ed note 7-26-02: Two weekends ago I attended H2K2, the fourth Hackers on Planet Earth conference, put on by the folks at 2600 Magazine. I wrote most of the following super-gossipy, not-really-relevant-to-anyone-but-myself notes shortly thereafter but didn't finish them because I had sooooooo much to say, and then finished it up tonight because I sooooooo wanted to get it over with and off my plate. voila.

Stage notes, for Xephreniaq: H2K2 was held at the former Penta Hotel, where (the inappropriately-named) LACC and (the more aptly named) PYSO both stayed when we went to play at Carnegie Hall. The now-Pennsylvania Hotel seems slightly less shabby than when I first visited New York. Most of the conference action took place in the thick-pillared top floor ballroom, where PYSO practiced when we stayed there. They somehow managed to secure the mezzanine, which looked as if it were under construction, as well -- a low-ceilinged floor with exposed works and peeling paint where a number of ancient computers -- Apple ][Es, Ataris, Commodores -- were set up like some fanatic’s model trainset with all the fun moving parts on display, the tape drives and joysticks and cartridges and manuals to remind you how to program the old things.

I should establish from the beginning that I went into the conference with an unfair advantage which colored the experience with an almost unbearable giddiness: I showed up wearing a top which showed off my breasts. It's a grey old raggy piece of shit tank top I got during Hippie Christmas, but it does go right down my cleavage. Additionally, I had an accordion strapped to my back (wanted to trade it in at Accordion-O-Rama, which I had just discovered and which is just blocks from the hotel. It was my day off; plausible excuse, right?). The effect was immediate: within minutes I was hearing buzz behind my back about some chick with an accordion; after one of the first lectures I went to, the speaker made a pass at me.

Irrational exuberance; inflated self-confidence. All of this is still so weird to me. I was the ugly nerd girl in school. Even at Hampshire, the overt expressions of lust never happened. Call it hypocritical, when I spend so much time bitching about being hit on on the subway. I’ve gone through the self-recriminations. I don’t want lust coming from random strangers when I’m trying to get to work or buying groceries. It’s more welcome, however, coming from a roomful of relatively intelligent, non-macho subversives. So I call this reclaiming control: I calculated a reaction; I got it; it was one of the headiest experiences of this past year.

I wish I had more to say about the speakers or the topics or the vibe or the future of hacking, but (partially due to the abovementioned reasons) much of what comes to mind about the conference is personal. A key outcome of the conference for me was realizing that my lecture-going habits -- and more broadly, my information-gathering habits -- have changed dramatically. I think it was the presence of Emmanuel Goldstein that clarified this. I found out about his magazine, 2600, when I was maybe 11 or 12 through an article in the LA Times; Emmanuel was in some kind of trouble for hacking or phreaking. It occurs to me that I probably wouldn't have found that article today (and not just because I don't read the Times anymore).

During my pre-teen years, I read like a baleen whale: the house was a sea of newspapers and magazines and books my mom left lying around, and I sifted through it finding things I liked. I liked hacking enough that I saved the article on Emmanuel and a few other pieces on hackers, along with stuff about Stuart Brand and some early pieces on raves. I wasn't anywhere near hacking myself, because I didn't program, and the topics weren't ones that I tried to look into any more deeply, but something about the topic felt enough worth coming back to that those clips are decaying in the bags and boxes of random papers in my parents' basement.

I also liked an article in the paper about a woman who married herself in a performance-art piece in which she wore pink rubber gloves to underscore the cleanness of such a ceremony. Then there was a piece in the Los Angeles Times's Sunday magazine about the history of belligerence in Japan. I picked up books which I read parts of and never gave back to my parents: Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals; a book about the Penobscot people called Glooskap's Children; book one of The Authoritarian Personality; coffee table books on the Saarinen family of architects; Dad's copy of The Closing Of The American Mind. There was lots of other stuff I didn't read; for example, I never touched any of my mom's books about Russian poets. Sometimes I feel bad about the other stuff which I didn't read; my dad also has a pretty decent collection on US history, a field in which I often find I have fundamental deficiencies.

Only recently have these reading patterns started to make sense to me. The parts I avoided are pretty easy to understand. I was a territorial kid: one of my sisters got to be into ballet, another got to be into anime, Mom had her poets and dad had his cars and as long as someone in the family was into that stuff I didn't have to be. The stuff I did read, I think these days, was all about saying NO. It was about saying no to marriage and saying no to being white and saying no to governments and to America specifically and saying NO to idiocy and to indifference. I went to look for my internal compass recently as I've been thinking about religion and morality, and it appears the word NO is stamped all over it. The needle even points NOrth(west).

I was happy I was able to finally identify my compass. I think my favorite word is No. (Feel free to disagree with me if you feel I'm overgeneralizing.) I'm happy They Might Be Giants has put out an album called NO, although I am currently saying NO to They Might Be Giants because they have done things like saying YES to making a Coke ad.

Speaking of which, the greatest thrill of H2K2 for me -- possibly the greatest thrill of my last few years -- was the four (was it FIVE?) hours back to back in which Mark Hosler and Jello Biafra spoke, with the resulting unintentional juxtaposition of Negativland's self-written Pepsi jingle ("Child-ren dy-ing of dis-ease -- Pepsi!) with old records Jello brought in which had been specially made for corporate sales conferences, including one from Pepsi and one from Coke -- the former written by Cabaret creators Kander and Ebb, the latter featuring a song called something like "That Great Big Bottling Plant In The Sky" in which hosannas are sung for the miraculous disappearance of the EPA and of protracted labor disputes.

Getting back to the point: My information-gathering habits have changed. I do not blame the Internet; I could be an even better baleen whale these days with all this fantastic krill in the soup. My problem may be that I'm getting old or that I have a job where the boss tells me to shut up all day long, or possibly that I was pressured not to be a (totally unabashed) generalist by the demands of college. At H2K2, I found myself going to lectures I felt like I *should* be going to in order to bolster my ostensible career or the leftist ideas I espouse. As a result, I ended up missing all sorts of fascinating shit, like the lecture on lockpicking and the one on an autonomous nation that consists of a platform off the coast of England. This kind of be-dullishment has to stop. First thing I'm going to do is stop hanging out with anyone steeped in the old-school New York Left. Goddamn if they didn't mung up parts of the conference by trying to create unnecessary organizing structures and dragging their Upper-West-Side-hothouse-poodle-psychobabble neuroses into every single unrelated issue.

The conference was much more oriented towards politics than I might have expected. I don't know how the geeks felt about the infiltration of their conference by so much overt political material. I've heard some of them grouse before (or heard of their grousing) about the efforts of Emmanuel Goldstein (2600’s editor and one of the conference’s lead organizers) to raise consciousness that the legal issues facing hackers, P2P software developers, free software advocates and the rest of the computing world extend to other free speech movements as well. The complaint, if I recall, was associated with those hackers who didn't see the issues from a leftist perspective... The traditional right-wing counterbalance-guy from Off the Hook showed his pointy little nose around the premises at one point, but I don't think he stayed long. Someone told me he'd quit the show, denouncing WBAI as "anti-American." There were dozens of Indymedia folks there, some of them not techies, though the radio crowd was in full effect.

But I either didn't get a reading on the crowd's sentiments about the politics this time or everyone was content with it. Emmanuel seemed to think everything went well. In his closing remarks he thanked everyone for connecting so well with Mark Hosler (of Negativland, an experimental band) and Jello Biafra (formerly of the punk group Dead Kennedys).

The presence of these artists (along with Aaron McGruder, the cartoonist who does Boondocks) and Indymedia types were the fruits of outreach that the 2600 crew has been doing for a while to the activist community. I was there the day Emmanuel offered the underused 2600 space to the folks who established the New York IMC... I had this strange sensation when we walked out of the restaurant that night that I could feel history, that I was a rock in it and it was rushing all around me. It gave me a certain frisson when I realized at the end of the conference that the non-techie speakers had been integrated into the proceedings so organically that it hadn't occurred to me that they might seem out of place to anyone.

(I'm still not sure if it's a good thing to feel like a rock in the context of that metaphor. ed note 7-26-02: I'm *certain*, however, that it's not a good thing that I felt swoony enough to summon that last paragraph of self-important reverie when I wrote this. In retrospect, I'm a little worried I got so attached to the whole event. I barely ate for three days, I spent hours in an enclosed area cut off from the outside world and my usual daily routine, listening to fist-waving lecturers -- the list of environmental factors reads a little like the ingredients for brainwashing. And I want to note there was a hell of a lot of fronting going on at the conference, not just by me, either. You get a lot of geeks together, they go all alpha on each other.)

Other notable moments:

*At one point on the last evening the center ring turned to a public trivia contest, and Emmanuel and Bernie S. and Cheshire and a handful of the old guard, the phone hackers and the radio guys, asked questions about the blue boxes used to manipulate pay phones, staples of the phreaking world... and nobody in the audience could answer. There was a moment of palpable chagrin onstage, and then Emmanuel said, "Give 'em a question about UNIX systems." No complaints from him, just a quiet adjustment. I wonder how the old guys feel about having such a very different experience of computing from hackers today, such as they are.

*The social engineering lecture was, IMO, the highlight of the conference. The old-school hackerati got up on stage and explained how information you were interested in could be got by simply calling people, posing as some sort of expert, and asking questions.

As in years past, AT&T was to be a target, but they’ve been duped enough times now that they got wise well before the conference and circulated a memo telling employees to ask for human resources ID numbers and put up a few other barriers, for example blocking all 800 calls on the conference’s two lines. No big deal; while a call went out for donated phone cards from the audience to circumvent the problem, the veterans told stories of past exploits. One guy told of hacking into the intercom at at a major drugstore chain through their phone tree, calling for unneccessary aisle cleanups, playing Ina Gadda Da Vida, murmuring expletives, etc... another talked about duping people over nautical radios by knowing plenty about the ships picking up the signal.

Eventually Emmanuel decided to call a local Starbucks for a basic hack. Told the guy who picked up he was with the company’s systems administration team, and asked the poor sap if they had a broadband connection down... and the guy said no, it’s our modem, we’ve been having problems. You’re going to have to give me the card number from the last transaction you tried to send, Emmanuel said, having gotten some technical specifications about the modem to cement his authority. Over the speakers in an auditorium full of hundreds of hackers, the guy read the card type, expiration date, and most of the number before Emmanuel stopped him out of common decency... Emmanuel wrapped it up, and the room exploded in cheers.

He then went on to call the Russian Tea Room, saying he had reservations at eight but didn’t know what name his wife had used to reserve. The reservationist gave him the name (“Ah, that’s my pen name, I have a novel coming out soon,” he told her), then changed the reservation slightly later. He got the reservationist to give the phone number on the reservation, called that number, told the answering machine it was the Russian Tea Room calling and that their reservation had been moved to the later hour due to a Health Department visit.

I’m not doing this whole scene justice. They had to shush the room a dozen times (“It’s hard to explain the cheers, guys,” Emmanuel complained). Jen Howk has suggested the whole thing was a set up. In retrospect, I think she might be right; it went too smoothly. If it was real, though, it was a hell of a set of social acrobatics.

*This one guy had created a Linux port of Dance Dance Revolution and had brought it with him. At one point Funny-Hat-Ben calls me from another part of the hotel on his cel, as we had taken to doing, telling me to get my ass down there to check it out. There this kid was, booth set up in an obscure corner of the mezzanine... clearly he needed a better location, and AV equipment was ripe for the plucking, so I accosted the guy in charge of the performance area. DJs were supposed to be playing all day and all night, but they were running late and the next DJ hadn’t set up his kit yet. They grudgingly let us set up the mat in front of a large projection screen on the empty dance floor. A crowd had formed around the mat when the DJ, giant headphones and green hair and spike piercings, showed up by the booth and started making pouty faces at us... I’m really excited about this, I’ve been planning it for months, he said. Some of us got a song each in, then we had to fold. The DJ took up the booth. The dance floor *emptied.* Some of the DDR enthusiasts spent the rest of the night plotting how to get back at him.

Don’t you try to skool me. I’ll show YOU what geeks like to dance to. Posted by Gus at July 15, 2002 12:12 AM | TrackBack