I went for a walk after spendiing an hour or so in a strange place. A strange online space inhabited by people from a certain place in my past, a place with which I never publicly connected myself until recently. I moved on from there and mostly forgot about it, but revisiting it today revived the anxiety I felt about the place.
It was my first connection to the pure Internet but that is not memorable. I made friends there, friends I talk to and chat with to this very day, but that is not the point on which the place stands out from any other place in my past.
No ,this place connected me, unwittingly, to a world of computer hackers and phone phreakers — the very world occupied by the very people I encountered during college when friends and I phone-phreaked our way into a world of shit, a world made worse by the independent but (to the FBI) suspiciously simultaneouous activities of ouurselves and the considerably more well-heeled and destructive hacker organizations.
The only people I know who have heard the whole story are some ex-girlfriends and some off-the-record newspaper and magazine reporters. For my own posterity I do not particularly care about keeping the story secret. There are others, though, whose reputations could be sullied. For them even the merest mention of these affairs is like a darkness rising up, a long-forgotten nightmare laid to rest in an adolescent dream journal.
