Computer underground Digest Wed July 15, 1998 Volume 10 : Issue 38

Computer underground Digest Wed July 15, 1998 Volume 10 : Issue 38
ISSN 1004-042X

Editor: Jim Thomas ([email protected])
News Editor: Gordon Meyer ([email protected])
Archivist: Brendan Kehoe
Shadow Master: Stanton McCandlish
Shadow-Archivists: Dan Carosone / Paul Southworth
Ralph Sims / Jyrki Kuoppala
Ian Dickinson
Field Agent Extraordinaire: David Smith
Cu Digest Homepage: http://www.soci.niu.edu/~cudigest

CONTENTS, #10.38 (Wed, July 15, 1998)

File 1--Internet "Losing Virginity" Event a Scam
File 2--Free Kevin Mitnick -- Action Alert #1
File 3--Internet Privacy Ruling in Canada (excerpt)
File 4-- "EFF DES CRACKER" MACHINE BRINGS HONESTY TO CRYPTO DEBATE
File 5--Islands in the Clickstream. Prof. Communicators. July 4, 1998
File 6--Cu Digest Header Info (unchanged since 25 Apr, 1998)

CuD ADMINISTRATIVE, EDITORIAL, AND SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION ApPEARS IN
THE CONCLUDING FILE AT THE END OF EACH ISSUE.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Sun, 19 Jul 98 14:17 CDT
From: anonymous ([email protected])
Subject: File 1--Internet "Losing Virginity" Event a Scam

((MODERATORS' NOTE: Probably not many people outside of the media
were deceived by the story that two "18 year old virgins"
intended to lose their virginity on the net.

The intro to the site's homepage, http://www.ourfirsttime.com,
said:

On August 4th, 1998..... Come and meet Diane and Mike,
two 18 year old "Honor" students who have recently
graduated from high school, and are looking forward to
starting college in the fall. They are as close to
being "typical All-American" kids as you can get.
Active in school and church. Well liked by family,
friends, and their community - but sexually, they are
both virgins.Their lives are going to change in a
unique and dramatic way. They are about to leave the
safety of youth, accept the challenges of adulthood,
and take that frightening ... but wonderful, step into
adult sexuality. There's one big difference...they are
going to let the world come along and witness their
lives over an 18 day period as this adventure unfolds,
when they lose their virginity together ....

All, of course, for a small cost. The Chicago Tribune reported
the hoax in a short inside story on July 18. The following are
extracts from Reuters.

==============

By Mark Egan

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A company that was to provide the computer
equipment to show two 18-year-olds losing their virginity on the
Internet said Friday the event was a hoax designed to make a fortune
and fool millions of people.

Seattle-based Internet Entertainment Group (IEG), which had signed a
contract to supply the computer hardware, told Reuters the organizers
planned to charge Internet users $5 each and then not deliver on their
promise that the couple would have sex "for the first time."

IEG's President Seth Warshavsky said the couple was going to have AIDS
tests and pick out condoms leading up to their Aug. 4 event and charge
viewers $5 for "age-verification" purposes. Then on the actual day,
the couple would decide they were not ready for sex, he said.

<SNIP>

Warshavsky said he was informed by Ken Tipton, the organizer of the
event, in a phone call on Friday that it was aimed at fooling more
people than Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" 60 years ago. That
realistic radio drama duped millions of Americans into thinking that
Martians had invaded New Jersey.

<SNIP>

According to IEG's Web site (www.clublove.com) Tipton told the
company, "Nobody has any intention of having sex. You won't even see
them naked. Christ, I wouldn't be surprised to find out Diane had lost
her virginity years ago in the back seat of a Chevy."

Attorney Vega said Thursday that the site had attracted "hundreds of
millions" of "hits" and could become one the biggest ever online
events. He insisted the Web site would have been free and that the
event "was not about making money."

The caper was a field day for hackers who were able to trace
"www.ourfirsttime.com" Web site to Tipton and then connect Tipton and
Vega to the same movie production company.

Vega is known in Los Angeles legal circles for his work on freedom of
speech cases. He insisted in interviews earlier this week that the
project was not a hoax but an effort to expand free speech on the Net.

IEG, which markets the sex video of actress Pamela Anderson and rocker
Tommy Lee on its Web sites, became involved with the project Thursday.
But 24 hours after signing the contract, the company pulled out
because it said it suspected the organizers' motives.

<SNIP>

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 6 Jul 1998 08:50:02 -0700 (PDT)
From: Free Kevin <[email protected]>
Subject: File 2--Free Kevin Mitnick -- Action Alert #1

FREE KEVIN MITNICK -- ACTION ALERT #1
5 July 1998

-----------------------------------------

PLEASE REDISTRIBUTE THIS DOCUMENT TO APPROPRIATE FORUMS

-----------------------------------------

1) Happy 4th of July
2) Let's Screw Kevin Again: The Movie
3) Where Are the Activists?
4) What You Can Do

------------------------------------------------------------

1) Happy 4th of July

Did you have an enjoyable 4th of July weekend? Did you hang out by the
barbecue, beer in hand, and eat too many burgers and/or tofu dogs? Well,
whatever you did, it was probably more enjoyable then Kevin Mitnick's 4th of
July. Kevin spent his in the same place that he had the last few -- the
Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Los Angeles.

Kevin has been held without bail for three years and four months pending his
trial on a 25 count federal indictment, and it will likely be more than four
years without bail by the time his trial actually takes place. MDC is a
pre-trial facility and is intended for much shorter periods of detention, so
Kevin is only allowed visits from his attorney and immediate family.
Amazingly, Kevin has never had the opportunity to present evidence and
cross-examine witnesses in an adversarial detention hearing, as is required
by the Bail Reform Act.

Kevin did waive his right to a speedy trial, as most defendants do, but this
isn't quite what he had in mind.

What makes all of this worse is that Kevin is not likely to get the
facilities that he needs to defend himself properly while he is in MDC. The
government is entering loads of evidence against Kevin that exists in
electronic form, and he will need a computer and a lot of time to properly
sort through it all. So far it appears that he will be given neither the time
nor the equipment to properly prepare a defense against the government's
case.

How long will this go on? Kevin has never committed a violent crime, and
there's no evidence that there was any profit motive behind his hacking.
Violent and truly dangerous criminals get lighter treatment than Kevin
every day and no one blinks. What would the Founding Fathers have thought
of such an obvious attempt to prevent someone from obtaining a fair trial?

Let's hope that Kevin doesn't have to spend another 4th of July in custody
next year...

------------------------------------------------------------

2) Let's Screw Kevin Again: The Movie

From the Exploitative Journalism Makes Good Movies department:

Miramax pictures recently announced that they will begin shooting in July on
"Takedown," a movie based on the book by Tsutomu Shimomura and John Markoff.
The book, which chronicles Shimomura's version of the events leading up to
Kevin's capture, was criticized by some as a self-serving attempt by the
authors to cash in on the hype surrounding Mitnick's arrest. People who
have seen the script for the movie say it's even worse.

Emmanuel Goldstein, editor of "2600" magazine, was one of the first Mitnick
supporters to obtain a copy of the "Takedown" script. Goldstein writes that
the script is "far worse than I had even imagined." "If this film is made
the way the script reads," he adds, "Kevin will be forever demonized in the
eyes of the public. And mostly for things that everyone agrees *never even
happened* in the first place!"

Inaccuracies in the script range from the merely comical (Kevin makes free
phone calls by whistling touch tones into the handset) to the outright false
and defamatory (Kevin assaults Shimomura in an alley with a garbage-can lid,
and Shimomura visits Kevin in prison and tells him "good work" for cracking
his systems).

Goldstein's notes on the script is online at:

http://www.kevinmitnick.com/review.html

In an article for ZDTV, columnist Kevin Poulsen writes, "nobody predicted
that the script, supposedly based on the dry, but inoffensive book of the
same name, would be filled with so much blatant fabrication. No one expected
that Kevin Mitnick might become the most feared and hated screen villain
since Hannibal Lecter."

Poulsen, himself a convicted hacker who was held for years without bail,
scored a revealing interview with one of the "Takedown" screenwriters, John
Danza. Danza told Poulsen that he had wanted to present a different view of
Mitnick's case, one that "wasn't so black and white; good and bad-- I think
Tsutomu was basically self-serving, and I thought it would be an interesting
idea if he realized that." The studio allegedly didn't buy off on Danza's
ideas, or even on his draft that stuck more closely to the book. "Then they
gave it to a high-priced polish writer who gets paid an enormous amount of
money to spice up the dialog," Danza told Poulsen, "and I think he did that
and also changed quite a bit. I've read that draft and I'm even less
satisfied."

Poulsen's article is at:

http://www.zdnet.com/zdtv/cda/index/0,2073,2115491-2103615,00.html

He's written several other articles about Mitnick's case:

http://www.zdnet.com/zdtv/cda/index/0,2073,2110084-2103615.00.html
http://www.zdnet.com/zdtv/cda/index/0,2073,2000162-2103615.00.html
http://www.zdnet.com/zdtv/cda/index/0,2073,2000163-2103615.00.html

-----------------------------------------------------------

3) Where Are the Activists?

One of the most disturbing aspects of Kevin Mitnick's case is the lack of
support for his plight from Net activists. The same people who could probably
quote moving passages from their dog-eared copies of "The Hacker Crackdown"
seem to become very quiet when it comes to Kevin's case. Not only have groups
like EFF not lent direct legal support to Kevin, but they have done little
else to show any support for him.

It's time for Internet activists to take a stand. It's time for people to
realize that for phrases like "Cyber Rights Now" to have any meaning, they
must apply to Kevin Mitnick as well as every other netizen. Even if we assume
that the worst accusations about Kevin's hacking are true, it still becomes
quickly clear that his case has been blown way out of proportion. Kevin is
the victim of a campaign to hype his story, a campaign which has made
millions of dollars for those responsible.

Obviously, Net activist organizations have a limited amount of time and
must focus their resources. They cannot respond to every potential crisis,
and no reasonable person would expect them to. They have other, more
practical concerns as well, like the possibility of alienating potential
donors and sponsors. That's reality.

What's also reality is that Kevin's case is sure to be a landmark in the
field of computer crime, and that activists should be getting involved to
make sure that bad precedents aren't set which could impact us all. Kevin
is obviously being singled out to act as an example for other hackers, and
the message is pretty clear so far: that the government can do as it
pleases when it comes to hackers, civil rights be damned. If that's the
case, then how safe is anyone?

Why should a "computer criminal" be treated more severely than violent
criminals are? Is a hacker more dangerous to the fabric of society than
a rapist or murderer? Should someone be penalized more severely for their
crimes because they involve computers? Is a computer a weapon, something to
be feared?

Will the real activists please stand up?

Ironically, it's the movie of "Takedown," which some people feel may do
irreversible damage to Kevin's reputation, that may put him in the same
boat with some prominent netizens. EFF co-founder John Gilmore reportedly
is portrayed in a negative light in the script, as is the management of The
Well. And believe it or not, Goldstein writes that the script portrays
"'Electronic Freedom Foundation' types" who actually aid in Mitnick's
capture. Things aren't quite that bad in real life, but they could be a lot
better.

------------------------------------------------------------

4) What You Can Do

There are a lot of things you can do to help Kevin's situation:

A) Donate to Kevin's defense fund. This is one of the most helpful things you
can do. Over $3,000 has been raised so far, but that's just a drop in the
bucket. Kevin needs expert witnesses, research, and other things that the
court is unlikely to provide much financial help for. Information about
donating is at:

http://www.kevinmitnick.com/df.html

If you can't afford to donate, though, there are still other things you
can do.

B) Bumper stickers. The tres chic "Free Kevin" bumper stickers are available
for $1 apiece through www.kevinmitnick.com, and the money goes towards
Kevin's defense fund. You can also place a virtual bumper sticker on your
web page and link it to www.kevinmitnick.com.

C) Join the mailing list. "2600" has set up a Majordomo list for discussion
of Kevin's case, and it's a great place to stay tuned for information about
the case and other related events. Email [email protected] with the words
"subscribe mitnick" (without the quotes) as the body of your message.
You can also get info on Kevin's case (and many other topics) from "Off
The Hook," Emmanuel Goldstein's radio program that airs on WBAI in New
York, and via RealAudio. More info is at:

http://www.2600.com/offthehook/

D) Protest the movie, "Takedown." Plans are being put in place now for
pickets of the Miramax offices in New York and Los Angeles, and there will
likely be some sort of demonstrations in North Carolina when shooting
there begins. Join the mailing list using the directions above to stay up
to date on these events. Also, write letters to those involved with the
movie expressing your feelings about the project. Individuals involved
with the production might not even be aware of the finer points of the
case, and they deserve to know what they're getting themselves into. A
list of contacts is at the end of this message.

E) Write legislators, members of the media, and anyone else you can think of
who might be able to have a positive impact on Kevin's situation.

F) Join the RC5 team. We're participating in the distributed.net effort to
crack RC5-64, and if someone on our team hits the key we will donate
our winnings to Kevin's defense fund. It's also an opportunity to get
some positive publicity for Kevin, and, after all, they're just spare CPU
cycles. You might as well use them for a good cause. More information is
at:

http://www.paranoid.org/mitnick/

G) Contact Net activists and ask them to get involved. The trial is getting
nearer, and Kevin needs help now, not in a couple of years on appeal.

H) Read, read, read. Read the books about Kevin's case, and the information
at www.kevinmitnick.com. The more information you have, the better able
you'll be to discuss the case.

I) Spread the word. Tell people about Kevin's case, hand out fliers, do
whatever you can to try to help balance out the negative hype.

J) Repost this message to appropriate forums.

K) Think of more ideas like these and post them to the mailing list.

-------------------------------------------------------

CONTACTS:

For feedback about this document, contact [email protected].
Emmanuel Goldstein of "2600" can be reached at [email protected].
Feedback on the www.kevinmitnick.com website should go to
[email protected].

We can all be reached through the [email protected] Majordomo list.

ASCII art by rOTTEN.

-----------------------------------------------------

People to contact about the movie "Takedown," as posted to the
[email protected] list:

Miramax Films
7966 Beverly Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90048
(213) 951-4200
(213) 951-4315 (fax)

Miramax Films
375 Greenwich St., 3rd floor
New York, NY 10013
(212) 941-3800
(212) 941-3949 (fax)

ANDREW STENGEL
Publicist for Miramax
(212) 625-2222

DAILY VARIETY
5700 Wilshire Boulevard #120
Los Angeles, CA 90036
(213) 857-6600

MONICA ROMAN
Variety writer who wrote internet announcement
about "Takedown" movie
(212) 337-7001 (Variety New York office)

HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
5055 Wilshire Bouevard #600
Los Angeles, CA 90036
(213) 525-2000

SKEET ULRICH (actor who will play Kevin Mitnick)
ICM
8942 Wilshire Boulevard
Beverly Hills, CA 90211
(310) 550-4000
(310) 550-4100 (fax)
(this is the agency representing Skeet)
Aleen Keshishian (212) 556-5698 (Skeet's agent)

JOE CHAPPELLE (director of Takedown)
Bohrman Agency
8489 W. Third Street
Los Angeles, CA 90048
(213) 653-6701
(agency representing Chappelle)

DAVID NEWMAN
HOWARD RODMAN
JOHN DANZA
(writers of Takedown script)
There were too many Newmans to trace.
Danza is not listed with the Writers Guild.
Howard Rodman is represented by:
Creative Artists
9830 Wilshire Boulevard
Beverly Hills, CA 90212
(310) 288-4545

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 11 Jul 1998 09:00:37 -0400
From: "Simon.Van-Norden" <[email protected]
Subject: File 3--Internet Privacy Ruling in Canada (excerpt)

Knowing your interest in privacy and legal issues on the internet, I
thought I'd send along the following item I found today. (The Financial
Post is Canada's leading daily business newspaper.)

--

Internet providers on defensive after Philip Ruling
More FP Technology stories

By KEITH DAMSELL
Technology Reporter The Financial Post

Corporate Canada is enthusiastic but Internet providers are
feeling defensive after struggling Philip Services Corp. won a
court order that may curb investors' online chat. "What's wrong
about making people more responsible?" asked Toronto corporate
lawyer and Internet surfer Derrick Tay. "Accountability is not a
bad thing." On Thursday, it was disclosed Philip had won court
ordersthat will force Internet providers to turn over the names,
addresses and messages of chat group users who have been
criticizing the company and its officers since April.

The industrial waste recycling and metals firm has becomethe
focus of angry and malicious gossip on the Internet after a
copper trading scandal earlier this year that left it with losses
of about US$200 million.

<SNIP>

The ruling is expected to have broad implications for investors
who talk on the Internet. If the court order remains
unchallenged, their anonymity will disappear. The decision is
believed to mark the first time a Canadian court has waded into
privacy issues in cyberspace.

<SNIP>

The developing technology of cyberspace means e-mail containing
hate messages may not even stem from the Internet provider in
question, Remborg said. By Friday afternoon, several Internet
providers had complied with the court order. "We haven't decided
what we want to do with the information," said Philips
spokeswoman Lynda Kuhn. "The goal was to stop the defamation."

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 17 Jul 1998 11:27:12 -0700 (PDT)
From: Mike Godwin <[email protected]>
Subject: File 4-- "EFF DES CRACKER" MACHINE BRINGS HONESTY TO CRYPTO DEBATE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 17, 1998

CONTACTS:
Alexander Fowler, +1 202 462 5826, [email protected]
Barry Steinhardt, +1 415 436 9333 ext. 102, [email protected]
John Gilmore, +1 415 221 6524, [email protected]

"EFF DES CRACKER" MACHINE BRINGS HONESTY TO CRYPTO DEBATE

ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION PROVES THAT DES IS NOT SECURE

SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today
raised the level of honesty in crypto politics by revealing that the
Data Encryption Standard (DES) is insecure. The U.S. government has
long pressed industry to limit encryption to DES (and even weaker
forms), without revealing how easy it is to crack. Continued adherence
to this policy would put critical infrastructures at risk; society
should choose a different course.

To prove the insecurity of DES, EFF built the first unclassified
hardware for cracking messages encoded with it. On Wednesday of this
week the EFF DES Cracker, which was built for less than $250,000,
easily won RSA Laboratory's "DES Challenge II" contest and a $10,000
cash prize. It took the machine less than 3 days to complete the
challenge, shattering the previous record of 39 days set by a massive
network of tens of thousands of computers. The research results are
fully documented in a book published this week by EFF and O'Reilly and
Associates, entitled "Cracking DES: Secrets of Encryption Research,
Wiretap Politics, and Chip Design."

"Producing a workable policy for encryption has proven a very hard
political challenge. We believe that it will only be possible to
craft good policies if all the players are honest with one another and
the public," said John Gilmore, EFF co-founder and project leader. "When
the government won't reveal relevant facts, the private sector must
independently conduct the research and publish the results so that we
can all see the social trade-offs involved in policy choices."

The nonprofit foundation designed and built the EFF DES Cracker to
counter the claim made by U.S. government officials that governments
cannot decrypt information when protected by DES, or that it would
take multimillion-dollar networks of computers months to decrypt one
message. "The government has used that claim to justify policies of
weak encryption and 'key recovery,' which erode privacy and security
in the digital age," said EFF Executive Director Barry Steinhardt. It
is now time for an honest and fully informed debate, which we believe
will lead to a reversal of these policies."

"EFF has proved what has been argued by scientists for twenty years,
that DES can be cracked quickly and inexpensively," said Gilmore.
"Now that the public knows, it will not be fooled into buying products
that promise real privacy but only deliver DES. This will prevent
manufacturers from buckling under government pressure to 'dumb down'
their products, since such products will no longer sell." Steinhardt
added, "If a small nonprofit can crack DES, your competitors can too.
Five years from now some teenager may well build a DES Cracker as her
high school science fair project."

The Data Encryption Standard, adopted as a federal standard in 1977 to
protect unclassified communications and data, was designed by IBM and
modified by the National Security Agency. It uses 56-bit keys,
meaning a user must employ precisely the right combination of 56 1s
and 0s to decode information correctly. DES accounted for more than
$125 million annually in software and hardware sales, according to a
1993 article in "Federal Computer Week." Trusted Information Systems
reported last December that DES can be found in 281 foreign and 466
domestic encryption products, which accounts for between a third and
half of the market.

A DES cracker is a machine that can read information encrypted with
DES by finding the key that was used to encrypt that data. DES
crackers have been researched by scientists and speculated about in
the popular literature on cryptography since the 1970s. The design
of the EFF DES Cracker consists of an ordinary personal computer
connected to a large array of custom chips. It took EFF less than
one year to build and cost less than $250,000.

This week marks the first public test of the EFF DES Cracker, which
won the latest DES-cracking speed competition sponsored by RSA
Laboratories (http://www.rsa.com/rsalabs/). Two previous RSA
challenges proved that massive collections of computers coordinated
over the Internet could successfully crack DES. Beginning Monday
morning, the EFF DES Cracker began searching for the correct answer to
this latest challenge, the RSA DES Challenge II-2. In less than 3
days of searching, the EFF DES Cracker found the correct key. "We
searched more than 88 billion keys every second, for 56 hours, before
we found the right 56-bit key to decrypt the answer to the RSA
challenge, which was 'It's time for those 128-, 192-, and 256-bit
keys,'" said Gilmore.

Many of the world's top cryptographers agree that the EFF DES Cracker
represents a fundamental breakthrough in how we evaluate computer
security and the public policies that control its use. "With the
advent of the EFF DES Cracker machine, the game changes forever," said
Whitfield Diffie, Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems and famed
co-inventor of public key cryptography. "Vast Internet collaborations
cannot be concealed and so they cannot be used to attack real, secret
messages. The EFF DES Cracker shows that it is easy to build search
engines that can."

"The news is not that a DES cracker can be built; we've known that for
years," said Bruce Schneier, the President of Counterpane Systems.
"The news is that it can be built cheaply using off-the-shelf technology
and minimal engineering, even though the department of Justice and the FBI
have been denying that this was possible." Matt Blaze, a cryptographer
at AT&T Labs, agreed: "Today's announcement is significant because it
unambiguously demonstrates that DES is vulnerable, even to attackers with
relatively modest resources. The existence of the EFF DES Cracker proves
that the threat of "brute force" DES key search is a reality. Although
the cryptographic community has understood for years that DES keys are
much too small, DES-based systems are still being designed and used
today. Today's announcement should dissuade anyone from using DES."

EFF and O'Reilly and Associates have published a book about the EFF
DES Cracker, "Cracking DES: Secrets of Encryption Research, Wiretap
Politics, and Chip Design." The book contains the complete design
details for the EFF DES Cracker chips, boards, and software. This
provides other researchers with the necessary data to fully reproduce,
validate, and/or improve on EFF's research, an important step in the
scientific method. The book is only available on paper because
U.S. export controls on encryption potentially make it a crime to
publish such information on the Internet.

EFF has prepared a background document on the EFF DES Cracker, which
includes the foreword by Whitfield Diffie to "Cracking DES." See
http://www.eff.org/descracker/. The book can be ordered for worldwide
delivery from O'Reilly & Associates at http://www.ora.com/catalog/crackdes,
+1 800 998 9938, or +1 707 829 0515.

**********

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is one of the leading civil liberties
organizations devoted to ensuring that the Internet remains the world's
first truly global vehicle for free speech, and that the privacy and
security of all on-line communication is preserved. Founded in 1990 as a
nonprofit, public interest organization, EFF is based in San Francisco,
California. EFF maintains an extensive archive of information on
encryption policy, privacy, and free speech at http://www.eff.org.

------------------------------

Date: Wed, 08 Jul 1998 19:23:37 -0500
From: Richard Thieme <[email protected]>
Subject: File 5--Islands in the Clickstream. Prof. Communicators. July 4, 1998
Islands in the Clickstream:
Professional Communicators

From one point of view, all we humans do is communicate. We broadcast
information about ourselves all the time, just as our planet broadcasts
information into space. (Isn't there a better name than "space?" "Space"
sounds like Greeks calling all the non-Greeks "barbarians." The Universe
is teeming with life, and all we can call it is "space?")

But I digress.

All humans communicate, yes, but there are also men and women who call
themselves "professional speakers." I am just back from a convention of two
thousand of them. The National Speakers Association has been a tent for
twenty-five years under which every conceivable kind of "professional
speaker" comes to work and play.

Nick Carter, one of the great veterans of the speaking business, calls
himself a professional communicator, not a professional speaker. By making
that distinction, he captures the essence of life in the digital world.

The digital world is interactive, modular, and very much in flux, and
because it is back-engineering the way we imagine everything, we see our
selves as modular and transitory too. We imagine life as a kind of
plug-and-play digital game. We build symbolic modules in our minds and live
in those morphing modules even as our intuition tells us that there is a
larger matrix of possibility from which they all emerge.

In a world of simulations, we achieve our goals by maintaining some
consistency of artifact and design. We sustain a professional identity the
way a business engages in branding. In a way that prior generations could
not imagine, our intentions really do generate the landscapes of our lives.
The primacy of intentionality extends far beyond tasks or projects to our
selves and personas, the identities we present to the world. We become who
we intend to become, and when we alter the matrix of our lives, when we
move through any kind of dramatic passage or transition, we must build a
symbolic bridge even as we cross the chasm to become the self we are
imagining, adding modules to the modules of which we are already built.

Back to that great circus of "professional speakers." Enter the tent, the
first thing you notice is that every single one of us is hopelessly
neurotic. What a bunch we are, honestly. We traffic in symbols, nothing but
symbols, and because we know that we're always dancing in the middle of the
air, we pretend all the more that there's firm ground under our feet. We
look around at all the beautiful people and compare our fluttering, anxious
insides with the polished veneer of these practiced actors. We come
together because we need one another deeply, but the minute we're together,
we pretend we don't. We present images of accomplishment and success that
would make even a Bill Gates doubt his vocation.

But then, that's all of us, isn't it? Isn't that life in a knowledge
economy? What happens at that convention is what happens in the digital
world. We can choose to believe the symbols or we can see through them to
both the childlike fears and the real contribution of the people who invent
them. We come back to both the digital world and that convention because
every year we find more real connection, more modular structures to channel
the flow of energy and information, and suddenly we discover that we have
real friends in a world in which no one can know enough to make it alone.

Maintaining integrity in a world of simulations is, at best, pretty tricky.
Integrity once meant "walking the talk," the congruence of action and
speech. Now integrity means alignment of our selves and ALL of the digital
images we create.

The worst mistake we can make is to confuse our presentations for the
imperfect foundation on which they stand.

The story is told of a violinist whose notes were diced and spliced by an
expert mixer until the concerto he had played a dozen times had been turned
into one perfect performance. He was listening to the sound track with
obvious delight and turned to a colleague. "Isn't that magnificent?"

"Yes," said his friend. "Don't you wish you could play that well?"

Our egos always airbrush our self-portraits. Our minds are like PhotoShop,
making everything look better. The war between memory and pride, noted
Nietzsche, is always won by pride. Session musicians are replaced by
synthesizers, actors by their own more perfect digital scans. How can we
believe those images represent who we really are? And yet they do
because our images of ourselves are generated by interacting in and through
the matrix of those digital symbols. Mental artifacts couple with digital
ones. The simulation becomes the real landscape, perception becomes
reality. The symbolic universe we inhabit defines our larger life in a way
we can never escape.

"Professional speakers" had better become "professional communicators" and
so had everybody else. The symbolic modules we construct are bridges
between the thought of taking a step and the step itself, a Big Toy we can
climb to the next level of self-representation and self-understanding. We
need that bridge because we are headed for a cliff. The cliff is our
extinction, the moment of our translation as a species into something else,
something that we half-create and half-discover as we take control of our
evolution, spread throughout the solar system and to the nearest stars, and
become utterly other.

Yes, we do need a better name than "space" for the gregarious universe. And
a better name than "human" for what we are becoming. And a better name than
"aliens" for the others we encounter. And a better name than "writer" or
"speaker" for people who give names to emergent realities. Both the names
and the realities have already been invented somewhere in the deeper matrix
under us all. We ride a river of archetypal energy streaming from an
underground canyon, rafting a whitewater river that is a dream, not ours,
under a sky of multiple moons.

**********************************************************************

Islands in the Clickstream is a weekly column written by
Richard Thieme exploring social and cultural dimensions
of computer technology. Comments are welcome.

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Islands in the Clickstream (c) Richard Thieme, 1998. All rights reserved.

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------------------------------

Date: Thu, 25 Apr 1998 22:51:01 CST
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