l∅ckedinab∅x: Hack the planet

19 March 2004

Hack the planet

Let me tell you about my friend Gabriel. I met Gabriel in my IT class in six-form college; a tall softly spoken dude with gothic pretentions, who fit right into my definition of cool, with the twisted sense of humour and the morbid mentality, we got on like a house on fire. He was also a hacker; a good one, discrete, true to the ethic, deeply interested in the inner workings of networks, not some fly-by-night script-kiddie fuck who thinks it's big and clever to fuck up naive computer users machines. Fuck, until 10 years or so ago nobody even knew what a hacker was but after the internet blew-up mainstream the word was on everybody's lips. Anyway, my point being he wasn't an immature prick, he was the real deal. Tripping the machine fantastic, muttering RFCs in his sleep, hacking pedophile servers and tipping off the police, a white hat. Not that I'm saying he never did naughty shit, mind you.

We we're pretty tight for the duration of the course, for which I basically did none of the work because it was relational databases and business shit, not interesting like I thought it would be, and we'd hang out along with our friend James, get milkshakes during breaks, and try to get the network do interesting things. Web access was blocked on the machines we used, but much time was wasted on MUSHes and usenet. Gabriel did his work and got an A. He got into one of the top computer science universities in Britain and when september rolled around off he went. I finished with only one A-level (Film Studies) and decided to repeat a year leaning more towards creative things. We keep in contact over msn messanger and we go out sometimes when he's in Cardiff.

Anyway, he's on work placement right now. Guess where this guy has a placement? GCHQ. After years of hacking into shit for fun he's now getting paid for it, by the government. This guy could be reading your email right now.

Only kidding, your email is boring as fuck.

note: dear GCHQ: The individual in question hasn't actually told me shit about what he's doing with you guys, just like his contract says, so don't fire him, okay? He'll kill me...

[qu∅tes]

"one helped oneself out of solitude reluctantly by laying hold of some little odd or end, some sound, some sight." Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse

[on cinematography] "After you have done a picture you forget everything you have ever known, so that you become a child again, or an infant or a void into which the new picture creates a whole new evolvement... So that you do not have to keep doing the same thing all over again. In other words you take what yourself back to ground zero. Of course you cannot unlearn what your brain knowns. But I mean it emotionally. I mean you just become scared again, as if you do not know anything... I never felt on top of it. I neverfelt that I knew so much that I could sit back with a cup of coffee and it would all turn out wonderful." - Conrad Hall

[on cinematography] "When the budget is minimal you are forced to look at light as you find it, and to make it look good." - Haskell Wexler

"Rock 'n' roll is like an attitude, it's not a musical form of a strict sort. It's a way of doing things, of approaching things. Like anything can be rock 'n' roll." - Lester Bangs

"The capitalist mind perceives the world purely in terms of material resources to be used for its benefit, to increase productivity and profit without thought of long-term consequences." - Daniel Pinchbec, Breaking Open the Head

"In shamanic cultures, synchronicities are recognised as signs that you are on the right path." - Daniel Pinchbec, Breaking Open the Head (excerpt), Book of Lies

"...reality is up for grabs, so learn the codes through which the narrative is crafted and participate in its unfolding." - Douglas Rushkoff

"Hiroshima and Nagasaki were atomized at a time when the Japanese were suing desperately for peace. The American leaders were acting with almost inconceivable treachery by denying that they had received requests for peace…The bombs were exploded on congested cities filled with civilians. There was not even the slightest military justification, because the military outcome of the war had been decided months earlier." - Dave Dellinger

"We're living in a new Beat time, in my view. And it's very difficult for us to hang on." - Tilda Swinton

"Pursue the small utopias: nature, music, friendship, intimate love." -The Fugs

"We have reconstructed the Tower of Babel, and it is a television antenna: a thousand voices producing a daily parody of democracy, in which everyone's opinion is afforded equal weight regardless of substance or merit." - Ted Koppel

"There are alot of things you have to sacrfice. It all depends on how deep you want to get into whatever your gig is. Whatever you're there for. So like the deeper you get into it the more sacrifices you have to do, maybe even on your personality or your outward this and that. I just dedicate my life to this whole art. You have to forget about what people say. If it's art or anything else, whatever you really, really dig doing, you have to forget about what people say about you sometimes. Forget about this or that-when you're supposed to die or when you're supposed to be living. You have to forget about all these things. You have to go on and be crazy. Craziness is like heaven. Once you reach that point of where you don't give a damn about what everybody else is saying you're going towards heaven. The more you get into it, they're goin' to say "Damn, that cat's really flipped out. Oh, he's gone now". But if you're producin' and creatin', you know, you're getting closer to your own heaven. That's what man's tryin' to get to, anyway." - James Marshall Hendrix

"With its totalizing claim, the system created the conditions for this horrible retaliation. The immanent mania of globalization generates madness, just as an unstable society produces delinquents and psychopaths. In truth, these are only symptoms of the sickness." - Jean Baudrillard

"If poetry is what you can't translate, as Robert Frost once suggested, then art is what you cannot define. Nevertheless, it's fun to try." - james monaco, 'how to read a film'

"This spectacle of banality is todays true pornography..." - Jean Baudrillard

"...today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. We are bombarded with pseudorealities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms." - Philip K. Dick

"There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose ideas, shining in his head, frighted people and for whom delirium is the only solution to the strangulation that life has prepared for him." - Antonin Artaud

"The way to create art is to burn and destroy ordinary concepts and to substitute them with new truths that run down from the top of the head and out from the heart." - Charles Bukowski

"Tea heads are a sociable lot. Too sociable for my liking." - William S. Burroughs

l∅ckedinab∅x

19 March 2004

Hack the planet

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