Permanent Record

Ultima Online
, which was my
favorite MMORPG, I had to create and assume an alternative identity, or “alt.” I
could choose, for example, to be a wizard or warrior, a tinkerer or thief, and I
could toggle between these alts with a freedom that was unavailable to me in off-
line life, whose institutions tend to regard all mutability as suspicious.
I’d roam the 
Ultima
gamescape as one of my alts, interacting with the alts of
others. As I got to know these other alts, by collaborating with them on certain
quests, I’d sometimes come to realize that I’d met their users before, just under
different identities, while they, in turn, might realize the same about me. They’d

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read my messages and figure out, through a characteristic phrase I’d used, or a
particular quest that I’d suggest, that I—who was currently, say, a knight who
called herself Shrike—was also, or had also been, a bard who called himself
Corwin, and a smith who called himself Belgarion. Sometimes I just enjoyed
these interactions as opportunities for banter, but more often than not I treated
them competitively, measuring my success by whether I was able to identify
more of another user’s alts than they were able to identify of mine. These
contests to determine whether I could unmask others without being unmasked
myself required me to be careful not to fall into any messaging patterns that
might expose me, while simultaneously engaging others and remaining alert to
the ways in which they might inadvertently reveal their true identities.
While the alts of 
Ultima
were multifarious in name, they were essentially
stabilized by the nature of their roles, which were well defined, even archetypal,
and so enmeshed within the game’s established social order as to make playing
them sometimes feel like discharging a civic duty. After a day at school or at a
job that might seem purposeless and unrewarding, it could feel as if you were
performing a useful service by spending the evening as a healer or shepherd, a
helpful alchemist or mage. The relative stability of the 
Ultima
universe—its
continued development according to defined laws and codes of conduct—
ensured that each alt had their role-specific tasks, and would be judged
according to their ability, or willingness, to complete them and fulfill the societal
expectations of their function.
I loved these games and the alternative lives they let me live, though love
wasn’t quite as liberating for the other members of my family. Games, especially
of the massively multiplayer variety, are notoriously time-consuming, and I was
spending so many hours playing 
Ultima
that our phone bills were becoming
exorbitant and no calls were getting through. The line was always busy. My
sister, now deep into her teen years, became furious when she found out that my
online life had caused her to miss some crucial high-school gossip. However, it
didn’t take her long to figure out that all she had to do to get her revenge was
pick up the phone, which would break the Internet connection. The modem’s
hiss would stop, and before she’d even received a normal dial tone, I’d be
screaming my head off downstairs.
If you’re interrupted in the middle of, say, reading the news online, you can
always go back and pick up wherever you left off. But if you’re interrupted
while playing a game that you can’t pause or save—because a hundred thousand
others are playing it at the same time—you’re ruined. You could be on top of the

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world, some legendary dragon-slayer with your own castle and an army, but after
just thirty seconds of 
CONNECTION LOST
you’d find yourself reconnecting to a
bone-gray screen that bore a cruel epitaph: 
YOU ARE DEAD
.
I’m a bit embarrassed nowadays at how seriously I took all of this, but I can’t
avoid the fact that I felt, at the time, as if my sister was intent on destroying my
life—particularly on those occasions when she’d make sure to catch my eye
from across the room and smile before picking up the downstairs receiver, not
because she wanted to make a phone call but purely because she wanted to
remind me who was boss. Our parents got so fed up with our shouting matches
that they did something uncharacteristically indulgent. They switched our
Internet billing plan from pay-by-the-minute to flat-fee unlimited access, and
installed a second phone line.
Peace smiled upon our abode.

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5
Hacking
All teenagers are hackers. They have to be, if only because their life
circumstances are untenable. They think they’re adults, but the adults think
they’re kids.
Remember, if you can, your own teen years. You were a hacker, too, willing
to do anything to evade parental supervision. Basically, you were fed up with
being treated like a child.
Recall how it felt when anyone older and bigger than you sought to control
you, as if age and size were identical with authority. At one time or another, your
parents, teachers, coaches, scoutmasters, and clergy would all take advantage of
their position to invade your private life, impose their expectations on your
future, and enforce your conformity to past standards. Whenever these adults
substituted their hopes, dreams, and desires for your own, they were doing so, by
their account, “for your own good” or “with your best interests at heart.” And
while sometimes this was true, we all remember those other times when it wasn’t
—when “because I said so” wasn’t enough and “you’ll thank me one day” rang
hollow. If you’ve ever been an adolescent, you’ve surely been on the receiving
end of one of these clichés, and so on the losing end of an imbalance of power.
To grow up is to realize the extent to which your existence has been governed
by systems of rules, vague guidelines, and increasingly unsupportable norms that
have been imposed on you without your consent and are subject to change at a
moment’s notice. There were even some rules that you’d only find out about
after you’d violated them.
If you were anything like me, you were scandalized.
If you were anything like me, you were nearsighted, scrawny, and, age-wise,
barely entering the double digits when you first started to wonder about politics.
In school, you were told that in the system of American politics, citizens give
consent through the franchise to be governed by their equals. This is democracy.

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But democracy certainly wasn’t in place in my US history class, where, if my
classmates and I had the vote, Mr. Martin would have been out of a job. Instead,
Mr. Martin made the rules for US history, Ms. Evans made the rules for English,
Mr. Sweeney made the rules for science, Mr. Stockton made the rules for math,
and all of those teachers constantly changed those rules to benefit themselves
and maximize their power. If a teacher didn’t want you to go to the bathroom,
you’d better hold it in. If a teacher promised a field trip to the Smithsonian
Institution but then canceled it for an imaginary infraction, they’d offer no
explanation beyond citing their broad authority and the maintenance of proper
order. Even back then, I realized that any opposition to this system would be
difficult, not least because getting its rules changed to serve the interests of the
majority would involve persuading the rule makers to put themselves at a
purposeful disadvantage. That, ultimately, is the critical flaw or design defect
intentionally integrated into every system, in both politics and computing: the
people who create the rules have no incentive to act against themselves.
What convinced me that school, at least, was an illegitimate system was that
it wouldn’t recognize any legitimate dissent. I could plead my case until I lost
my voice, or I could just accept the fact that I’d never had a voice to begin with.
However, the benevolent tyranny of school, like all tyrannies, has a limited
shelf life. At a certain point, the denial of agency becomes a license to resist,
though it’s characteristic of adolescence to confuse resistance with escapism or
even violence. The most common outlets for a rebellious teen were useless to
me, because I was too cool for vandalism and not cool enough for drugs. (To this
day, I’ve never even gotten drunk on liquor or smoked a cigarette.) Instead, I
started hacking—which remains the sanest, healthiest, and most educational way
I know for kids to assert autonomy and address adults on equal terms.
Like most of my classmates, I didn’t like the rules but was afraid of breaking
them. I knew how the system worked: you corrected a teacher’s mistake, you got
a warning; you confronted the teacher when they didn’t admit the mistake, you
got detention; someone cheated off your exam, and though you didn’t expressly
let them cheat, you got detention and the cheater got suspended. This is the
origin of all hacking: the awareness of a systemic linkage between input and
output, between cause and effect. Because hacking isn’t just native to computing
—it exists wherever rules do. To hack a system requires getting to know its rules
better than the people who created it or are running it, and exploiting all the
vulnerable distance between how those people had intended the system to work
and how it actually works, or could be made to work. In capitalizing on these

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unintentional uses, hackers aren’t breaking the rules as much as debunking them.
Humans are hardwired to recognize patterns. All the choices we make are
informed by a cache of assumptions, both empirical and logical, unconsciously
derived and consciously developed. We use these assumptions to assess the
potential consequences of each choice, and we describe the ability to do all of
this, quickly and accurately, as intelligence. But even the smartest among us rely
on assumptions that we’ve never put to the test—and because we do, the choices
we make are often flawed. Anyone who knows better, or thinks more quickly
and more accurately than we do, can take advantage of those flaws to create
consequences that we never expected. It’s this egalitarian nature of hacking—
which doesn’t care who you are, just how you reason—that makes it such a
reliable method of dealing with the type of authority figures so convinced of
their system’s righteousness that it never occurred to them to test it.
I didn’t learn any of this at school, of course. I learned it online. The Internet
gave me the chance to pursue all the topics I was interested in, and all the links
between them, unconstrained by the pace of my classmates and my teachers. The
more time I spent online, however, the more my schoolwork felt extracurricular.
The summer I turned thirteen, I resolved never to return, or at least to
seriously reduce my classroom commitments. I wasn’t quite sure how I’d swing
that, though. All the plans I came up with were likely to backfire. If I was caught
skipping class, my parents would revoke my computer privileges; if I decided to
drop out, they’d bury my body deep in the woods and tell the neighbors I’d run
away. I had to come up with a hack—and then, on the first day of the new school
year, I found one. Indeed, it was basically handed to me.
At the start of each class, the teachers passed out their syllabi, detailing the
material to be covered, the required reading, and the schedule of tests and
quizzes and assignments. Along with these, they gave us their grading policies,
which were essentially explanations of how As, Bs, Cs, and Ds were calculated.
I’d never encountered information like this. Their numbers and letters were like
a strange equation that suggested a solution to my problem.
After school that day, I sat down with the syllabi and did the math to figure
out which aspects of each class I could simply ignore and still expect to receive a
passing grade. Take my US history class, for example. According to the syllabus,
quizzes were worth 25 percent, tests were worth 35 percent, term papers were
worth 15 percent, homework was worth 15 percent, and class participation—that
most subjective of categories, in every subject—was worth 10 percent. Because I
usually did well on my quizzes and tests without having to do too much

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studying, I could count on them for a reliable pool of time-efficient points. Term
papers and homework, however, were the major time-sucks: low-value, high-
cost impositions on Me Time.
What all of those numbers told me was that if I didn’t do any homework but
aced everything else, I’d wind up with a cumulative grade of 85, a B. If I didn’t
do any homework or write any term papers but aced everything else, I’d wind up
with a cumulative grade of 70, a C-minus. The 10 percent that was class