right there eating my bees as they came out of the hive. The Aboriginals are known to dry those poison sacks and smoke them to get high. But there was no pleasure in them for me. I had learned my final lesson in how to survive Australia: build your hives a good few feet off the ground as you travel north.
On the run, we learned a little bushcraft. We learned how to get by on very little money and not enough normality. Being unsettled was our normality and we became good at it. There was an Australian traveller called Nat Buchanan (‘Old Bluey’), who travelled light and had a gift for exploring Australia and making something of his independence. A book written by his great-granddaughter Bobbie Buchanan, In the Tracks of Old Bluey, reveals a man who knew Queensland, a man who knew how to co-exist with animals and humans, a man whose temperament led him to show courage when faced with life’s obstacles. Buchanan was a nomad of Irish stock, just like us, and, also like us, he passed his habits on to his children. Difference is, I suppose, that while Old Bluey was chasing nature and finding himself, we were being chased by a force of nature we could barely contend with, and getting lost. Nat was a pioneer, the first man, as Bobbie wrote, ‘to cross the Barkly Tablelands from east to west and first to take a large herd of breeding cattle from Queensland to the Top End of the Northern Territory’. Nat died in 1901, more than eighty years before my mother, my brother and I were driving as fugitives past the Tanami Desert. ‘Nat was a colourful, if enigmatic character,’ his relative’s book says, ‘whose story is quite remarkable and needs no exaggeration.’
My mother changed her name. We worked out that Leif must have had contacts within the social security administration – that was how The Family is thought to have worked – so it seemed best to change the names that would be held inside the government computer system. But he was quite a gifted talker and would get friends to supply him with information about our whereabouts and he would always catch up. It was a private investigator who eventually came and told us about his close relationship with the Anne Hamilton-Byrne cult. We were living in Fern Tree Gully, and I was now sixteen years old. We’d come to the end of the road. Also, I was feeling almost a man myself and was ready to front-up to him. Masculinity and its discontents could be addressed here, but let’s just say I knew I could waste him and he appeared to know it, too. He was lurking round the bounds of the house and I walked over and told him to fuck off. It was the first and the last time, and something in the way I said it ensured that we would never see him again. He would push, for a time, for access to my brother, but his history spoke against him and he was gone.
Truth be told, my mind was in other places for much of the time Leif was chasing us back and forth across Australia. I had always liked taking machines and pulling them apart and rebuilding them. It was, I suppose, a technical instinct, and I was keen not just to push appliances around or switch them on but to understand them. After the departure of Brett the first period of my life was over and I was ready for some heady advancement. I noticed, in a shop in Lismore, a fascinating new machine that instantly spoke to me of something new. It stood in the window: the Commodore 64 computer.
To modern eyes that computer looks laughably primitive, a chunky, boxy mass of grey plastic that ran on disks more than twice the size of the phone in my pocket with less than one-hundred-thousandth of the capacity. You could look at it now and say that it resembled a cast-off from a Star Trek set, a childish impression of what the future might look like. But the thing is, to someone like me in a small town in Australia, this really was the future, and I wanted to understand it.
By the time I was sixteen, the computer had become my consciousness. It was the beginning of a new life. Not that the old life didn’t have sway – it did, and still does – but in some way it was the computer I spoke with, or spoke through, reaching past all local concerns to an infinity point where selfhood dissolves into history. Later on, the question of selfhood, or my selfhood, would come to obsess many sections of the press. Was I arrogant or crazy, careless or manipulative, touchy or thin-skinned or tyrannical? But the self they were talking about was in their heads. It was part of their fantasy. I was trying to do my work under pressure and wasn’t much aware of myself at all, not in the sense they mean. People nowadays love the play of selfhood: they think everything is a soap opera. But I mean what I say when I say my ‘self’ lies somewhere behind me: with a computer, and a lifetime’s project, you no longer find yourself chasing from pillar to post the small business of yourself. You disappear into something larger and you serve it as best you can.
Maybe it was a generational thing. And some don’t get it. They want to stuff you into their old fictional categories: of being Billy the Kid or Dr No, of being Robin Hood or Dr Strangelove. But I believe a generation came of age in the late 1980s that didn’t think like that. We were weaned on computers, and we didn’t reckon on ‘selfhood’: we reckoned on ‘us’, and, if at all possible, ‘us and them’. When it comes to computers, the cliché was of a geek in a bedroom who was disconnected. In fact, it was the kids watching TV that were disconnected, passive, solitary. We might have been up all night, but the best of us were busy making what we were watching.
To know what your thoughts really are – to grow beyond them, into the thoughts of others, a very sweet oblivion – is about placing a large part of your mind into the space of your computer. Without being grandiose about it, I would say this constituted not only a new way of being in the world, but a new way of being in your own skin. People would always have trouble with it, wishing us, even now, to fulfil the old remits of the ego. But we learned at a young age how commitment works in the computer age: it works by transfusing your lifeblood to an intelligence system dependent on you, and on whom you are dependent. It used to be science fiction, but now it is everyday reality, and I guess I will always seem alien to many people, because I was part of a generation that dug down into our machines, asking them to help us fight for justice in ways that would fox the old guard, even the protest element of the old guard, such as my parents, who didn’t know how to break the patterns of power and corruption that kept the world unfair.
Computers provided a positive space in a negative field: they showed us we could start again, against ‘selfhood’, against ‘society’, building something less flawed and less corrupt in these fresh pastures of code. One day we knew they would change the world, and they did. The old guard would come with its name-calling and its media, its embedded sense of ‘national interests’ and patriotism, its accusations of betrayal, but we always knew the world was more modern than they realised. Cairo was waiting. Tunisia was waiting. We were all waiting for the day when our technology would allow an increasing universality of freedom. In the future, power would not come from the barrel of a gun but from communications, and people would know themselves not by the imprimatur of a small and powerful coterie, but by the way they could disappear into a social network with huge political potential.
That was me at the age of sixteen. I was giving myself to my computer. I was testing my sense of the natural world I’d grown up in, all that bright sunlight and leafy shade, all those stars and bees. The years of mystery and human complication went into the computer, too: in some ways I would always be answering the parables of my childhood, from Vietnam protests to cultish surveillance, and that’s as close as I can get to the truth. You have to have a self in order to lose it – or use it – and I’m sure the work I have done at WikiLeaks bears the ghostly imprint of my younger years. I say ghostly, because that is how it appears. The work is haunted with first principles and early experiences and that is how it goes.
This is the story of a person who came in time to do a piece of work. The work made a difference in the world. But the story did not begin with the work: the work began with the story. This is why I have taken you back to the wilderness of early childhood, for we both – the work and I – began in those perfect glades of unknowing. At the age of sixteen, I sat at my computer and began to leave everything behind. There were desks, old socks, piles of computer disks and half-eaten sandwiches. The computer and I were one: into the night we went in search of newness. The next phase of life, the phase that included code-breaking and hacking, would indeed prove to be the link that made possible the future we had hoped for. Soon I was wandering inside the computer, inside the inner circle of a
