But I like to describe the conflict as one between Metcalfe’s Law and Ron’s Outlaws.

Do you know about Metcalfe’s Law? It was named after my high-school friend and rival, Bob Metcalfe, now probably a billionaire from his invention of Ethernet, the device that effects connectivity between computers in a network. He subsequently founded the 3Com Corporation and established himself as an Internet-boom progenitor and guru. Some give him—and Metcalfe’s Law—the credit (or blame) for the late-90’s dot-com bubble and the credit (or blame) for the Web 2.0 expansion that, according to some, is fast approaching a Bubble 2.0 bursting point.

In fact, a hot debate has broken out in the blogosphere (I first noticed it on Jeff Jarvis’ Buzzmachine blog, www.buzzmachine.com) over whether, as the title of a recent scientific-journal article bluntly put it, “Metcalfe’s Law Is Wrong.” And not just wrong, but “dangerous.”

The principle of Metcalfe’s Law, for those coming late to this crucial argument about the nature and economics of the Web, was first outlined circa 1980 by Mr. Metcalfe and given the name Metcalfe’s Law in 1993 by First Bubble philosopher George Gilder. Paraphrased, the law states that “the value of a communications network is proportional to the square of the number of its users.” Or, in mathematical notation, V~n2.

Why should you care about whether this formula is right or wrong? Well, only if you care about the economic future of the nation, if you believe the authors of “Metcalfe’s Law Is Wrong,” which appeared in the electrical-engineering journal IEEE Spectrum (spectrum.ieee.org/jul06/4109). They argue that Metcalfe’s Law became the theoretical basis for the late-90’s dot-com expansion and collapse. Why? Because it was used to lead (or mislead) investors into overvaluing the growth potential of dot-com companies specializing in connectivity services, from Cisco to 3Com.

Or, as the authors of “Metcalfe’s Law Is Wrong,” Bob Briscoe, Andrew Odlyzko and Benjamin Tilly, put it: “It seemed to offer a quantitative explanation for the boom’s various now-quaint mantras, like ‘network effects,’ ‘first-mover advantage,’ ‘Internet time,’ and, most poignant of all, ‘build it and they will come.’”

What it did, in practical terms, was to convince a sufficient number of venture-capital investors that the potential profitability of net-related start-up companies would increase in value to the second power while their costs to reach such profit levels would increase only in a lesser, linear fashion. Which justified pouring exponentially greater investment capital into ventures that, as it turned out, did not produce that level of growth, but rather enormous losses when the bubble burst.

Whether this was because “Metcalfe’s Law Is Wrong” or whether other factors caused the bubble to burst is a matter of dispute. And Mr. Metcalfe himself disputes the critique in a forcefully reasoned argument that you can find at a Web site called VCMike’s Blog (vcmike.wordpress.com/2006/08/18/metcalfe-social-networks/#more-99), in which he not only declares that he regrets nothing, but he ingeniously positions his Law as a precursor of the newly fashionable “Long Tail” theory of net economics. (It’s a long tale.)

But according to the authors of “Metcalfe’s Law Is Wrong,” this is not just a matter of past history. The persistence in the wrongheaded belief in Metcalfe’s Law, they argue, is “dangerous” because it adds “a touch of scientific respectability to a new wave of investment” that is inflating what they ominously call “Bubble 2.0.”

They proceed to propose their alternative to Metcalfe’s Law, an alternative formula they render as V~n log(n), which predicts growth from network connectivity greater than linear but far less than the n2 growth that Metcalfe’s Law predicts.

I’ll return to the question of these competing laws, but first, a brief return to high school, where I believe the philosophical differences that lie behind the clash I’ve called Metcalfe’s Law vs. Ron’s Outlaws had their origins.

Yes, I think I could make a case that it all goes back to Bay Shore High School, where Bob and I were friendly rivals. I should emphasize friendly: He was (and is, as far as I can tell—although we’ve had only sporadic contact since high school) a genuinely good-natured guy, with a good sense of humor to leaven his intellectual seriousness.

There was, however, one key philosophical difference and one, let’s say, difficulty in our friendship. The philosophical difference was that even back then, he tended to see the world through the lens of hard science. I recall watching in awe as he soldered together his first primitive analog computer from a kit he ordered from Popular Science. I knew then we were on different paths. My lens was literature: Novels like Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Heller’s Catch-22, with their emphasis on romanticized band-of-outlaws anarchism, led me to a more irrationalist, or at least anti-technocratic, literary-Luddite view of the world.

The difficulty involved our rivalry for the position of No. 1 in our class. I edged him out and, as I recall, there was a bit of not entirely good-natured bitterness about this on his part (I was, needless to say, completely gracious about it all).

Of course, he went on to be a billionaire, more or less—and I’ve entertained the notion that his galling high-school loss to me spurred him on to achieve his fabulous success, which he therefore owes to me. And I went on to … considerably less lucrative, more literary pursuits. (Still, Cynthia Ozick’s quote about my new book The Shakespeare Wars—“Electrifying. A spectacular book”—feels better than any sum of money could).

Nonetheless, I’d always been a little suspicious of Metcalfe’s Law, precisely because it seemed too confident that it could quantify and digitize human relationships, turn them all in their infinite variety into an all-too-simple mathematical formula—a formula that seems a bit too much like a thinly disguised promotional device for Ethernet. He’s selling connectivity devices and he’s proclaiming a “law” that values the growth they promote at n2 levels. Not bad for business, although that alone does not disprove its truth.

In fact, I also have a problem with the recent IEEE takedown of Metcalfe’s Law for the same reason. It, too, attempts the quantification of human relationships—long a dream, often a dreadful mistake. But at least the authors exhibit a tentativeness, an awareness of the arbitrariness of assigning a number value to human connections, or of identifying techno-connections with human connections.

In any case, the discussion of this question sparked by “Metcalfe’s Law Is Wrong” on Jeff Jarvis’ blog reawakened high-school memories and made me think of my “blue box” story and what I like to think of as “Ron’s Outlaws,” the original hackers.

There’s been, lately, a curious spike in interest in the story, which I wrote for Harold Hayes’ Esquire (on the basis of a tip from my colleague there, Craig S. Karpel).

The story, first published in October 1971 (and reprinted in The Secret Parts of Fortune, and also available on the Web at www. webcrunchers.com/crunch/esq-art.html) concerned my odyssey into the techno-nerd outlaw world of blue-boxers, many of them blind teenage electronics geniuses who created their own illicit net in the web of then-monopoly AT&T’s long-distance line circuits using devices dubbed “blue boxes.” These “phone phreaks” included one who, on the basis of my story, became a legendary original superhero of hacker culture, “Captain Crunch.”

In retrospect, my technology-vs.-anarchy debates in Long Island diners with Bob Metcalfe may have shaped my vision of these anti-technocracy tech geniuses. I envisioned them in my story as analogues of the black-clad secret society, the “Tristero” in The Crying of Lot 49. One of the distinguishing achievements of the Tristero was that they traced their ancestry to a group that sought to subvert the official postal system of Europe with their own private communication network.

If Bob Metcalfe was the guru of connectivity, my story at least had helped give birth to both the dark side of cyber culture and other more profitable sides as well.

When I say there’s been a spike of interest, there was a call from a TV documentary producer working on a project about the history of the telephone. They were asking permission to reproduce an image of my Esquire story, “Secrets of the Little Blue Box,” in conjunction with their interview with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, an interview on the history of the telephone. The reason: Mr. Wozniak and his friend Steve Jobs both read my “blue box” story in high school and, as they both have publicly reported, were inspired by the story to try to manufacture the illicit “blue box” devices in one of their parents’ garages, a project that led ultimately to their Apple partnership. It also led to their contact with and (I’d say) spiritual kinship with the hacker legend I’d portrayed in the story, Captain Crunch, who, after getting into trouble with the law, left the dark side and became a “white hat” hacker and an important innovator in the PC revolution.

My account of Crunch’s exploits gave widespread recognition—helped the wildfire spread—of incipient hacker culture. For better or worse, I felt I had made enough of a contribution to the origin and spread of this subculture to justify thinking of them as the antipodes of Metcalfe’s Law: Ron’s Outlaws. After all, the former is about enhancing connectivity, the latter about subverting it.

Or is it? In a way, its origins in the secret blind-boy blue-box networks suggest that hacker culture is about enhancing connectivity, or about offering an alternative connectivity. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that there was a kind of interdependence between Metcalfe’s Law and Ron’s Outlaws: that “my” hacker outlaws did more to enhance connectivity by demonstrating the holes and flaws in cyber-based networks, testing the system and spurring it to greater heights of efficiency and security.

And Bob’s known in his world as a bit of a rebel, taking on Bill Gates early, offering heretical apocalyptic visions of the Internet future.

Perhaps Ron’s Outlaws are not necessarily opposed to Bob and his Laws. Too bad there was room for only one No. 1 in high school, which, as we know, is all that counts.

Ron Rosenbaum’s new book, The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups, is just out from Random House.

But I like to describe the conflict as one between Metcalfe’s Law and Ron’s Outlaws.

Do you know about Metcalfe’s Law? It was named after my high-school friend and rival, Bob Metcalfe, now probably a billionaire from his invention of Ethernet, the device that effects connectivity between computers in a network. He subsequently founded the 3Com Corporation and established himself as an Internet-boom progenitor and guru. Some give him—and Metcalfe’s Law—the credit (or blame) for the late-90’s dot-com bubble and the credit (or blame) for the Web 2.0 expansion that, according to some, is fast approaching a Bubble 2.0 bursting point.

In fact, a hot debate has broken out in the blogosphere (I first noticed it on Jeff Jarvis’ Buzzmachine blog, www.buzzmachine.com) over whether, as the title of a recent scientific-journal article bluntly put it, “Metcalfe’s Law Is Wrong.” And not just wrong, but “dangerous.”

The principle of Metcalfe’s Law, for those coming late to this crucial argument about the nature and economics of the Web, was first outlined circa 1980 by Mr. Metcalfe and given the name Metcalfe’s Law in 1993 by First Bubble philosopher George Gilder. Paraphrased, the law states that “the value of a communications network is proportional to the square of the number of its users.” Or, in mathematical notation, V~n2.

Why should you care about whether this formula is right or wrong? Well, only if you care about the economic future of the nation, if you believe the authors of “Metcalfe’s Law Is Wrong,” which appeared in the electrical-engineering journal IEEE Spectrum (spectrum.ieee.org/jul06/4109). They argue that Metcalfe’s Law became the theoretical basis for the late-90’s dot-com expansion and collapse. Why? Because it was used to lead (or mislead) investors into overvaluing the growth potential of dot-com companies specializing in connectivity services, from Cisco to 3Com.

Or, as the authors of “Metcalfe’s Law Is Wrong,” Bob Briscoe, Andrew Odlyzko and Benjamin Tilly, put it: “It seemed to offer a quantitative explanation for the boom’s various now-quaint mantras, like ‘network effects,’ ‘first-mover advantage,’ ‘Internet time,’ and, most poignant of all, ‘build it and they will come.’”

What it did, in practical terms, was to convince a sufficient number of venture-capital investors that the potential profitability of net-related start-up companies would increase in value to the second power while their costs to reach such profit levels would increase only in a lesser, linear fashion. Which justified pouring exponentially greater investment capital into ventures that, as it turned out, did not produce that level of growth, but rather enormous losses when the bubble burst.

Whether this was because “Metcalfe’s Law Is Wrong” or whether other factors caused the bubble to burst is a matter of dispute. And Mr. Metcalfe himself disputes the critique in a forcefully reasoned argument that you can find at a Web site called VCMike’s Blog (vcmike.wordpress.com/2006/08/18/metcalfe-social-networks/#more-99), in which he not only declares that he regrets nothing, but he ingeniously positions his Law as a precursor of the newly fashionable “Long Tail” theory of net economics. (It’s a long tale.)

But according to the authors of “Metcalfe’s Law Is Wrong,” this is not just a matter of past history. The persistence in the wrongheaded belief in Metcalfe’s Law, they argue, is “dangerous” because it adds “a touch of scientific respectability to a new wave of investment” that is inflating what they ominously call “Bubble 2.0.”

They proceed to propose their alternative to Metcalfe’s Law, an alternative formula they render as V~n log(n), which predicts growth from network connectivity greater than linear but far less than the n2 growth that Metcalfe’s Law predicts.

I’ll return to the question of these competing laws, but first, a brief return to high school, where I believe the philosophical differences that lie behind the clash I’ve called Metcalfe’s Law vs. Ron’s Outlaws had their origins.

Yes, I think I could make a case that it all goes back to Bay Shore High School, where Bob and I were friendly rivals. I should emphasize friendly: He was (and is, as far as I can tell—although we’ve had only sporadic contact since high school) a genuinely good-natured guy, with a good sense of humor to leaven his intellectual seriousness.

There was, however, one key philosophical difference and one, let’s say, difficulty in our friendship. The philosophical difference was that even back then, he tended to see the world through the lens of hard science. I recall watching in awe as he soldered together his first primitive analog computer from a kit he ordered from Popular Science. I knew then we were on different paths. My lens was literature: Novels like Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Heller’s Catch-22, with their emphasis on romanticized band-of-outlaws anarchism, led me to a more irrationalist, or at least anti-technocratic, literary-Luddite view of the world.

The difficulty involved our rivalry for the position of No. 1 in our class. I edged him out and, as I recall, there was a bit of not entirely good-natured bitterness about this on his part (I was, needless to say, completely gracious about it all).

Of course, he went on to be a billionaire, more or less—and I’ve entertained the notion that his galling high-school loss to me spurred him on to achieve his fabulous success, which he therefore owes to me. And I went on to … considerably less lucrative, more literary pursuits. (Still, Cynthia Ozick’s quote about my new book The Shakespeare Wars—“Electrifying. A spectacular book”—feels better than any sum of money could).

Nonetheless, I’d always been a little suspicious of Metcalfe’s Law, precisely because it seemed too confident that it could quantify and digitize human relationships, turn them all in their infinite variety into an all-too-simple mathematical formula—a formula that seems a bit too much like a thinly disguised promotional device for Ethernet. He’s selling connectivity devices and he’s proclaiming a “law” that values the growth they promote at n2 levels. Not bad for business, although that alone does not disprove its truth.

In fact, I also have a problem with the recent IEEE takedown of Metcalfe’s Law for the same reason. It, too, attempts the quantification of human relationships—long a dream, often a dreadful mistake. But at least the authors exhibit a tentativeness, an awareness of the arbitrariness of assigning a number value to human connections, or of identifying techno-connections with human connections.

In any case, the discussion of this question sparked by “Metcalfe’s Law Is Wrong” on Jeff Jarvis’ blog reawakened high-school memories and made me think of my “blue box” story and what I like to think of as “Ron’s Outlaws,” the original hackers.

There’s been, lately, a curious spike in interest in the story, which I wrote for Harold Hayes’ Esquire (on the basis of a tip from my colleague there, Craig S. Karpel).

The story, first published in October 1971 (and reprinted in The Secret Parts of Fortune, and also available on the Web at www. webcrunchers.com/crunch/esq-art.html) concerned my odyssey into the techno-nerd outlaw world of blue-boxers, many of them blind teenage electronics geniuses who created their own illicit net in the web of then-monopoly AT&T’s long-distance line circuits using devices dubbed “blue boxes.” These “phone phreaks” included one who, on the basis of my story, became a legendary original superhero of hacker culture, “Captain Crunch.”

In retrospect, my technology-vs.-anarchy debates in Long Island diners with Bob Metcalfe may have shaped my vision of these anti-technocracy tech geniuses. I envisioned them in my story as analogues of the black-clad secret society, the “Tristero” in The Crying of Lot 49. One of the distinguishing achievements of the Tristero was that they traced their ancestry to a group that sought to subvert the official postal system of Europe with their own private communication network.

If Bob Metcalfe was the guru of connectivity, my story at least had helped give birth to both the dark side of cyber culture and other more profitable sides as well.

When I say there’s been a spike of interest, there was a call from a TV documentary producer working on a project about the history of the telephone. They were asking permission to reproduce an image of my Esquire story, “Secrets of the Little Blue Box,” in conjunction with their interview with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, an interview on the history of the telephone. The reason: Mr. Wozniak and his friend Steve Jobs both read my “blue box” story in high school and, as they both have publicly reported, were inspired by the story to try to manufacture the illicit “blue box” devices in one of their parents’ garages, a project that led ultimately to their Apple partnership. It also led to their contact with and (I’d say) spiritual kinship with the hacker legend I’d portrayed in the story, Captain Crunch, who, after getting into trouble with the law, left the dark side and became a “white hat” hacker and an important innovator in the PC revolution.

My account of Crunch’s exploits gave widespread recognition—helped the wildfire spread—of incipient hacker culture. For better or worse, I felt I had made enough of a contribution to the origin and spread of this subculture to justify thinking of them as the antipodes of Metcalfe’s Law: Ron’s Outlaws. After all, the former is about enhancing connectivity, the latter about subverting it.

Or is it? In a way, its origins in the secret blind-boy blue-box networks suggest that hacker culture is about enhancing connectivity, or about offering an alternative connectivity. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that there was a kind of interdependence between Metcalfe’s Law and Ron’s Outlaws: that “my” hacker outlaws did more to enhance connectivity by demonstrating the holes and flaws in cyber-based networks, testing the system and spurring it to greater heights of efficiency and security.

And Bob’s known in his world as a bit of a rebel, taking on Bill Gates early, offering heretical apocalyptic visions of the Internet future.

Perhaps Ron’s Outlaws are not necessarily opposed to Bob and his Laws. Too bad there was room for only one No. 1 in high school, which, as we know, is all that counts.

Ron Rosenbaum’s new book, The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups, is just out from Random House.

alliance is over. Long live the (real) alliance, The Edgy Alliance.

According to Sean, the goofy alleged neurologist from the

first Survivor (if you ask me, anyone

who would go to Sean for a neurological consultation ought to have his head

examined), the key difference in the new Survivor

is that the show now bans alliances. Of course, I'm not sure Sean is the most

reliable source in the world about anything, but it's right there in cold type,

in one of publicity-shy Sean's gazillion or so exclusive interviews in the

run-up to the new Survivor , this one

in the Post . After crudely dissing

the looks of the women in his Survivor

group and telling us, of the women in the new

one, "They are just great looking! Great looking! I could have had a great time

with a couple of them, believe me," the super-suave Sean proceeded to drop a

bombshell about an alleged new alliance policy. One he takes credit for

himself. One so stupid , you can

almost believe him on that basis alone.

"At the end of the

taping for Survivor I ," Sean told the

Post , "the creator Mark Burnett asked

us what we would do to make the next series better …. One of the things I told them

was to ban alliances. And this time they've done that. The rules say it's

illegal to collude on a vote. That's going to add a new dimension to the

series."

Yeah, Sean-the dimension of boredom . Way to go, you neurological nitwit; way to ruin the single

most (perhaps only) interesting and novel element in the show. Hey, why not

just cut out the heart of its popularity, the only thing that gave it any

unscripted drama amidst the schlock.

What did you think was the source of the show's success,

Sean? The dumb relay races? The island-legends trivia contest? Your moronic

alphabetical voting strategy in the tribal council? No, you brain-challenged

brain doctor, it was the drama of alliance formation, the Machiavellian

scheming, the rise of Richard Hatch as a great pop-culture character archetype,

the way the alliance formation and freeze-outs tapped deep into the nation's

primal junior high school insecurity fears (primal fears that carry over into

the rest of life for many of us). The way it made human character and human

relationships the real subject of Survivor

in a brilliant, pop-novelistic way.

Jeez, banning alliances: an idea so dumb only the deeply

addled, self-infatuated Sean could have thought of it. Well, we'll see. Since

I'm writing this in advance of the first episode of the new Survivor , I'll reserve comment until the

end of this column, which I'll append after I see it.

Instead, this column will be devoted to another kind of

alliance: to The Edgy Alliance and its members, and their responses to my idea,

in the aftermath of Survivor, to form

a different kind of alliance.

As I wrote back then, I was stunned by the success of

Richard Hatch's Machiavellian scheming, stunned into re-evaluating my life and

realizing that I wanted an alliance too .

Not to win some game-show prize, but an alliance of kindred spirits,

enlightened obsessives and enthusiasts-and who better to turn to than the

readers of this column?

Thus was born The Edgy

Alliance. I provided a handy coupon-sized application form with space for readers

to make their own suggestions for topics to be treated in the column, as well

as a list of some 60 or so writers, artists, thinkers, songwriters, films,

books and music I'd previously praised, so that prospective members could see

if they felt simpatico.*

I spoke of the way I hoped the Alliance could serve not just

as solidarity for like-minded souls, but as a kind of "mobile cultural strike

force to galvanize support for deserving works of art." And cited, as

precedent, successful campaigns by this column to get the works of the

brilliant, reclusive novelist Charles Portis back in print (if you haven't read

Dog of the South yet, I'm tempted to

ban you from the Alliance), to save the smartest, funniest show on TV, Mystery Science Theater 3000 (for a couple

of seasons, anyway) and to get the new owners of the Chrysler Building to keep

its beautiful spire lit all night long instead of turning it off at 2 a.m. (If

you're out late at night and you gaze up at the spire, you have this column to

thank for the sight.)

Anyway, the response was truly gratifying. Letters began

pouring in to the postal box I'd rented (The Edgy Alliance, Box 105, 577 Second

Avenue, New York, N.Y., 10016). I was invited to appear on Christopher Lydon's

National Public Radio program, The

Connection, prompting a new wave of applications-and after one further

mention in my Jan. 8 column on Thomas Pynchon and Captain Crunch, the total is

now nearly 400 Edgy Allies. (By the way, I was pleased The Times cited my essay on Crunch in its recent profile of the

hacker legend, but a little bit dismayed that they said I characterized Crunch

as an "American anti-hero." My exact words were, "a true American hero." How does that become "anti-hero"? O.K., O.K.,

I'm edgy.)

But what was most gratifying was not the number of responses

but the range, variety and quality of the suggestions and obsessions shared.

To paraphrase Wayne and Garth in Wayne's World : I am not

worthy . The erudition, the passion, the eclectic and imaginative aesthetic

taste in your suggestions floored me. Edgy Allies don't just rock the house

down, they rock it back up again and re-arrange the porch furniture.

So I've been trying to figure out what to do with all of the suggestions, many of

which deserve an entire column in response. And I thought maybe the best thing

would be to go through the coupons and letters and select a few suggestions

this week, some just to list, some to comment briefly on-kind of an interactive

thing-hoping this will inspire more people to seek to join and send in

suggestions (did I mention the address: The Edgy Alliance, Box 105, 577 Second

Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016).

Let me begin with:

· Oblomov , by Ivan Goncharov. No fewer

than three requests to write about

this lovely 19th-century Russian novel that is, in a way, a hymn to lassitude.

I think it's no accident that Oblomov

is such a favorite with The Edgy Alliance, because over the years I've noticed

that Oblomov enthusiasts tend to be,

like Edgy Enthusiast types, above all deeply devoted readers. The kind of

reader for whom reading is a deliriously sensual pleasure. The kind of readers

for whom Oblomovian lassitude represents a realization of their secret fantasy

of abandoning the onerous demands of the real world-going to work in the

morning and all that-and, instead, getting to stay in bed and read as long as

they want for the rest of their lives. Anyway, I know that's my alternate-life

fantasy. Well, one of them.

· "William

Empson's essay on Marvell's 'Garden,' Scrutiny

1932, pp. 236-240." What I like about this suggestion is not just the poet

(Marvell is my fave among the later metaphysical poets), not just the poem

itself. "The Garden" is a lovely pastoral in which the poet imagines himself

going into a synesthesia-like trance in a garden, annihilating all into "a

green thought in a green shade." (Interesting: another instance of sensual and

spiritual lassitude. I think there's a theme here.) And it's not just the

reference to Empson, who, as I've confessed in previous columns, is my

20th-century lit-crit hero, still a giant (you'll note the appearance of his

great work Seven Types of Ambiguity

in my original list). I'd commend to anyone who doubts the continuing relevance

of Empson the chapter on him in Jonathan Bate's valuable recent book The Genius of Shakespeare . Mr. Bate

makes a lovely analogy between Empsonian ambiguity and Heisenbergian

uncertainty, both of which intersected in Cambridge in the 1920's.

But what I particularly like about this suggestion is its

specificity. Although Empson's Marvell essay has been reprinted elsewhere, the

specificity of the citation to " Scrutiny

… pp. 236-40" suggests the reader actually has in his possession an original

copy of that legendary (in lit-crit circles, anyway) magazine edited by F.R.

Leavis. Marvell's "Garden," Empson, Scrutiny :

a trifecta of good taste!

·

Gram Parsons' "Thousand Dollar Wedding." In this case, a reader sent me an

entire essay he'd written about the version of this song on the Gram Parson

tribute album, Return of the Grievous

Angel (a duet cover version sung by Juliana Hatfield and Evan Dando), an

essay entitled "$1,000 Wedding: Gram Parson's Faulknerian Mini-Opera." It's

really smart, the essay, and it made me think again about why I'm drawn to

country music. Not only me, but a number of Edgy Allies who requested more

about both Johnny and Rosanne Cash (which led me to go buy Johnny's new album, Solitary Man . Check out his

heartbreaking version of Bono's great anthem, "One"). Maybe it's the lassitude

again, the pure lassitude of longing and sadness at the heart of every great

country song.

It also made me realize that if I got to choose another

person's life to have lived, I'd have wanted to be Gram Parsons. To have

written his songs, lived his brief tragic life, given birth to his legend and,

perhaps most of all, to have Emmylou Harris write "Boulder to Birmingham" about

my death, how they burned my body in a desert canyon near Joshua Tree.

· Here's a

multiple request that I record here for its wonderfully strange eclecticism:

the reader who wanted me to write about "Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian , Bar Kochba [the

second-century Jewish rebel], Buddy Greco, and the cello."

I'm sort of fascinated by whatever it is that links those

four, but it gives me an excuse to cite one of my favorite lines from one of my

favorite film comedies, The In-Laws ,

the cult fave scripted by Andrew Bergman. Not a Buddy Greco reference exactly,

but a Jose Greco reference.

It's in the scene in which Peter Falk, who's playing a

wacked-out rogue C.I.A. agent, not quite housebroken in polite society, arrives

for dinner at the home of his son's prospective in-laws, a suburban dentist

(played with deadpan aplomb by Alan Arkin) and his wife (Nancy Dussault). Mr.

Falk proceeds to weird them out by telling a disturbingly over-the-top story

about some operation down in Central America, a place where, he claims, the

tsetse flies were so big they carried off young children in their beaks. He

goes into an elegiac description of the flies flapping off into the sunset with

the children drooping from their jaws, and then tells the wigged-out in-laws

the name he claims the frightened native people have for the giant tsetses:

"They call them ' Los Jose Greco del Muertes '-the flamenco

dancers of death." Thank you for giving me an excuse to repeat that. You'll

see: Rent the movie, you'll thank me.

·

Ed Sanders. Yes! Great request. Here's another alternate life fantasy: If I

were a Beat, Sanders is the Beat I'd most like to have been. Virtually the only

one I really admire as a poet: his Egyptological and classical Greek learning

inflect, in a brilliant way, his vision of the East Village as a site of comic,

mythic, pornographic legends. Beatitude fused with grungitude: a sensibility

best exemplified in prose in Sanders' Tales

of Beatnik Glory and Shards of God .

Plus he wrote The Family , one of the

scariest true-crime books ever (about the Manson family) and co-founded the

Fugs with the great Tuli Kupferberg. I rest my case.

· "Joel

Carmichael's translation of Anna Karenina ."

Not familiar with it yet, although I have written in the past about the

mystical vision of the One and the Many to be found beneath the surface of

Tolstoy's opening line in Anna Karenina

("All happy families are alike ….") as an analogue to Flannery O'Connor's

mystical vision of beatitude in the title Everything

That Rises Must Converge, another true fave .

· "The Sex Life

of Krishnamurti." No comment yet, but I'll look into it.

· "The Tao of

Jackson Browne." Yes, he's very unfashionable now, but I've confessed in the

past to having a weakness for J.B.'s work, even to searching for and

celebrating "my inner Jackson Browne" every time I go to L.A. The first two

letters of lassitude are "L.A.," and Late

for the Sky -isn't that a classic of sad lassitude? And yes, it's true: My

heart still stirs in a sad, neo–Popular Front way (a "Pop Front" way?) whenever

I hear Jackson Browne's "For Every Man."

· A

thought-provoking analysis of the metrical anomalies in King Lear's

grief-stricken words ("Never, never, never, never, never") and their thematic

implications.

· On the Shoulders of Giants by Robert

Merton. Described as " Pale Fire

footnotes in non-fiction form." I'm down, dude. I once owned a secondhand copy,

but somehow lost it. Will now search for another.

· Jimi Hendrix

and Randy Rhoads. Who is Randy Rhoads again? Oh, okay-the dude who played

guitar for Ozzy Osbourne. But I will say something about Hendrix: We share the

same birthday! James Agee, too-Nov. 27. Nonetheless, apropos of Hendrix:

doesn't "Voodoo Chile" in the Mazda commercial just completely blow away

Bowie's "Changes" in the Nortel ad? "Voodoo Chile" dominates, subverts,

shatters the framework of its commercial exploitation, but "Changes" becomes,

with repetition, subservient to it. Very sad.

· "The aggressive

machiavellian alliance forming game play in King Herod," with a citation to

Josephus' Jewish Antiquities , Books

14-17. A worthy subject, but isn't Josephus a suspect  source?

· One of my

favorite requests: "Could you write about what is a liberal today? When I was

in college in 1938 I took a liberal conservative test. I scored 85% liberal 15%

conservative I dare say the questions would be somewhat different today." A

good question and I'll get to this and some others I have in hand later on. But

I think I have to stop now. Not because I've run out of great suggestions from

Edgy Allies, but because I'm running out of space.

But I kind of like this

free-associative, interactive way of responding to Edgy Alliance suggestions.

So I hope readers will continue to sign up for the Alliance and send their

suggestions for possible discussion in future columns.

And by the way, I promised an update on goofy Sean's

"alliance ban" claim about the new Survivor .

What do you know: No mention of any

rule change on the first show, and you'd certainly think they'd mention it if there was a change. Way to go, Dr. Sean! I think what we have here, with

the neurologist turned show-biz analyst, is the first case of infotainment malpractice . Still, I'll

forgive Sean, since his claim did prompt me to get around to writing about the

Alliance suggestions. I'd even let Sean join the Alliance, on one condition:

that he reveal the one remaining secret of the first Survivor -when he claimed that Colleen and Greg were "covering up for

another relationship" when they'd go off together (followed by a camera crew)

at night. What was that other

relationship, Sean? The Edgy Alliance wants to know.

*Here's the original list:

All the King's Men ,

the Cowboy Junkies, Dead Souls , Mystery Science Theater 3000 , The Long Goodbye , Peter Brook, Badlands , Smokey Robinson, Chimes at Midnight , Don DeLillo's Libra , Chrissie Hynde, Murray Kempton, Larry Sanders , the Dixie Chicks, De Rerum Natura (Lucretius), Persuasion , doo wop, Pale Fire , Brian Kulick, Sandra

Bernhardt, David Berlinski, "Shipping Out" (David Foster Wallace), Tom Petty, The Third Man , Julie Taymor's Titus , Lingua Franca , Willie Nelson, Tom Frank, the Shirelles, Eric

Ambler, Blade Runner , The Anatomy of Melancholy , Charles

Portis, Blood on the Tracks , James M.

Cain, Bruce Wagner, Rickie Lee Jones, Sam Cooke, Errol Morris, Ann Magnuson, Seven Types of Ambiguity , The Woman in White , The Simpsons , "Losing My Religion," Christopher Ricks, Renaldo and

Clara, the dream of Clarence (in Richard

III ), Edith Wharton, Jon Stewart, George Herbert, The Pat Hobby Stories , Nicholson Baker, The Crying of Lot 49 , Other

Inquisitions (Borges), Chinatown ,

Bill Murray, Rosanne Cash, Hart Crane, and Bruce Cutler, John Gotti's lawyer.

(No official Gotti endorsement implied.)

life, and sometimes it can seem to outweigh the pleasures and rewards. So I

hope you'll forgive me if I spend a little time dwelling on one of the real

sustaining satisfactions I've had from it all: being present at the creation,

being part of the creation of a true American hero, a genuine-and, I think,

genuinely significant-mythic American icon. I'm speaking, of course, of Captain

Crunch.

Well, not just Crunch, but the whole crew of phone phreaks,

proto-hackers and blind boy-electronic-geniuses who created outlaw cyber

culture. The whole crew whose existence first became known to the world in one

of the first magazine stories I ever wrote, a story called "Secrets of the

Little Blue Box" in the October 1971 Esquire .

The whole crew, yes, but especially Captain Crunch,

pseudonym of the first hacker superhero. I'm not writing this to claim credit

for their achievements, for their creation of a genuinely subversive rebellion

against (and critique of) techno-totalizing culture-an Underworld Wide Web, you

might say. In fact, one reason I'm writing this is to share credit with someone else-with another writer,  whose prophetic novel about an underground

web of subversive communicants shaped the way I wrote about the phone phreaks

and the proto-hackers. I'm speaking of Thomas Pynchon and his 1965 ­novel, The Crying of Lot 49 .

I was reminded of the Pynchon connection when a British

documentary producer came to New York to tape an interview with me for Channel

Four in London, which (in conjunction with the Learning Channel here) is doing

a documentary about the origins of hacker culture. His name was Ralph Lee, and

he seemed like an extraordinarily energetic and intelligent reporter, someone

who really got the sensibility of the

phone phreaks and hackers; it gave one hope that the documentary might be the

first to ­really do justice to the subject the way feature films have so far

failed to.

Mr. Lee had been retracing the steps I'd taken on my initial

odyssey into the phone-phreak underworld, relocating certain key characters in

my story, including Crunch; "Mark Bernay" (a.k.a. the Midnight Skulker); and

Joe Engressia, the original blind boy-genius. And certain other individuals

whose lives had been changed by the story, such as Steve Wozniak, co-founder of

Apple with Steve Jobs.

I'd read elsewhere that the Wozniak-Jobs partnership had

been forged when, as teenagers, they'd read my "Blue Box" ­story and decided to

try to manufacture the illicit cell-phone-sized free-call " blue box" devices

in their parents' garage. While they apparently weren't too successful at

making a profit, they did make a connection :

to the pioneers of cyber-hacker culture such as Captain Crunch, and to the

rebel ­sensibility that (for a while) inspired Apple. My story inspired many

other kindred spirits to become phreaks and hackers, forging alliances of

isolated local networks into an Underworld Wide Web of techno rebels.

Forgive me if I take a paternal pride in characters like

Crunch, Bernay and Engressia. As I said, I want to share paternity with someone else. If my story helped father hacker

culture, Thomas Pynchon is, at the very least, its ghostly godfather.

What reminded me of the debt I owe (we all owe) to

Pynchon-as a prophet who tells us more about the deep structure of contemporary

culture than any other artist or political theorist I know of-was a single

three-word phrase: "the lawyer Metzger."

The lawyer Metzger: It came up when Ralph Lee asked me how

I'd come upon the phone-phreak underground in the first place. It was something

I couldn't reveal in my original story because of security constraints. It's

something that time-and the statute of limitations-permit me to disclose here.

It involved a daring plan by an outlaw "blue-box" entrepreneur to bring the

phone company-then the undivided, all-smothering Ma Bell-to its knees with a

devastating coup … of which I was to be the chosen instrument.

See, this lawyer named Metzger had reached out to Harold

Hayes, the legendary Esquire editor,

through his ­protégé, Craig Karpel, and said he had a client who was very, very

angry with the phone company-primarily for getting him busted for selling

illicit "blue boxes" to Las Vegas organized-crime figures. "Blue boxes"

permitted the user to make unlimited, untraceable free phone calls all over the

world-often an asset to gamblers, dealers and others who preferred anonymity

and free long distance. Blue boxes were, ironically enough, invented and

popularized by a network of mostly blind whiz kids who used them not for

profit, but to create their own Web-like community in the worm holes they found

in Ma Bell's etheric net.

Anyway, the lawyer Metzger said his client was so incensed

at the Darth Vaders of the phone company's security division that he wanted to

strike back at the Evil Empire in a devastating way. What this fellow-whom I've

never named, and whose name I've since forgotten (although I'd love to hear

from him)-wanted Esquire to do was to

include, bound in the issue that

carried my story, a vinyl disc, a 45 r.p.m. record that contained the secret

codes that comprised internal phone-company signaling tones. So that everybody

in America could make a blue box and bankrupt Ma Bell.

You could, if you were charitable, see this as an

anticipation of the "open source" movement in contemporary cyber culture. But

you could also look at it-as I believe Esquire's

lawyers did when they nixed the idea-as opening oneself up to a charge of

criminal conspiracy. But by introducing me, and thus the world, to the existence

of an illicit underground communications network, he accomplished something

more far- reachingly subversive.

He was the first to tell me about the then-embryonic field

of computer hacking-demonstrating to me how to modem into a mainframe (this was

1971) and search out the passwords.

It was this guy (the lawyer Metzger's client), who

introduced me to Joe Engressia, the blind phone-phreak adept who was, I

believe, the first to discover the secret utility to the Cap'n Crunch whistle.

The Cap'n Crunch whistle, a little cheap plastic job, was a key icon (or maybe

an iconic key) to the phone-phreak underground: It was the key that unlocked Ma

Bell's treasures. The makers of Cap'n Crunch cereal had no idea (I think) of

what they were doing when they decided to include the little "bosun whistle"

(in keeping with the nautical theme) in the cereal box, much like the prize

found in Cracker Jacks. But Engressia, who was gifted with perfect pitch,

discovered that the whistle produced a perfect 2,600-­cycle-per-second tone, a

high-pitched note that was the entry

signal to the phone company's electronic switching system. The tone that, in

the hands of a skilled hacker-phreak, allowed unlimited, untraceable access to

the long-distance lines-and through a modem, to the innards of computers.

I'd never actually seen one of the Cap'n Crunch whistles

(which were quickly taken off the market), but the enterprising Ralph Lee had

unearthed one, which he showed me when I arrived for the taping. I felt the

kind of thrill archaeologists must have gotten when they first came upon the

Rosetta Stone. Anyway, it was this device that gave the name to phone-phreak

superhero Captain Crunch. What a guy: a kind of Bizarro-world Thomas Edison, or

Alexander Graham Bell, the myth of the American inventor merged with the myth

of the American outlaw and the attitude of a comic-book superhero; Gyro

Gearloose crossed with the Phantom. Faster than a speeding bullet, he'd travel

the freeways of America, ducking into a phone booth (just like Superman) and

transform himself by hooking up his famous computerized unit, thus making the

phone booth a kind of transporter that beamed him up into the world wide web of

the telephone system. He'd zap his voice around the globe before disappearing,

Phantom-like, into the ether.

I only met Captain Crunch in person once, although he

shadowed me throughout my phone-phreak odyssey, peppering me with phone calls,

building his own self-mythology. Our meeting was in a McDonald's in San Jose,

Calif., a few months after my story came out, at which time he seemed grateful

for the (well-­deserved) iconic stature I'd endowed him with and the vast new

network of admirers he'd acquired, although I know he's had mixed feelings

since about some of the consequences.

Crunch was the real star of the story (which is reprinted in

my new nonfiction collection, The Secret

Parts of Fortune ); he was the one who became the icon, but his flamboyance

perhaps unfairly overshadowed an equally influential proto-­hacker-Mark Bernay,

a.k.a. the ­Midnight Skulker. It was Bernay who acted as the Johnny Appleseed

of phone phreakdom, traveling up and down the West Coast in the late 60's

pasting little stickers in phone booths that gave the numbers for "toll-free

looparounds," AT&T tech-check connections that permitted nationwide free

conference calls, the primitive proto-Internet of the blind phone phreaks and

hackers. And it was Bernay who sketched out for me the Manichaean, metaphysical

pleasures of computer hacking: the cat-and-mouse games with security, the

intellectual game-playing that holds the appeal for the most advanced hackers.

(Bernay would often tell security how to detect the Midnight Skulker just to

raise the game to another level.)

I think it was Bernay's phone-booth stickering that first

evoked a Pynchon vibe in me when I was reporting the story. Because, as a

youthful fan of Pynchon's The Crying of

Lot 49 , I'd done some stickering myself; I used to sticker phone booths

with the sign of the muted post horn, the symbol of the Trystero , the shadowy conspiratorial network in

Pynchon's novel. (See illustration.)

Anyway, entering the phone-phreak underground was like

entering the Trystero underground. Among many things that make The Crying of Lot 49 perhaps the great American visionary work of the

past century (a novel that ranks in my pantheon with Pale Fire ) is its imagination of an alternate communication system,

a Web uniting the disaffected, the disillusioned and the just plain disgruntled

in America. The outsiders who no longer trusted their private dreams and

longings to the official public channels of communication (like the post office

and the phone company). A fantasied conspiracy-as-communion that took the form

of an underground postal system. A vision that took as its sign and symbol "the

muted posthorn," the symbol of  Thurn

and Taxis, the ancient European private postal service-with a mute silencing

it.

Curiously, "mute" was

the phone-phreak term for one of their key artifacts, a skeleton-key device to

generate the 2,600-cycle-per-second tone that put the phone company's

long-distance signaling system at their command. Coincidence? Were the phone

phreaks life imitating (Pynchon's) art? Or was Pynchon's art anticipating,

prophesizing life? I don't think it's just me seeing things through the lens of

Pynchon; I think it's Pynchon foreseeing

things. Foreseeing, as he put it in the novel, "a network by which x number of Americans are truly

communicating … among a web of telephone wires … searching ceaselessly among

the dial's ten million possibilities for that magical Other who will reveal

herself out of the roar of relays." Sound familiar?

But there was one particularly spooky foresight or

foreshadowing that floored me: "the lawyer Metzger." As I was talking to the

documentary producer about the origin of my odyssey in a lawyer named Metzger,

it suddenly struck me: Wait a minute, wasn't there a lawyer named Metzger in The Crying of Lot 49 ?

I raced home and dug out my copy of the novel. There it was,

on page 17: Oedipa Maas, Pynchon's heroine, receives a summons from the estate

of a deceased lover, Pierce Inverarity. She is to be the executrix of his

tangled last will and testament, a labyrinthine legacy embedded, encoded in the

circuit board of the new American landscape.

She checks into the Echo Court motel in the San Francisco

suburb of San Narciso, and "That night the lawyer Metzger showed up." Her

guide. I won't dwell much further on the fictional lawyer Metzger himself, or

the fact that he turns out to be the former child actor Baby Igor, or on one of

the all-time great seduction scenes in American literature (one that also

serves as a metaphor for the veiling and unveiling of Truth!), the one that

ensues when Metzger and Oedipa watch a Baby ­Igor movie on the motel-room TV.

Except to say that, in very much the same way that a lawyer named Metzger was

my connection to the underworld realm, "the lawyer Metzger" is the one who

connects Pynchon's heroine to the shadowy Trystero underground. Coincidence?

One of the persistent concerns of The Crying of Lot 49 is the nature of coincidence. How does one

distinguish accident and chance from pattern and plan, signal from noise, order

from randomness, conspiracy from paranoia-in physics, in history, in human

consciousness?

I won't detain you with any further meditations on this

subject (not now, anyway), but the coincidence of the fictional and factual

"lawyer Metzger" both serving as Vergilian guides to an underworld labyrinth is

(as I believe Martin Heidegger put it in his famous Marburg seminar on

Heraclitus and the pre-Socratics) "pretty freaky, dude."

But I do want to talk about the vision of The Crying of Lot 49 and its embodiment

in the ideals of enlightened phreaks and hackers as a political vision. I'd contend they are the true opposition party in American culture, or at least the smartest

one. They have a far more knowing and savvy critique of technological totalism

than postmodernists,post-Marxistsand ­cultural-studies savants, all of whom are

in thrall to totalizing ideological systems even as they purport to critique

such systems.

They-my guys, the Pynchonian underground-are the ultimate

opposition to systemization. But theirs is not, I repeat, not a Luddite critique. These guys love the possibilities of technology; they love systems and they

love to fuck with systems. (Fuck with them like lovers.) They know that systems

tend to become stagnant, oppressive and totalitarian unless they're fucked

with. That they only evolve under the pressure that punctures their

self-confidence.

But I would argue that my party, the Pynchon-Crunch

opposition, are more than political-they're also a philosophical opposition.

Although Captain Crunch may not immediately strike one as a philosopher in the

mode of Aristotle or Kant, the cyber-­hackers can be seen as descendants of the

Skeptics, the ones who ­refute the pretenses of the overconfident

system-builders.

Perhaps (like all great lifelong passions) my predilection

for cyber skeptics can be traced back to high school. It was in high school

that I read Pynchon, and it was in high school that I was engaged in a friendly

rivalry with a tech-minded classmate named Bob Metcalfe, who later went on to

become a legendary cyber-world system-builder and theorist: He invented

Ethernet and "Metcalfe's Law" ("the value of a network grows by the square of

the size of the network"-is this a real law of science or a clever Ethernet

promotion?). Mr. Metcalfe is a terrifically good-natured techno-optimist of the

George Gilder school, and I have great respect for his achievements. But after

high school we went our separate ways, and I cast my lot with the anti-system

skeptics-the losers, the left-out, the lost causes, the disillusioned and the

disappointed, the doomed Romantic visionaries. But we've got Captain Crunch and

Thomas Pynchon on our side.

Endnote: It occurred to me that this is what I was getting

at a few months ago when I announced the formation of The Edgy Alliance: a

Trystero-like linkage of kindred spirits. And so I'd like to open the

membership rolls again and ask any who want to join the nearly 300 Edgy Allies

to whom I've already sent membership cards, to send their name and address (and

also suggested column topics) to The Edgy Alliance, Box 105, 577 Second Avenue,

New York, N.Y. 10016.