Close to the Machine_Technophilia and Its Discontents Read online

  A week after seeing the vice president, I had lunch with the old friend who had recruited me into the party. We were talking about grown-up things—houses, relationships—when suddenly I couldn’t stand it anymore. I reached across the table and asked her, “Did we ever really believe in the dictatorship of the proletariat?”

  She looked at me like I was crazy.

  I drove home through a tunnel and over a bridge, thinking about San Francisco earthquakes. I went home and thought about the gas line in the old Victorian flat where I used to live. We can’t live without cash machines the way we can’t live without natural gas, I thought. There is no way back. This is the fragility of what passes for regular life in the electronic era. We may surround that gas line with fancy moldings, all decorated with curlicues, yet it remains what it is: a slim pipe full of explosives.

  What worried me, though, was that the failure of the global electronic system will not need anything so dramatic as an earthquake, as diabolical as a revolutionary. In fact, the failure will be built into the system in the normal course of things. A bug. Every system has a bug. The more complex the system, the more bugs. Transactions circling the earth, passing through the computer systems of tens or hundreds of corporate entities, thousands of network switches, millions of lines of code, trillions of integrated-circuit logic gates. Somewhere there is a fault. Sometime the fault will be activated. Now or next year, sooner or later, by design, by hack, or by onslaught of complexity. It doesn’t matter. One day someone will install ten new lines of assembler code, and it will all come down.6

  Brian can bring it all down. At least he’d like you to think so. He hangs out with a group of cryptographers7 dedicated to knowing how to bring it all down. Cypherpunks: that’s what they call themselves. And if they have not yet brought the vice president’s network to its knees, it may only be because Brian has advised an odd sort of patience. He has counseled his fellow rebel cryptographers to practice their skills quietly, watch while global networks get huge, and let system managers get complacent.

  “You actually said that to a reporter!” I told him, “You said everyone should wait until there was really something big worth stealing!”

  “Yeah,” he answered with a grin, “I did say that, didn’t I?”

  Brian looks like a skateboarder. Or maybe he’s what the devil would look like if the devil decided to move around among us disguised as a skateboarder. Brian has long dark hair, pale eyes covered by thick glasses, and a pointy little beard. He wears baggy jeans, a motorcycle jacket, and a black cowboy hat. At thirty-one, he has devoted what there is of his adult life to the absolute electronic privacy of money. His obsession about the privacy of wealth is like my generation’s obsession about the privacy of identity, or sexuality, or belief, or the self.

  In our industry, Brian is perfect. In appearing to be a genius on a skateboard, he couldn’t be playing his part better. He looks exactly the way today’s computing genius is supposed to look: boyish, brilliant, and scary. These traits alone almost recommend him for success, for Brian is in management in his second start-up company. Rebel cryptographers are just the sort of people venture capitalists want to give money to these days.

  There’s no good reason I should know any of this about Brian. If I had been going about my life in a sensible way, I should have done no more than notice him as once of those whiz-kid crypto types with their libertarian, multiple-partner lifestyles. In the normal course of things, when Brian approached me, I would have followed my first impulses and fled. Besides, in some cultures, he’s young enough to be my son. But it was not a normal course of time for me, and I was not in a mood to be sensible. When I’m lonely for soul company, as I was then, I have a tendency to believe I’m open to anything. And sometimes this sense that I have nothing to lose makes me take risks I should not take, do things I should not do.

  And I was in one of those risky moods. I’d spent two years in a series of loose-ended relationships. Before that, I parted ways with the woman I’d been with for eight years, and my father died, the two events coming within weeks of each other. All this is only to explain how, yes, I was lonely for soul company and, yes, I felt open to anything. And despite the known dangers of cavorting with libertarian cryptographers, I went off to a conference with the idea that anything might happen to me and why should I care.

  Of course, such things have always happened at conventions. Even at conventions like this one: a meeting of programmers, hackers, EU policy wonks, German data privacy commissioners, representatives of the FTC, law enforcement geeks, software industry media stars—all there to debate issues of computers and civil liberties. But no one says that conventioneering techno-freaks are much different from conventioneering dentists. Both have their appropriate forms of funny hats, secret handshakes, and debauchery. Our form of debauchery was talk.

  The real conference, the place to talk, was the hotel bar. There, on a very uncomfortable sofa, a mildly famous computing lawyer held forth night after night. And there, sitting knee-to-knee with him at the bar, I had late-night drinks with the Commissioner of Data Policy for Berlin. And over there, on the far side of the wide circular bar one late afternoon, is where I had my first real notice of Brian.

  Brian was leaning on the bar, drizzling his long hair through his fingers as dreamily as any teenage girl. He was there doing what we all were doing: haunting the place to find some interesting talk. Maybe this was the one thing Brian and I had in common—this hunger for conversation, this hunt for an intelligent being with whom we might share our brain for twenty seconds.

  At the time, I wasn’t much interested in meeting Brian. Next to him was a man I really did want to meet, a writer of science fiction who had just spoken in the conference hall. After all the dull talk about data policies, he had delivered a jeremiad: about dirty words and dirty thoughts and the freedom for sons of bitches like himself to exist on the Internet. This writer was a grown-up man, a rebel of the kind I recognized: someone for whom saying “Fuck you!” into a microphone was the very essence of freedom. Besides, he was a man of words, not a technoid, and someone who clearly had his passions. But Brian, no. Brian could not be mistaken for a man with passions.

  I recognized Brian as one of the cypherpunk crowd that had been sitting in a clump near the back of the conference hall. Whenever someone from the government or law enforcement spoke, they put up a wall of backtalk, a sort of peanut gallery of the cryptologically hip. Someone from law enforcement would inveigh against exporting encryption products with keys longer than 40 bits, and a guffaw would rise up from the cypher gallery. “We can break that,” a voice would say, “No problem!”

  “We need to be able to catch the bad guys,” said the guy from the FBI.

  Guffaws. Backtalk. Much flipping of long hair and pony tails.

  “We cannot give powerful encryption keys to our enemies,” said the commissioner from the Federal Trade Commission. “Exports must be limited to 40 bits.”

  “40 bits. No problem!”

  Could they really crack any message encrypted with keys up to 40 bits, or would they just like everyone to think they could?8 Something in the whole cypherpunk presentation invited skepticism. The name they’d given themselves: punks. Their self-promotion. Their manifestos posted on the Web. The whole hip-boy-rebel thing. The idea that they could outsmart anyone: global superpowers, international law enforcement, giant transnational corporations—they hated any and all authority and no one was safe from their brilliant cypherpunkdom. And they were having way too much fun making everyone deeply nervous. Something about all this was just too familiar. Despite the techno-future glow of it all, something seemed old and recycled. It took me a while but it soon came to me: Yippies. They were latter-day Yippies. Jerry Rubin and company with higher mathematics skills. Steal this book! Crack this network! Boys being bad: what else is new.

  So it was that I had no particular interest in meeting Brian. When he drizzled his hair at me, I made my eyes slide off his immedia
tely. When I kept running into him and he twice invited me to dinner, I declined, both times claiming to have already eaten. “It seems we are perpetually one meal out of phase, Brian,” I said, which seemed to delight the mathematician in him. So I went elsewhere, several other elsewheres in fact, to indulge my openness to anything.

  Why then did I return Brian’s calls when I got back home? Maybe, despite those several elsewheres, I still had not played enough Russian roulette with my emotional life. Maybe I underestimated my own perversity. Most likely loneliness was a factor—and let’s not forget flattery, because after all I am a woman of a certain age and Brian, to me, is a boy.

  But these days, I tell myself a more intriguing story: that my interest in Brian had something to do with my being an old communist who builds software for hire. That it was somehow related to my attack of nausea over the vulnerabilities of international banking. That Brian—representative of everything my profession admires—was something I couldn’t keep ignoring forever. And that this boy, with his pointy beard and octopus hair, was sent into my life as some sort of strange messenger, and his mission was to test me on what I believe in now.

  [2] SUSHI

  BRIAN AND I AGREED TO MEET FOR SUSHI. It poured that night, an odd sort of rain for San Francisco, a steaming tropical downpour. It was all I could do to keep my raincoat around me. And through the gray wall of water that was the air, I barely saw the figure standing outside the restaurant. Motorcycle boots, wet leather jacket, straggled drenched long hair, cowboy hat with water running off the brim in torrents. Brian.

  “Why are you standing outside in the rain!” is how I greeted him.

  The restaurant was tiny, maybe eight tables. The air inside was close. Our eyeglasses steamed over in the humidity. I peeled off my wet clothes—raincoat, hat, scarf, jacket—and nearly ran out of chairs to drape them on.

  I pushed up my shirtsleeves, looked over at Brian, and then, even before we’d seen a menu, I had time to regret that I’d ever agreed to this meeting. For Brian was giving me a gesture so bizarre, so inappropriate, that to this day I can hardly believe what I saw. His head was thrown back, his eyes were half closed. He sniffed at the air—once, twice, three times. Then he actually snorted. Though I’m sure I’d never seen anything like it in the whole of my life, I only needed to be a primate to understand its meaning: Brian wanted to fuck me.

  I suppose it was outright amazement that kept me sitting there. How often, in a public restaurant, do you find yourself the object of someone’s personal private masturbation fantasy? Because that is exactly what it felt like: as if Brian were all alone and I were some figment of his sexual imagination. But, as I said, I was in a risky place in my life. And if you pretend to be open to anything, these are just the sort of unsavory things that can happen to you.

  For whatever reason, I resisted the impulse to pull on my wet clothes and dash back out into the rain. For whatever reason, I decided that it would be perfectly all right to spend the evening with someone who may have been brought up by wolves. I even convinced myself it might be interesting.

  I was not immediately disappointed. Brian launched into talk about his work with the same wild unselfconsciousness that led him to a public display of sexual fantasy. And his vision of the Internet had the same quality of bizarre hyperreality—all the hallucinatory detail of a dream. It was like a dream of flying, only instead of soaring, we circled lower and lower, down toward the wires and machinery at the base of the Internet. For as “technical” as I might appear to my clients, as close to the machine as I was from their point of view, that’s as far away as I was from Brian. He exploded the Net for me. I saw the many levels of hardware, each with its own software, its own little portion of intelligence. I was accustomed to thinking of a program as something that ran on a computer and of the network as only a means to carry messages around from computer to computer, program to program. But before we had even ordered our sushi, Brian had given me a vision of the Net as a complicated sea of intelligent devices, where the distinction between hardware and software began to blur and few people knew how to navigate.

  Brian knew how to navigate. And because he knew, he would control the routes. He was quite straightforward about this: he wanted influence, and he wanted influence because he knew more than most people and because he was right. He would be the one to decide how a packet got routed. He would know where someone had clicked from and clicked to. He would decide who could have information about the way from one cyber place to some cyber elsewhere, and who could not.

  “You’re under non-D, right?” he said, looking up suddenly out of his reverie to notice that he had said things about his company that perhaps I shouldn’t know.

  “Right,” I said, though I was much more ignorant than he imagined, and I could not have described his secret technologies if I’d wanted to.

  One thing was for certain: neither government nor corporations were going to know very much in Brian’s universe. The last time I had heard such off-handed rebellion, such naked disdain for big business and the government, was also from a long-haired man, another wildman who firmly believed in his own rightness. But that was 1969, and the man, twenty-three years old, was a member of SDS. Then, as if to turn my mind inside out, Brian abruptly turned to talk of business plans and initial public offerings, venture capitalists and marketing.

  “Rebellion and money,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. But, inside, I was wobbling between past and present, between one long-haired man and another—and all the short-haired women in between; between socialism and software engineering; between the time of my own rebellion and the time of my money.

  “An odd mix,” I said, “rebellion and money.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Brian, munching a pickle off his chopstick, “I’m an anarchocapitalist.”

  Anarchocapitalist. He said this with complete matter-of-factness. It was as if the statement required no further explanation, as if everyone was now an anarchocapitalist, the way everyone was once against the war in Vietnam or into macrobiotics. Maybe these days everyone was indeed an anarchocapitalist, and it was only then—when I surfaced briefly from middle age to talk with Brian—that I’d noticed it.

  At some point, Brian ordered our dinner—he seemed to know a great deal about sushi, and I sat passively and let him take care of it. What looked to me like an enormous quantity of raw fish now sat between us. Brian urged me to try a piece that he assured me would be particularly succulent. He picked one up for himself, popped it into his mouth, and was soon gone into a transport of pleasure.

  “Oh, man,” he said. He gripped the table. He shut his eyes. He lifted his head in a gesture of prayer. He swallowed. He smiled. “Have you tried this tuna? Oh, man! OH, MAN!”

  Another feral moment. Another completely unselfconscious display. Again, I felt as if I’d caught him being alone. “I feel like I’m intruding on your pleasure,” I said. “Should I leave?”

  He grinned at me.

  “You’re very strange,” I said.

  “I used to think that was a compliment,” he said. And his pleasure vanished.

  It was at that moment that I thought there might be a bit more to Brian. Yes, he was weird. Yes, he barely belonged to this world. But a part of him knew all too well that he was odd, and he suffered from it.

  We left the tiny sushi place. The rain had stopped and the streets had a steam-washed feel. I lived a few blocks away and intended to walk home. I gestured at the bus stop across the street. “There’s your line,” I said to Brian.

  “Oh, no,” Brian said, “I don’t feel like I’m done talking yet.”

  Not done talking yet: this was indeed what we had in common. I am used to wearing people out; here was someone who had not yet had enough of me.

  There was a wine bar near the bus stop, but Brian doesn’t drink wine. There was a tapas place, but I knew it would be mobbed. I rejected all the quiet places for tea right nearby. I felt strangely vacant, as if my saner self could only wat
ch as something inevitable happened.

  I took him home.

  “I mean,” said Brian, facing me from the other end of the sofa, “have you ever really thought about what money is?”

  This was why he came home with me, I realized. Oh, yes, sex, but before that would come the really important intercourse of tech talk. I was a programmer, I seemed to understand him, I had not run out of the restaurant despite his strangeness: all this recommended me to Brian. We sat with our legs extended across the sofa, not quite touching, and we were going to talk about electronic cash. I looked back through his thick glasses into terribly determined eyes, to a mouth set over that pointy beard. Had I ever really thought about what money is? No, but over the next terrifyingly intense hours—hours when the cross-bay trains would stop running and Brian, who had no car, would settle himself in—I was going to find out that Brian had indeed thought a great deal about what money is.

  Brian’s goal, indeed his mission in life, was to create an entirely anonymous global banking system. I’m not sure exactly why he wanted to do this, whether it was to get rich or to control the world or simply to prove that he could do it. In any case, he faced a rather serious obstacle: he would have to deal with the entirely pesky problem of the United States legal system.

  Brian’s strategy, he said, was to “arbitrage existing law to set up a banking system without being a bank.” That was his favorite word: “arbitrage.” To Brian, “arbitrage” meant more than the traditional practice of buying and selling on a large scale to skim benefits from small differences between markets. He meant finding and manipulating the small skipped-over spaces in national and international law. Discovering the tiny interstices of the complex banking network that no one else thought much about. Locating a niche the laws had forgotten or that, in the new universe of electronic transactions, the law did not yet know about. Here he would set himself up, not illegally but extralegally, as a bank in essence not in law, in the place he knew where money “really” was, at the very heart of money.