Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

  Now he is thinking of shaving his beard off. He might do his scalp and his upper body, while he’s at it.

  He is in the habit of doing a lot of vigorous walking. By the standards of the body nazis who infest California and Seattle, this is only a marginal improvement over (say) sitting in front of a television chain-smoking unfiltered cigarettes and eating suet from a tub. But he has stuck to his walking doggedly while his friends have taken up fitness fads and dropped them. It has become a point of pride with him, and he’s not about to stop just because he is living in Manila.

  But damn, it’s hot. Hairlessness would be a good thing here.

  Only two good things came out of Randy’s ill-fated First Business Foray with the food-gathering software. First, it scared him away from trying to do any kind of business, at least until he had the foggiest idea of what he was getting into. Second, he developed a lasting friendship with Avi, his old gaming buddy, now in Minneapolis, who displayed integrity and a good sense of humor.

  At the suggestion of his lawyer (who by that point was one of his major creditors), Randy declared personal bankruptcy and then moved to central California with Charlene. She had gotten her Ph.D. and landed a teaching-assistant job at one of the Three Siblings. Randy enrolled at another Sibling with the aim of getting his master’s degree in astronomy. This made him a grad student, and grad students existed not to learn things but to relieve the tenured faculty members of tiresome burdens such as educating people and doing research.

  Within a month of his arrival, Randy solved some trivial computer problems for one of the other grad students. A week later, the chairman of the astronomy department called him over and said, “So, you’re the UNIX guru.” At the time, Randy was still stupid enough to be flattered by this attention, when he should have recognized them as bone-chilling words.

  Three years later, he left the Astronomy Department without a degree, and with nothing to show for his labors except six hundred dollars in his bank account and a staggeringly comprehensive knowledge of UNIX. Later, he was to calculate that, at the going rates for programmers, the department had extracted about a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of work from him, in return for an outlay of less than twenty thousand. The only compensation was that his knowledge didn’t seem so useless anymore. Astronomy had become a highly networked discipline, and you could now control a telescope on another continent, or in orbit, by typing commands into your keyboard, watching the images it produced on your monitor.

  Randy was now superbly knowledgeable when it came to networks. Years ago, this would have been of limited usefulness. But this was the age of networked applications, the dawn of the World Wide Web, and the timing couldn’t have been better.

  In the meantime, Avi had moved to San Francisco and started a new company that was going to take role-playing games out of the nerd-ghetto and make them mainstream. Randy signed on as the head technologist. He tried to recruit Chester, but he’d already taken a job with a software company back up in Seattle. So they brought in a guy who had worked for a few video game companies, and later they brought in some other guys to do hardware and communications, and they raised enough seed money to build a playable prototype. Using that as their dog-and-pony show, they went down to Hollywood and found someone to back them to the tune of ten million dollars. They rented out some industrial space in Gilroy, filled it full of graphics workstations, hired a lot of sharp programmers and a few artists, and went to work.

  Six months later, they were frequently mentioned as among Silicon Valley’s rising stars, and Randy got a little photograph in Time magazine in an article about Siliwood—the growing collaboration between Silicon Valley and Hollywood. A year after that, the entire enterprise had crashed and burned.

  This was an epic tale not worth telling. The conventional wisdom circa the early nineties had been that the technical wizards of Northern California would meet the creative minds of Southern California halfway and create a brilliant new collaboration. But this was rooted in a naive view of what Hollywood was all about. Hollywood was merely a specialized bank—a consortium of large financial entities that hired talent, almost always for a flat rate, ordered that talent to create a product, and then marketed that product to death, all over the world, in every conceivable medium. The goal was to find products that would keep on making money forever, long after the talent had been paid off and sent packing. Casablanca, for example, was still putting asses in seats decades after Bogart had been paid off and smoked himself into an early grave.

  In the view of Hollywood, the techies of Silicon Valley were just a particularly naive form of talent. So when the technology reached a certain point—the point where it could be marketed to a certain large Nipponese electronics company at a substantial profit—the backers of Avi’s company staged a lightning coup that had obviously been lovingly planned. Randy and the others were given a choice: they could leave the company now and hold on to some of their stock, which was still worth a decent amount of money. Or they could stay—in which case they would find themselves sabotaged from within by fifth columnists who had been infiltrated into key positions. At the same time they would be besieged from without by lawyers demanding their heads for the things that were suddenly going wrong.

  Some of the founders stayed on as court eunuchs. Most of them left the company, and of that group, most sold their stock immediately because they could see it was going nowhere but down. The company was gutted by the transfer of its technology to Japan, and the empty husk eventually dried up and blew away.

  Even today, bits and pieces of the technology keep popping up in the oddest places, such as advertisements for new video game platforms. It always gives Randy the creeps to see this. When it all started to go wrong, the Nipponese tried to hire him directly, and he actually made some money flying over there to work, for a week or a month at a time, as a consultant. But they couldn’t keep the technology running with the programmers they had, and so it hasn’t lived up to its potential.

  Thus ended Randy’s Second Business Foray. He came out of it with a couple of hundred thousand dollars, most of which he plowed into the Victorian house he shares with Charlene. He hadn’t trusted himself with that much liquid cash, and locking it up in the house gave him a feeling of safety, like reaching home base in a frenzied game of full-contact tag.

  He has spent the years since running the Three Siblings’ computer system. He hasn’t made much money, but he hasn’t had much stress either.

  Randy was forever telling people, without rancor, that they were full of shit. That was the only way to get anything done in hacking. No one took it personally.

  Charlene’s crowd most definitely did take it personally. It wasn’t being told that they were wrong that offended them, though—it was the underlying assumption that a person could be right or wrong about anything. So on the Night in Question—the night of Avi’s fateful call—Randy had done what he usually did, which was to withdraw from the conversation. In the Tolkien, not the endocrinological or Snow White sense, Randy is a Dwarf. Tolkien’s Dwarves were stout, taciturn, vaguely magical characters who spent a lot of time in the dark hammering out beautiful things, e.g. Rings of Power. Thinking of himself as a Dwarf who had hung up his war-ax for a while to go sojourning in the Shire, where he was surrounded by squabbling Hobbits (i.e., Charlene’s friends), had actually done a lot for Randy’s peace of mind over the years. He knew perfectly well that if he were stuck in academia these people, and the things they said, would seem momentous to him. But where he came from, nobody had been taking these people seriously for years. So he just withdrew from the conversation and drank his wine and looked out over the Pacific surf and tried not to do anything really obvious like shaking his head and rolling his eyes.

  Then the topic of the Information Superhighway came up, and Randy could feel faces turning in his direction like searchlights, casting almost palpable warmth on his skin.

  Dr. G. E. B. Kivistik had a few things to say about the Informati
on Superhighway. He was a fiftyish Yale professor who had just flown in from someplace that had sounded really cool and impressive when he had gone out of his way to mention it several times. His name was Finnish, but he was British as only a non-British Anglophile could be. Ostensibly he was here to attend War as Text. Really he was there to recruit Charlene, and really really (Randy suspected) to fuck her. This was probably not true at all, but just a symptom of how wacked out Randy was getting by this point. Dr. G. E. B. Kivistik had been showing up on television pretty frequently. Dr. G. E. B. Kivistik had a couple of books out. Dr. G. E. B. Kivistik was, in short, parlaying his strongly contrarian view of the Information Superhighway into more air time than anyone who hadn’t been accused of blowing up a day care center should get.

  A Dwarf on sojourn in the Shire would probably go to a lot of dinner parties where pompous boring Hobbits would hold forth like this. This Dwarf would view the whole thing as entertainment. He would know that he could always go back out into the real world, so much vaster and more complex than these Hobbits imagined, and slay a few Trolls and remind himself of what really mattered.

  That was what Randy always told himself, anyway. But on the Night in Question, it didn’t work. Partly because Kivistik was too big and real to be a Hobbit—probably more influential in the real world than Randy would ever be. Partly because another faculty spouse at the table—a likable, harmless computerphile named Jon—decided to take issue with some of Kivistik’s statements and was cheerfully shot down for his troubles. Blood was in the water.

  Randy had ruined his relationship with Charlene by wanting to have kids. Kids raise issues. Charlene, like all of her friends, couldn’t handle issues. Issues meant disagreement. Voicing disagreement was a form of conflict. Conflict, acted out openly and publicly, was a male mode of social interaction—the foundation for patriarchal society which brought with it the usual litany of dreadful things. Regardless, Randy decided to get patriarchal with Dr. G. E. B. Kivistik.

  “How many slums will we bulldoze to build the Information Superhighway?” Kivistik said. This profundity was received with thoughtful nodding around the table.

  Jon shifted in his chair as if Kivistik had just dropped an ice cube down his collar. “What does that mean?” he asked. Jon was smiling, trying not to be a conflict-oriented patriarchal hegemonist. Kivistik, in response, raised his eyebrows and looked around at everyone else, as if to say Who invited this poor lightweight? Jon tried to dig himself out from his tactical error, as Randy closed his eyes and tried not to wince visibly. Kivistik had spent more years sparring with really smart people over high table at Oxford than Jon had been alive. “You don’t have to bulldoze anything. There’s nothing there to bulldoze,” Jon pleaded.

  “Very well, let me put it this way,” Kivistik said magnanimously—he was not above dumbing down his material for the likes of Jon. “How many on-ramps will connect the world’s ghettos to the Information Superhighway?”

  Oh, that’s much clearer, everyone seemed to think. Point well taken, Geb! No one looked at Jon, that argumentative pariah. Jon looked helplessly over at Randy, signaling for help.

  Jon was a Hobbit who’d actually been out of the Shire recently, so he knew Randy was a dwarf. Now he was fucking up Randy’s life by calling upon Randy to jump up on the table, throw off his homespun cloak, and whip out his two-handed ax.

  The words came out of Randy’s mouth before he had time to think better of it. “The Information Superhighway is just a fucking metaphor! Give me a break!” he said.

  There was a silence as everyone around the table winced in unison. Dinner had now, officially, crashed and burned. All they could do now was grab their ankles, put their heads between their knees, and wait for the wreckage to slide to a halt.

  “That doesn’t tell me very much,” Kivistik said. “Everything is a metaphor. The word ‘fork’ is a metaphor for this object.” He held up a fork. “All discourse is built from metaphors.”

  “That’s no excuse for using bad metaphors,” Randy said.

  “Bad? Bad? Who decides what is bad?” Kivistik said, doing his killer impression of a heavy-lidded, mouth-breathing undergraduate. There was scattered tittering from people who were desperate to break the tension.

  Randy could see where it was going. Kivistik had gone for the usual academician’s ace in the hole: everything is relative, it’s all just differing perspectives. People had already begun to resume their little side conversations, thinking that the conflict was over, when Randy gave them all a start with: “Who decides what’s bad? I do.”

  Even Dr. G. E. B. Kivistik was flustered. He wasn’t sure if Randy was joking. “Excuse me?”

  Randy was in no great hurry to answer the question. He took the opportunity to sit back comfortably, stretch, and take a sip of his wine. He was feeling good. “It’s like this,” he said. “I’ve read your book. I’ve seen you on TV. I’ve heard you tonight. I personally typed up a list of your credentials when I was preparing press materials for this conference. So I know that you’re not qualified to have an opinion about technical issues.”

  “Oh,” Kivistik said in mock confusion, “I didn’t realize one had to have qualifications.”

  “I think it’s clear,” Randy said, “that if you are ignorant of a particular subject, that your opinion is completely worthless. If I’m sick, I don’t ask a plumber for advice. I go to a doctor. Likewise, if I have questions about the Internet, I will seek opinions from people who know about it.”

  “Funny how all of the technocrats seem to be in favor of the Internet,” Kivistik said cheerily, milking a few more laughs from the crowd.

  “You have just made a statement that is demonstrably not true,” Randy said, pleasantly enough. “A number of Internet experts have written well-reasoned books that are sharply critical of it.”

  Kivistik was finally getting pissed off. All the levity was gone.

  “So,” Randy continued, “to get back to where we started, the Information Superhighway is a bad metaphor for the Internet, because I say it is. There might be a thousand people on the planet who are as conversant with the Internet as I am. I know most of these people. None of them takes that metaphor seriously. Q.E.D.”

  “Oh. I see,” Kivistik said, a little hotly. He had seen an opening. “So we should rely on the technocrats to tell us what to think, and how to think, about this technology.”

  The expressions of the others seemed to say that this was a telling blow, righteously struck.

  “I’m not sure what a technocrat is,” Randy said. “Am I a technocrat? I’m just a guy who went down to the bookstore and bought a couple of textbooks on TCP/IP, which is the underlying protocol of the Internet, and read them. And then I signed on to a computer, which anyone can do nowadays, and I messed around with it for a few years, and now I know all about it. Does that make me a technocrat?”

  “You belonged to the technocratic elite even before you picked up that book,” Kivistik said. “The ability to wade through a technical text, and to understand it, is a privilege. It is a privilege conferred by an education that is available only to members of an elite class. That’s what I mean by technocrat.”

  “I went to a public school,” Randy said. “And then I went to a state university. From that point on, I was self-educated.”

  Charlene broke in. She had been giving Randy dirty looks ever since this started and he had been ignoring her. Now he was going to pay. “And your family?” Charlene asked frostily.

  Randy took a deep breath, stifled the urge to sigh. “My father’s an engineer. He teaches at a state college.”

  “And his father?”

  “A mathematician.”

  Charlene raised her eyebrows. So did nearly everyone else at the table. Case closed.

  “I strenuously object to being labeled and pigeonholed and stereotyped as a technocrat,” Randy said, deliberately using oppressed-person’s language, maybe in an attempt to turn their weapons against them but more likely (he th
inks, lying in bed at three A.M. in the Manila Hotel) out of an uncontrollable urge to be a prick. Some of them, out of habit, looked at him soberly; etiquette dictated that you give all sympathy to the oppressed. Others gasped in outrage to hear these words coming from the lips of a known and convicted white male technocrat. “No one in my family has ever had much money or power,” he said.

  “I think that the point that Charlene’s making is like this,” said Tomas, one of their houseguests who had flown in from Prague with his wife Nina. He had now appointed himself conciliator. He paused long enough to exchange a warm look with Charlene. “Just by virtue of coming from a scientific family, you are a member of a privileged elite. You’re not aware of it—but members of privileged elites are rarely aware of their privileges.”

  Randy finished the thought. “Until people like you come along to explain to us how stupid, to say nothing of morally bankrupt, we are.”

  “The false consciousness Tomas is speaking of is exactly what makes entrenched power elites so entrenched,” Charlene said.

  “Well, I don’t feel very entrenched,” Randy said. “I’ve worked my ass off to get where I’ve gotten.”

  “A lot of people work hard all their lives and get nowhere,” someone said accusingly. Look out! The sniping had begun.

  “Well, I’m sorry I haven’t had the good grace to get nowhere,” Randy said, now feeling just a bit surly for the first time, “but I have found that if you work hard, educate yourself, and keep your wits about you, you can find your way in this society.”

  “But that’s straight out of some nineteenth-century Horatio Alger book,” Tomas sputtered.

  “So? Just because it’s an old idea doesn’t mean it’s wrong,” Randy said.

  A small strike force of waitpersons had been forming up around the fringes of the table, arms laden with dishes, making eye contact with each other as they tried to decide when it was okay to break up the fight and serve dinner. One of them rewarded Randy with a platter carrying a wigwam devised from slabs of nearly raw tuna. The pro-consensus, anti-confrontation elements then seized control of the conversation and broke it up into numerous small clusters of people all vigorously agreeing with one another. Jon cast a watery look at Randy, as if to say, was it good for you too? Charlene was ignoring him intensely; she was caught up in a consensus cluster with Tomas. Nina kept trying to catch Randy’s eye, but he studiously avoided this because he was afraid that she wanted to favor him with a smoldering come-hither look, and all Randy wanted to do right then was to go thither. Ten minutes later, his pager went off, and he looked down to see Avi’s number on it.