Permanent Record

PART TWO

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11
The System
I’m going to press Pause here, for a moment, to explain something about my
politics at age twenty-two: I didn’t have any. Instead, like most young people, I
had solid convictions that I refused to accept weren’t truly mine but rather a
contradictory cluster of inherited principles. My mind was a mash-up of the
values I was raised with and the ideals I encountered online. It took me until my
late twenties to finally understand that so much of what I believed, or of what I
thought I believed, was just youthful imprinting. We learn to speak by imitating
the speech of the adults around us, and in the process of that learning we wind
up also imitating their opinions, until we’ve deluded ourselves into thinking that
the words we’re using are our own.
My parents were, if not dismissive of politics in general, then certainly
dismissive of politicians. To be sure, this dismissal had little in common with the
disaffection of nonvoters or partisan disdain. Rather, it was a certain bemused
detachment particular to their class, which nobler ages have called the federal
civil service or the public sector, but which our own time tends to refer to as the
deep state or the shadow government. None of those epithets, however, really
captures what it is: a class of career officials (incidentally, perhaps one of the last
functional middle classes in American life) who—nonelected and non-appointed
—serve or work in government, either at one of the independent agencies (from
the CIA and NSA to the IRS, the FCC, and so on) or at one of the executive
departments (State, Treasury, Defense, Justice, and the like).
These were my parents, these were my people: a nearly three-million-strong
professional government workforce dedicated to assisting the amateurs chosen
by the electorate, and appointed by the elected, in fulfilling their political duties
—or, in the words of the oath, in faithfully executing their offices. These civil
servants, who stay in their positions even as administrations come and go, work
as diligently under Republicans as under Democrats because they ultimately

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work for the government itself, providing core continuity and stability of rule.
These were also the people who, when their country went to war, answered
the call. That’s what I had done after 9/11, and I found that the patriotism my
parents had taught me was easily converted into nationalist fervor. For a time,
especially in my run-up to joining the army, my sense of the world came to
resemble the duality of the least sophisticated video games, where good and evil
are clearly defined and unquestionable.
However, once I returned from the Army and rededicated myself to
computing, I gradually came to regret my martial fantasies. The more I
developed my abilities, the more I matured and realized that the technology of
communications had a chance of succeeding where the technology of violence
had failed. Democracy could never be imposed at the point of a gun, but perhaps
it could be sown by the spread of silicon and fiber. In the early 2000s the Internet
was still just barely out of its formative period, and, to my mind at least, it
offered a more authentic and complete incarnation of American ideals than even
America itself. A place where everyone was equal? Check. A place dedicated to
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Check, check, check. It helped that
nearly all the major founding documents of Internet culture framed it in terms
reminiscent of American history: here was this wild, open new frontier that
belonged to anyone bold enough to settle it, swiftly becoming colonized by
governments and corporate interests that were seeking to regulate it for power
and profit. The large companies that were charging large fees—for hardware, for
software, for the long-distance phone calls that you needed back then to get
online, and for knowledge itself, which was humanity’s common inheritance and
so, by all rights, should have been freely available—were irresistible
contemporary avatars of the British, whose harsh taxation ignited the fervor for
independence.
This revolution wasn’t happening in history textbooks, but now, in my
generation, and any of us could be part of it solely by dint of our abilities. This
was thrilling—to participate in the founding of a new society, one based not on
where we were born or how we grew up or our popularity at school but on our
knowledge and technological ability. In school, I’d had to memorize the
preamble to the U.S. Constitution: now its words were lodged in my memory
alongside John Perry Barlow’s “A Declaration of the Independence of
Cyberspace,” which employed the same self-evident, self-elect plural pronoun:
“We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice
accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are

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creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no
matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”
This technological meritocracy was certainly empowering, but it could also
be humbling, as I came to understand when I first went to work in the
Intelligence Community. The decentralization of the Internet merely emphasized
the decentralization of computing expertise. I might have been the top computer
person in my family, or in my neighborhood, but to work for the IC meant
testing my skills against everyone in the country and the world. The Internet
showed me the sheer quantity and variety of talent that existed, and made clear
that in order to flourish I had to specialize.
There were a few different careers available to me as a technologist. I could
have become a software developer, or, as the job is more commonly called, a
programmer, writing the code that makes computers work. Alternatively, I could
have become a hardware or network specialist, setting up the servers in their
racks and running the wires, weaving the massive fabric that connects every
computer, every device, and every file. Computers and computer programs were
interesting to me, and so were the networks that linked them together. But I was
most intrigued by their total functioning at a deeper level of abstraction, not as
individual components but as an overarching system.
I thought about this a lot while I was driving, to and from Lindsay’s house
and to and from AACC. Car time has always been thinking time for me, and
commutes are long on the crowded Beltway. To be a software developer was to
run the rest stops off the exits and to make sure that all the fast-food and gas
station franchises accorded with each other and with user expectations; to be a
hardware specialist was to lay the infrastructure, to grade and pave the roads
themselves; while to be a network specialist was to be responsible for traffic
control, manipulating signs and lights to safely route the time-crunched hordes to
their proper destinations. To get into systems, however, was to be an urban
planner, to take all of the components available and ensure their interaction to
maximum effect. It was, pure and simple, like getting paid to play God, or at
least a tinpot dictator.
There are two main ways to be a systems guy. One is that you take
possession of the whole of an existing system and maintain it, gradually making
it more efficient and fixing it when it breaks. That position is called a systems
administrator, or sysadmin. The second is that you analyze a problem, such as
how to store data or how to search across databases, and solve it by engineering
a solution from a combination of existing components or by inventing entirely

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new ones. This position is called a systems engineer. I eventually would do both
of these jobs, working my way into administration and from there into
engineering, oblivious throughout about how this intense engagement with the
deepest levels of integration of computing technology was exerting an influence
on my political convictions.
I’ll try not to be too abstract here, but I want you to imagine a system. It
doesn’t matter what system: it can be a computer system, an ecosystem, a legal
system, or even a system of government. Remember, a system is just a bunch of