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A computer is at its heart as elegant electronic doodad for sequentially executing logical statements and shuffling interim stuff to and from the vast and retentive acreage called memory. A elusive moment passed between the first computer plug suckling volts and amps at a socket and the first programmer bootlegging recreational code. Splendid, rabid programmers - explicitly pathological hackers - are testosterone-fried males. Code embodies conquest, personal immortality, and boasting rights. It is like sexual behavior embracing social folk, but more global, sustaining, and compelling. And aggressive. Computer viruses emerged. They illicitly gambol through others' processing and storage seeking succor and cloister. They are self-propagating code itching to impregnate the world and heartily laugh out loud iniquities exalting their creators' moxie.
The prudent computer user invests in constantly updated software which casts a hard look into his equipment, hunting executable trespass. The struggle between offense and defense shapes ever more complex and subtle. Recursive and self-modifying code gave us fractals, cellular automatons, and other universes governed by tiny bags of simple rules, which eerily mirror the patterns of developing organic tissue. When a silicon intelligence arises to rub our carbon-based faces in the fact of its existence, I expect it will be bootlegged code. We log into our boxes discreetly aware that lawful users are not perched at the food chain apex.
Fluffy philosophy meets cold steel and microcircuitry when in a society everything using electricity also grasps digital logic, because it is much nicer that way. That's us, buster. Wherever a microprocessor and memory lurk there will be hackers with visions of immortal code infecting the world. Take your car, for instance. Perhaps somebody already has.
Real and imagined Enviro-whiner exigencies, doctrines opposed to progress in all its varied forms, mandate that simple devices meet enigmatic objectives inappropriate to their purpose. In decades past, the mechanical intricacies of car engines could be subdued by a pimply teenager with a dwellmeter, tachometer, and a ring of ranked metal shims to gap spark plugs. Today's motors monitor a few dozen variables from intake air temperature to exhaust oxygen partial pressure, millisecond by millisecond, dynamically adjusting everything continuously and interactively. This guarantees disgusting performance, fat maintenance and repair bills, and Enviro-whiners screaming atrocities because the cars still run, mostly. What is missing from 75,000,000 microprocessors sweating inside Detroit, Japanese and German steel? How about some autonomous programming? Let's lock the brakes when we hit 80 mph! Sometimes. Call it a computer crash.
Imagine an estranged nerd serving a ten year government hitch at detestable wages because he was caught (Eleventh Commandment!) blue-boxing Pentagon Tempest communications. Amidst avalanches of "Yes, Sir!" and "No, Sir!" he ascends to white-hot fury. Lesser beings might ease the pain by toting an assault rifle to work, sloshing nerve gas through a subway system, or detonating a couple of tons of ammonium nitrate-fuel oil explosive hauled in a rented truck. The number of our beast is 1010011010.
Consider a computer virus for car engine microprocessors spread through garage diagnostic machines. Like an Anopheles mosquito carrying malaria, the disease vector would be a virulent source of infection but not an adversely affected host. When the digital pathogen was introduced into its preferred ecological niche, your car engine microprocessor, it would snuggle into a silicon womb and wait. One unhappy day it might shut everything down, or cancel your miraculous ABS brakes during a panic stop, or posit a kamikaze run at 110 mph down Interstate 5 during rush hour by throwing open your throttle. Does that strike terror in your First World heart?
Who knows what evil lurks within your Cable TV server, swimming in the bitstreams of fiberoptic and coaxial conduits, infecting your television, VCR, stereo amplifier... Does your neck crawl when you pass by your oh-so-clever dishwasher? Is your washing machine plotting against you, participating in the radical dialectic of national and international class struggles of the proletariat despite the mystifications and distortions spread by the bourgeois media? Where will you be on digital Judgment Day?
The ability to destroy is a true certificate of ownership. America scrambled its nest eggs and fed them to the poor, turning its back upon the honest, gifted and able. They are crafting a veritable Pandora's lunch box, filled with eldritch surprises, patiently waiting to be opened. When the last sooty demon has spread his scaly wings and departed, the surviving few of us will look into the box and see at its very bottom - not hope, but a thin scum of requisitioned vengeance.
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