intellectual freedom isn't entirely benign. The access to knowledge, like freedom, is risky when absolute. Things have changed in the hacker community. the first generation of young computer enthusiasts, now in their twenties, operated from a more mature, concerned-for-the-future frameof reference. But synergy admits danger may lie ahead with the new generation of hackers: "The new kids on the block, the new 14-year-old cast and crew, don't have a very good handle on morality, knowing what they should and souldn't be doing with these wonderful tools they have." Furthermore, computer technology has outmoded old forms of political power. "Anyone who was around in the Sixties is aware of the concept that all political power comes from the barrel of a gun and the power to control is the power to destroy," Synergy says. "Now, with information tools, people like me have the capability and the access - because of the way system is structured - to shut everything down - not just locally, but globally. And, it's getting worse every day. Interestingly, Synergy's vision of the future liew on the opposite end of the cyberpunk spectrum from Gibson's. "I think Gibson is about the most pessimistic mother fucker I've ever run into," says Synergy. "His basic premise is that science will be abused, period. I tend to be more of an optimist: If we were going to blow each other up, we'd have done it by now. And, actually having been inside and looked around, I seriously doubt whether we actually could blow ourselves up." "Well, if you're living in south Central Los Angeles," says Gibson, "the world is a lot uglier than the world in Neuromancer. And, in some cases, you'd be very lucky to wind up with the Neuromancer future. It's hardly the most dystopian vision." The cyberpunk future is still up for grabs - between utopia and dystopia. But indications are that the world will be one of corporate states, moving away from governments of locales to goveernments of multinational corporations whose increasing monopolization of information wields more and more power and control over individuals as well as nation states. The new tools for diplomacy, politics, espionage, and terrotism will be electronic ones. While cyberpunk seems to have the potential for being the most potent, effective, bohemian force ever to take on civilization, its impact remains to be seen. One thing, however, is certain: CYBERPUNK ISN'T JUST SCIENCE FICTION ANYMORE.