Underground: Hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontierDreyfus, Suelette
Science
Underground: Hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier
Dreyfus, Suelette
Computer crimes -- Australia; Computer hackers -- Australia -- Biography; Computer security -- Australia
Snort some speed or pop an ecstasy tablet on Saturday night. Go to a
rave. Dance all night, sometimes for six hours straight. Get home
mid-morning and spend Sunday coming down from the drugs. Get high on
dope a few times during the week, to dull the edges of desire for the
more expensive drugs. When Saturday rolled around, do it all over
again. Week in, week out. Month after month.
Dancing to techno-music released him. Dancing to it on drugs cleared
his mind completely, made him feel possessed by the music. Techno was
musical nihilism; no message, and not much medium either. Fast,
repetitive, computer-synthesised beats, completely stripped of vocals
or any other evidence of humanity. He liked to go to techno-night at
The Lounge, a city club, where people danced by themselves, or in
small, loose groups of four or five. Everyone watched the video screen
which provided an endless stream of ever-changing, colourful
computer-generated geometric shapes pulsing to the beat.
Prime Suspect never told his mother he was going to a rave. He just
said he was going to a friend's for the night. In between the drugs,
he attended his computer science courses at TAFE and worked at the
local supermarket so he could afford his weekly $60 ecstasy tablet,
$20 rave entry fee and regular baggy of marijuana.
Over time, the drugs became less and less fun. Then, one Sunday, he
came down off some speed hard. A big crash. The worst he had ever
experienced. Depression set in, and then paranoia. He knew the police
were still watching him. They had followed him before.
At his police interviews, he learned that an AFP officer had followed
him to an AC/DC concert less than two weeks before he had been busted.
The officer told him the AFP wanted to know what sort of friends Prime
Suspect associated with--and the officer had been treated to the spectre
of seven other arm-waving, head-thumping, screaming teenagers just like
Prime Suspect himself.
Now Prime Suspect believed that the AFP had started following him
again. They were going to raid him again, even though he had given up
hacking completely. It didn't make sense. He knew the premonition was
illogical, but he couldn't shake it.
Something bad--very, very bad--was going to happen any day. Overcome
with a great sense of impending doom, he lapsed into a sort of
hysterical depression. Feeling unable to prevent the advent of the
dark, terrible event which would tear apart his life yet again, he
reached out to a friend who had experienced his own personal problems.
The friend guided him to a psychologist at the Austin Hospital. Prime
Suspect decided that there had to be a better way to deal with his
problems than wasting himself every weekend. He began counselling.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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