"Rushkoff, Douglas - Cyberia" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rushkoff Douglas)

Craig was seven when he discovered the catacombs.'' His parents had taken him on a
family visit to his uncle, and while the adults sat in the kitchen discussing the prices of sofas
and local politics, young Craig Neidorf--whom the authorities would eventually prosecute as a
dangerous, subversive hacker--found one of the first portals to Cyberia: a video game called
Adventure.
Like a child who wanders away from his parents during a tour of the Vatican to
explore the ancient, secret passages beneath the public walkways, Craig had embarked on his
own video-driven visionquest. As he made his way through the game's many screens and
collected magical objects, Craig learned that he could use those objects to see'' portions of
the game that no one else could. Even though he had completed whatever tasks were
necessary in the earlier parts of the game, he was drawn back to explore them with his new
vision. Craig was no longer interested in just winning the game--he could do that effortlessly.
Now he wanted to get inside it.
I was able to walk through a wall into a room that did not exist,'' Craig explains to
me late one night over questionably accessed phone lines. "It was not in the instructions. It
was not part of the game. And in that room was a message. It was a message from the creator
of the game, flashing in black and gold...''
Craig's voice trails off. Hugh, my assistant and link-artist to the telephone net, adjusts
his headset, checks a meter, then acknowledges with a nod that the conversation is still being
recorded satisfactorily. Craig would not share with me what the message said--only that it
motivated his career as a cyberian. This process--finding something that wasn't written about,
discovering something that I wasn't supposed to know--it got me very interested. I searched in
various other games and tried everything I could think of--even jiggling the power cord or the
game cartridge just to see what would happen. That's where my interest in playing with that
kind of thing began ... but then I got an Apple.''
At that point, Cyberia, which had previously been limited to the other side of the
television screen, expanded to become the other side of the computer screen. With the help of
a telephone connection called a modem,'' Craig was linked to a worldwide system of
computers and communications. Now, instead of exploring the inner workings of a packaged
video game, Craig was roaming the secret passages of the datasphere.
By the time he was a teenager, Craig Neidorf had been arrested. Serving as the editor
of an on-line magazine'' (passed over phone lines from computer to computer) called Phrack,
he was charged with publishing (legally, "transporting'') a dangerous, $79,000 program
document detailing the workings of Bell South's emergency 911 telephone system
(specifically, the feature that allows them to trace incoming calls). At Neidorf's trial, a Bell
South employee eventually revealed that the program'' was actually a three-page memo
available to Bell South customers for less than $30. Neidorf was put on a kind of probation
for a year, but he is still raising money to cover his $100,000 legal expenses.
But the authorities and, for most part, adult society are missing the point here. Craig
and his compatriots are not interested in obtaining and selling valuable documents. These kids
are not stealing information--they are surfing data. In Cyberia, the computer serves as a
metaphor as much as a tool; to hack through one system to another and yet another is to
discover the secret rooms and passageways where no one has ever traveled before. The web
of interconnected computer networks provides the ultimate electronic neural extension for the
growing mind. To reckon with this technological frontier of human consciousness means to
reevaluate the very nature of information, creativity, property and human relations.
Craig is fairly typical of the young genius-pioneers of this new territory. He describes
the first time he saw a hacker in action:
I really don't remember how he got in; I was sitting there while he typed. But to see
these other systems were out there was sort of interesting. I saw things like shopping