another, and there I was, trying to train myself to think in the computers’ own language. New life was burning within me, and within the others I met as I walked. I’m sure my face glowed blue in the bedroom of our final house, in the middle of the trees, as the lure of a brand new discovery went far into the night. It seemed as if justice itself might live on the other side of a flashing cursor.
4
The computers back then came with nothing; they had no programs of their own. That’s one of the things lost to the new generation of kids coming to their first computer. They are pre-loaded now with all sorts of software and fancy graphics and so on, but when I started you were just one layer above the bare metal. You were typing into this wonderful emptiness, waiting to be populated with minds. The thing was programmed to accept your typing and that was it: as teenagers, we went into that space exactly like explorers, seeking to discover new terrain. Just like in mathematics, where there is the atomic realm, the computer had a space and a set of possible laws that could be discovered gradually. All laws and modes of operation and side-effects were to be freshly discovered. And that is what we did. The excitement was barely containable, in that, within minutes, you could learn to do something on your computer that was infinite. You could train your computer to type the words ‘hello there’ to infinity, a command that would never end, and for a young person to discover that kind of deep power is at very least thrilling, and, at most, revolutionary.
Your thoughts had to be clear, though. The computer was not going to do your thinking for you: it was the difference between saying ‘I want the computer to count’ and saying ‘This is how you count’. As teenage computer nerds, we got into the business of precise instruction. School didn’t teach us that. Our parents didn’t teach us that. We discovered it for ourselves while getting to know the life of the computer. There were guys, of course, who just wanted to play games and that was fine. But a few of us were interested in projecting our thoughts into the computer to make it do something new. We began writing codes and we began cracking them, too.
Wherever we went, I had a desk for my computer and a box for my floppy disks. It was heaven. You would look at the stars and get a certain notion of infinity, then at your computer, and think: infinity resides there, too, but much less remotely. A lot of our initial knowledge came from the people who wrote the computer manuals. The better manuals weren’t always easy to get hold of, but we’d pass the information around, and a teenage underground began to form, loose groups of us who had gained access to certain knowledge and could exchange it. It soon became clear that the subculture we were involved in wasn’t just local, wasn’t just Australian: there was a worldwide subculture of people who would take computer programs invented by software companies and modify them, breaking the encryption codes on them so you could then copy them and give them to your friends. It was mainly for the challenge. The guys who wrote the codes and the guys who broke them were in a kind of competition, except the guys who wrote them were in their twenties and working for companies. We were in our bedrooms laughing at the screen.
Those guys were the authorities. And we never met them. They would sometimes leave hidden messages inside the software, hidden under layers of encryption that we would have to get around, and sometimes the program was built in such a way as to attack parts of our computer as we struggled to decrypt the software. Our relationship with our computers was an important element in our own expanding minds. We had learned so much, so quickly, and we knew that we could teach the computer to expand its own complexity based upon our instructions. The competition between us and those initial software manufacturers actually speeded up the process: we may have been enemies, but together we pushed the art forward, which I suppose is what happens in a very good game of chess.
I began writing programs. Much later on, with WikiLeaks, some people would think it was all about politics. But much of what we are doing is locked into the logic of computer intelligence, and locked into what a precise interaction with computer intelligence makes inevitable. In many respects, nothing has changed since the box bedroom. The ultimate limits of computer power are not determined simply by the man who solders components together in the Chinese factory, they are written into the very meaning of what a computer is. It was Alan Turing who observed that any precise instruction that one could write on paper and give to another human being, could potentially be followed by a computer. And we championed that idea. People might get emotional about it, but it is simply what happens when inventions are allowed to fulfil their potential in company with ongoing human imagination. By cracking codes we were making the code better, and by writing code we were making the codes harder to crack. It was a circular irony and one that became joyful for teenagers inclined in that direction. Every night was like a new adventure.
I began receiving disks in the post from abroad. From America and Sweden and France, where new friends had cracked codes and would send me the stuff, and I would do the same, all of this postage coming for free because we had worked out a system of re-using stamps. It was great to be alive at a point when so much was changing – so much was new – and to feel the rush of progress flitting through your fingers and over the keyboard. I was sixteen and my time had come: I was finding my calling, my skill, my peer group and my passion, all at once. I’m sure we were, at some level, as arrogant as we were insubordinate, but young men need to feel their own power at that age, and we were flying.
I think it’s fair to say Australia was considered then to be some kind of provincial backwater. It suffered from a certain cultural cringe, a definite notion that the country existed as a permanent outback to the main currents of European culture and American life. And in a small way – a small way that became a big way – we opposed that. At this time I was living with my family in the suburbs just outside Melbourne, but I was beginning to take my place within an elite group of computer hackers. We felt we were the dead centre of the turning world, no less significant than cutting-edge computer guys in Berlin or San Francisco. Melbourne was prominent on the world computer map from early on, and we were partly responsible for that: we entertained a global notion of how the technology could work, and never for a second did we feel remote or provincial. We felt we could lead the world, which is a nice thing to feel at the bottom of the planet. Ordinarily, Australia is a lagoon in a sea of Englishness; the culture of Britain tended to wash over us, with its big colonial sense of national values. This had been our reality, so when we fought, we had to fight like kings. The hackers’ mentality in Melbourne was unashamed in that way. We had no sense of being away from the main currents: we were the main currents. And given that innovation often relies on self-certainty – however temporary, however misplaced – we found ourselves on top of the world. The Levellers of the seventeenth century aimed to turn a backwater into a political frontline: later historians would speak of A World Turned Upside Down. It was Christopher Hill who wrote of the possibility of ‘masterless men’, a population escaping lordship, who would become renegades or outlaws if need be. My former friends in the computer underground would have enjoyed the words of the Leveller called William Erbery: ‘Fools are the wisest of men, and mad men the most sober-minded . . . If madness be in the heart of every man . . . then this is the island of Great Bedlam . . . Come, let’s all be mad together.’
It was a time of new ideas, energy, engagement. The idea of popular sovereignty over the Internet, of ‘teeming freedom’ arriving in that arena, was a way off and would still need to be fought for, and hard. I didn’t know it until later, but we could have called on Milton, who wrote a kind of saintly justification for civil disobedience and spoke of ‘a nation not slow and dull, but of a quick ingenious and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy in discourse, not beneath the reach of any point the highest human capacity can soar to’.
We were neither so ambitious nor so capable, but we knew we were onto something that the world had never known before. From our own suburban bedrooms, we were seeking and finding a global computer network. ‘The whirlwind comes from the North,’ wrote one of the Levelling heroes. Well, maybe. But in a modern world
