To modern eyes that computer looks laughably primitive, a chunky, boxy mass of grey plastic that ran on disks more than twice the size of the phone in my pocket with less than one-hundred-thousandth of the capacity. You could look at it now and say that it resembled a cast-off from a Star Trek set, a childish impression of what the future might look like. But the thing is, to someone like me in a small town in Australia, this really was the future, and I wanted to understand it.
By the time I was sixteen, the computer had become my consciousness. It was the beginning of a new life. Not that the old life didn’t have sway – it did, and still does – but in some way it was the computer I spoke with, or spoke through, reaching past all local concerns to an infinity point where selfhood dissolves into history. Later on, the question of selfhood, or my selfhood, would come to obsess many sections of the press. Was I arrogant or crazy, careless or manipulative, touchy or thin-skinned or tyrannical? But the self they were talking about was in their heads. It was part of their fantasy. I was trying to do my work under pressure and wasn’t much aware of myself at all, not in the sense they mean. People nowadays love the play of selfhood: they think everything is a soap opera. But I mean what I say when I say my ‘self’ lies somewhere behind me: with a computer, and a lifetime’s project, you no longer find yourself chasing from pillar to post the small business of yourself. You disappear into something larger and you serve it as best you can.
Maybe it was a generational thing. And some don’t get it. They want to stuff you into their old fictional categories: of being Billy the Kid or Dr No, of being Robin Hood or Dr Strangelove. But I believe a generation came of age in the late 1980s that didn’t think like that. We were weaned on computers, and we didn’t reckon on ‘selfhood’: we reckoned on ‘us’, and, if at all possible, ‘us and them’. When it comes to computers, the cliché was of a geek in a bedroom who was disconnected. In fact, it was the kids watching TV that were disconnected, passive, solitary. We might have been up all night, but the best of us were busy making what we were watching.
To know what your thoughts really are – to grow beyond them, into the thoughts of others, a very sweet oblivion – is about placing a large part of your mind into the space of your computer. Without being grandiose about it, I would say this constituted not only a new way of being in the world, but a new way of being in your own skin. People would always have trouble with it, wishing us, even now, to fulfil the old remits of the ego. But we learned at a young age how commitment works in the computer age: it works by transfusing your lifeblood to an intelligence system dependent on you, and on whom you are dependent. It used to be science fiction, but now it is everyday reality, and I guess I will always seem alien to many people, because I was part of a generation that dug down into our machines, asking them to help us fight for justice in ways that would fox the old guard, even the protest element of the old guard, such as my parents, who didn’t know how to break the patterns of power and corruption that kept the world unfair.
Computers provided a positive space in a negative field: they showed us we could start again, against ‘selfhood’, against ‘society’, building something less flawed and less corrupt in these fresh pastures of code. One day we knew they would change the world, and they did. The old guard would come with its name-calling and its media, its embedded sense of ‘national interests’ and patriotism, its accusations of betrayal, but we always knew the world was more modern than they realised. Cairo was waiting. Tunisia was waiting. We were all waiting for the day when our technology would allow an increasing universality of freedom. In the future, power would not come from the barrel of a gun but from communications, and people would know themselves not by the imprimatur of a small and powerful coterie, but by the way they could disappear into a social network with huge political potential.
That was me at the age of sixteen. I was giving myself to my computer. I was testing my sense of the natural world I’d grown up in, all that bright sunlight and leafy shade, all those stars and bees. The years of mystery and human complication went into the computer, too: in some ways I would always be answering the parables of my childhood, from Vietnam protests to cultish surveillance, and that’s as close as I can get to the truth. You have to have a self in order to lose it – or use it – and I’m sure the work I have done at WikiLeaks bears the ghostly imprint of my younger years. I say ghostly, because that is how it appears. The work is haunted with first principles and early experiences and that is how it goes.
This is the story of a person who came in time to do a piece of work. The work made a difference in the world. But the story did not begin with the work: the work began with the story. This is why I have taken you back to the wilderness of early childhood, for we both – the work and I – began in those perfect glades of unknowing. At the age of sixteen, I sat at my computer and began to leave everything behind. There were desks, old socks, piles of computer disks and half-eaten sandwiches. The computer and I were one: into the night we went in search of newness. The next phase of life, the phase that included code-breaking and hacking, would indeed prove to be the link that made possible the future we had hoped for. Soon I was wandering inside the computer, inside the inner circle of a network in which hundreds of thousands of computers lived in sync with one another, and there I was, trying to train myself to think in the computers’ own language. New life was burning within me, and within the others I met as I walked. I’m sure my face glowed blue in the bedroom of our final house, in the middle of the trees, as the lure of a brand new discovery went far into the night. It seemed as if justice itself might live on the other side of a flashing cursor.
4
The computers back then came with nothing; they had no programs of their own. That’s one of the things lost to the new generation of kids coming to their first computer. They are pre-loaded now with all sorts of software and fancy graphics and so on, but when I started you were just one layer above the bare metal. You were typing into this wonderful emptiness, waiting to be populated with minds. The thing was programmed to accept your typing and that was it: as teenagers, we went into that space exactly like explorers, seeking to discover new terrain. Just like in mathematics, where there is the atomic realm, the computer had a space and a set of possible laws that could be discovered gradually. All laws and modes of operation and side-effects were to be freshly discovered. And that is what we did. The excitement was barely containable, in that, within minutes, you could learn to do something on your computer that was infinite. You could train your computer to type the words ‘hello there’ to infinity, a command that would never end, and for a young person to discover that kind of deep power is at very least thrilling, and, at most, revolutionary.
Your thoughts had to be clear, though. The computer was not going to do your thinking for you: it was the difference between saying ‘I want the computer to count’ and saying ‘This is how you count’. As teenage computer nerds, we got into the business of precise instruction. School didn’t teach us that. Our parents didn’t teach us that. We discovered it for ourselves while getting to know the life of the computer. There were guys, of course, who just wanted to play games and that was fine. But a few of us were interested in projecting our thoughts into the computer to make it do something new. We began writing codes and we began cracking them, too.
Wherever we went, I had a desk for my computer and a box for my floppy disks. It was heaven. You would look at the stars and get a certain notion of infinity, then at your computer, and think: infinity resides there, too, but much less remotely. A lot of our initial knowledge came from the people who wrote the computer manuals. The better manuals weren’t always easy to get hold of, but we’d pass the information around, and a teenage underground began to form, loose groups of us who had