There’s a lot of loneliness and frustration in the writing
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.
