It was a full day before she heard back—he said he missed her and when would he see her and also that he was sorry it took him so long to get back to her but that he rarely checked his surface web e-mail anymore, spent virtually all his virtual time on IRC chat rooms. She didn’t know what IRC even meant—she had a college friend who worked for the International Relief Committee, but she was certain that’s not what Mark was referring to, just like when people said WWF these days they meant World Wildlife Fund, not World Wrestling Federation, which her dad loved to watch when she was a kid on weekends on their local Ohio Fox station.
By the time she heard back from him it was all over the Internet, all over the news: baby boomer institutions across the country had received something called distributed denial-of-service attacks. Much as she had when she was first offered this job in Native Content, Cassie had to go to the Urban Dictionary website to discover what a distributed denial-of-service attack even was, that it was abbreviated DDoS, some of its history.
No sooner had Cassie closed the window on the Urban Dictionary entry than an e-mail came across her desk from Regan. She’d just assigned and gotten back already a list of the top ten DDoS attacks of all time—they’d only been happening for about five years so “all time” wasn’t quite accurate, but Cassie couldn’t think of a better phrase so she just left it—starting with a group called Anonymous’s taking down the Church of Scientology website. The current attack on the AARP, which was the most conspicuous attack the Boomers had carried out, was number three. Though she’d been hired to work fact-checking native content pieces, they got so few through that now Cassie was doing research on any piece RazorWire ran that might get a large number of views—lists about celebrities and animals, the earliest attempts at the crowd-sourced propaganda Mario had suggested they might test out and which had failed. A savvier businessman might have negotiated for more compensation before taking that work on, but Cassie was neither savvy nor a businessman—in any sense of the word or its component parts—and she didn’t care: she was bored, and fact-checking was what she should be doing if she was sitting in an office working as a fact-checker. The director of research. It took her much of the rest of the afternoon to fact-check the piece. By the time she got to number seven she e-mailed Regan to see if she wanted to take a bocce break but Regan just wrote back, “That DDoS piece ready to be posted yet?”
It wasn’t. Cassie still had three more entries to go. She wrote back: “Just one entry away. Getting close.” It was almost seven by the time Cassie felt solid on the piece, and by then Regan had to head out to a dinner with friends, so Cassie had to go home alone, where she streamed the night before’s The Daily Show on her computer, drank a six-pack of Brooklyn Lager, and passed out on the couch. One of her roommates woke her after midnight and told her to go back into her room if she was going to pass out. The common space was not for passing out. That’s what bedrooms were for.
The next week news of another huge round of DDoS attacks was all over the Internet—magazines, stores, baby boomer icons of all kinds were being hit. People were posting GIFs from the Boomer videos on Twitter and Facebook and asking excited exclamation-filled questions about what was up next. Cassie worked on no less than twenty-three separate RazorWire pieces related to DDoSing, to baby boomers and millennials and the differences in their taste (Take This Quiz: Are You a Millennial/Boomer Lover? Find Out!).
But half the pieces she worked on were just lists of quotations or GIFs from the Boomer Missives themselves. There was even a long think-piece from a disciple of Edward Said called “Generational vs. Religious Fundamentalist Terrorism,” about the differences in the responses law enforcement made to these new attacks (the Times reported the FBI was investigating the AARP attack, an attack on the website for Rolling Stone magazine, and one on Eddie Bauer as well, and Cassie could only imagine how terrified Mark himself must be reading some of this). One RazorWire compilation of the best of the BB rants got almost two million hits in its first three days up on the site, the rants themselves re-edited with more effective slash-cutting, and when Cassie went back to look again at some of Mark’s early videos, she couldn’t believe how many hits they had. The first missive, the one he’d gone back and re-recorded with his David Crosby mask on so he could lay down his case against the baby boomers in its broadest form, was nearing nine million views. Cassie wasn’t sure if she was more surprised to see that number, or to realize that of all the advice he could’ve gotten early on, her own now-girlfriend Regan’s guidance on moving his whole operation to the Dark Web, and erasing his earlier footprint, was the best. If that video had contained Mark’s unmasked face and undisguised voice, she could only imagine the scrutiny he’d be under right now.
And though it was far more a product of her new job than her own curiosity, Cassie found herself doing a fair amount of scrutinizing of those videos herself. The first thing that became clear was that in the world of trad media, these missives would never have gained traction. But here she was, working at a website of the kind that could help disseminate them far and wide. Where an anarchist like Emma Goldman might have had to travel to 120 cities in 180 days to rouse a movement—Cassie had finally read Mark’s piece on Goldman, if only in case Regan asked again, and of course Regan hadn’t asked again—now Mark could just record a video and suddenly he was in all the cities, all at once.
She looked and looked at those videos. Once she actually lined GIFs from the videos down a couple of screens for publication—online posting—whatev—she started noticing all kinds of inconsistencies between them. Sometimes the David Crosby mask seemed to have black hair, while in other videos it looked auburn. One had a blond (blonde?) ponytail peeking out the back. The upside-down Jerry poster over the speaker’s shoulder was hung at all different angles. Vocoder or no vocoder, it was clear that pitch and timbre of the voices on those videos were quite different, missive to missive. Even just a couple dozen missives in it was becoming clear that there was no way Mark Brumfeld, or Isaac Abramson, or whatever he wanted to call himself now, was posting all these videos, and that had been the case since even before the guy on the first action had identified himself as Boomer2. Mark had spawned imitators or co-conspirators—it wasn’t clear which—and apparently lots of them, others who’d take up the cause and were now posting their own missives under the auspices of what Mark had started. Maybe this was what he’d hoped, maybe it wasn’t. What Mark had started was becoming a bona fide movement, one that would no longer be under his control. If Cassie could see that, she was sure he must know it by now, too.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
A MONTH AFTER THEIR FIRST DATE THERE, Regan took Cassie out to dinner at Prairie Fire a second time. They left work together and again took the R uptown. Rather than taking the train across town, they got off at the southeast corner of the park. When they came up out of the subway station Cassie saw that across from FAO Schwarz there was a huge group of people standing or sitting, carrying signs and shouting slogans. As she and Regan started to walk west, she saw that on the signs were familiar slogans: “Boom Boom,” and “Social Security Not Social Insecurity” and “Once We Have the Jobs, You Can Live in Our Fucken Basements,” “Retirement or Retire the Mint” and “#ResistMuchObeyLittle” and even “#RMOL.” Every fifth person was wearing a David Crosby mask. A couple of what looked like teenagers carried a reproduction of Mark’s Social Insecurity Card—in fact, six or seven of them were in the mix. Police kept a tense watch over their protest.
Every person in the crowd appeared to be under the age of thirty. Cassie asked Regan if she thought maybe they should go over and talk to them, but it was only fifteen minutes until their reservation at Prairie Fire, and it was a solid fifteen-minute walk to Columbus Circle, and just as they were talking a mounted police officer’s horse reared up, spooked by the sound of a foghorn one of the protesters was blowing to get the rest of the group’s attention. Holding a protest right next to where all the mounted police in the city went with t
heir horses didn’t seem like a good idea.
So Cassie and Regan walked on.
They walked past the Plaza, west on Fifty-seventh Street, until they arrived. When Cassie first came to the city to visit as a college student, this corner of Columbus Circle had been an open-air market where mostly West African men sold pirated CDs, T-shirts, and trinkets in front of a big old white building that looked like a huge church. The circle itself was just a round plateau of brown dirt with a statue of Columbus at its middle. Now the circle was filled with perfectly landscaped flower beds, and the TimeWarner/AOL building was fifty-five stories of chrome and glass reflecting the verdure and stone of the southwest corner of Central Park.
In the restaurant they ate well, four courses and a wine pairing menu. They were seated next to a window looking out over the huge green scar at the center of the island. The sun was falling behind the building, and heavy shadows cast out over the Sheep Meadow, where from this distance Cassie could make out groups of young people roving back into the mess of the city as the sun began to set. Inside, where they ate forty-to-sixty-dollar entrees, every other patron of the place was at least old enough to be Regan and Cassie’s parents. The whitehairs largely ignored them, but there was a new sense of ambient anger coming off the two couples seated across the aisle from them—whether it was real or something she was causing herself to feel, Cassie felt it. Since the Boomer Missives had gained media attention, and then the huge outpouring of press over the first action had caught everyone’s thoughts, Cassie felt certain that a new animosity had arisen when she found herself around people of her parents’ generation here in the city—which wasn’t all that often. All the bars they went to in Brooklyn were diverse by every demographic metric except age. There was no bar in Fort Greene or Greenpoint or DUMBO where she would encounter a person older than, say, thirty-five. When she saw a sixty-year-old woman now, it was almost impossible to tell if the animosity she felt was coming from her, or if it was her perceiving it in the other and then feeling anger in response to the anger she was perceiving. What was certain was that her own anger was present, palpable—and if she was feeling it, many others of her generation were, too.
That was the trouble with the kind of generational strife the Boomer Boomers were sowing: at some point animosity based in the broad strokes of identity simply pervaded, its origin obscured, only the intangible residue of its conflict remaining. Ideas obscured in favor of jagged emotion left in their wake. It was growing clearer and clearer that it wasn’t simply Mark or his disciples who’d stoked that anger. Maybe they’d channeled it. But they were also speaking what so many were already feeling. And once that anger was on the surface it would be very, very hard to dispel. It was uncontrolled and uncontrollable, anxiety-inducing and pervasive.
Here in Prairie Fire, amid the $250 prix fixe menus and thousand-dollar bottles of wine, Cassie and Regan represented a kind of tiny ageist minority. Here she felt the conflict, and she felt more and more certain it went both ways the more she thought about it. She was being made uncomfortable and making people uncomfortable all at once. Its nexus was at the table behind them. The two couples there kept talking in low voices, looking at them, looking back.
“I kind of think they’re talking about us,” Cassie said. Regan was seated with her back to the couples. She didn’t say anything then. But between courses the two of them went to use the bathroom together. Not long after they entered, the two women from the table behind them came in as well. The woman in a flowing maroon dress and salt-and-pepper hair cropped tight to her head stared right at Regan.
“What are you looking at?” Regan asked. Cassie would never have had the confidence to confront someone in a public restroom. She wasn’t certain Regan would have done so two months ago herself. “You have a problem with two women in love sitting at dinner together?” She took Cassie’s hand in hers and held it tight.
“No,” the woman said. “Oh God, no! We started the equal rights movement, for Chrissake. But now that you’ve emoted at me, I do have to say we have been wondering what kids like you thought of your fellow millennials trying to threaten an entire generation in some Internet videos, causing all this mishigas.”
“What do we think?” Regan said. She dropped Cassie’s hand and turned toward the woman. “Boom fucking boom,” she said. “That’s what we think.”
Then she turned and walked out of the bathroom, where the baby boomers still stood in stunned silence. It took a second for Cassie to wash her hands—ignoring the women—and head back to their table. Regan was already sitting.
“That was pretty—” Cassie said.
“Pretty what,” Regan said. The light from the setting sun glared off the façades of buildings all around their window, glints flashing off the tower outside onto Regan’s face. Though the glare must have been attacking her eyes, Regan did not lift a hand to protect herself.
“Pretty badass,” Cassie said. “I think I love you.”
Regan didn’t bat an eye at the comment before she said, “I love you, too,” and she didn’t bat an eye at the more-than-eight-hundred-dollar check they received when they were done. She just took out a Visa with the RazorWire icon in the lower right-hand corner and made clear that it was on the company.
“We talked about that list about lists that I’m working on at some point, didn’t we,” Regan said.
Cassie said they did.
By the time they got up to leave, the table of baby boomers behind them had emptied, but now, whether it was true or not, Cassie felt as if all the fifty- and sixty-year-olds in the place were glaring at them as they walked out arm in arm. Aside from the multifarious varieties of sexism that pervaded the culture, and the looks she endured at college when she and Natalia first got together—she’d never dated a black girl in high school, though surely she would have, her father’s weird conservatism wouldn’t have stopped her—Cassie had never felt discriminated against. Not as a kid, not in school. And the mere fact of being questioned for her identity in those moments was both oppressive and invigorating. Later it would cause active paranoia, forcing her to expend energy she didn’t want to expend, being in a constant state of angsty inner conflict. But as she walked out of that restaurant with a woman she loved, believing she’d been glared at for being born when she was born and having an assumed set of political opinions, having assumed a stance, she felt like a camera was tracking her, music playing to the rhythm of her steps, soundtrack of Rage Against the Machine or T. Rex blaring in the background. While they walked Regan started telling her all about how Czolgosz and its staff had plans to partner with TUT and start a publication devoted to covering Boomer Boomers and their actions, and protests, and transcribing various of their missives, but at that point Cassie only heard the rampant edgy birdsong of love in Regan’s voice. Even when Regan started talking about the boring specifics of all the actions the group was planning she couldn’t help but smile smile smile.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CASSIE WAS IN THE MIDDLE of scrutinizing sixteen GIFs of Boomer Boomer protests for a piece RazorWire was to post as soon as she was finished with it, three weeks after the Boomers’ initial call to action came, when she got a text from Regan, from across the office. “Need you over hr rt now,” it read. Though she was pretty certain “rt” didn’t mean Retweet, it wasn’t entirely clear if “hr” meant “here,” or “HR.” Cassie got up and was stepping across the bocce court before she saw that two men in tight-fitting suits were standing on either side of Regan’s desk.
“Hi, Cassie,” Regan said. She had swiveled around in her chair, but stayed seated. “Cassie is our director of research for our Native Content Division, but she works on many of the pieces we post. This is agent—and agent—sorry, what did you say your names were again?” The tall twenty-something guy flanking her on her left reached out a hand.
“Agent Todd Flavius,” he said. He had a startling shock of black hair, gelled straight back, and wore a brown gingham shirt underneath his navy bl
ue suit. “We’re just here from the FBI,” he said. “Agents. FBI agents.” Cassie half turned away from them without actually going anywhere. “Nothing to be alarmed about, sweetie. We’re just looking into whatever can be looked into around the group that calls itself the Boomer Boomers. There were a series of threatening comments in the thread under one of your recent stories about the group, and we’re doing a routine follow-up.”
“Routine,” Cassie said.
“Routine,” said the other officer. He was old enough to be her father, with thinning yellow hair pushed back over his head in whatever the opposite of a comb-over might be called. Just, combed. “I’m Agent Miller.” He flashed his badge.
“The routine,” Cassie said. The first agent asked what she said, and she said, “Oh, just routine, as you said, only with a definite article in front of it. You know I think we could do well to head back to an office we use for these kinds of things. I mean not that we have federal officers here often enough to have it be a ‘kind of thing.’ I’ve only been working here for like a month. Or I guess five months. Time flies! Five months. But.”
Regan said she agreed that using the shared conference office was a smart idea. She walked the three of them back to the glassed-off office where Cassie had interviewed for the job. There, with the door closed, the two agents asked Cassie a series of questions for almost twenty minutes: Had she herself received any direct threats? Did she receive any suspicious e-mail? Strange phone calls? Notice any faces recurring on her subway ride? Had she heard of a notorious hacker organization called Silence? Had anyone from Silence ever contacted her? Did the fact that the anniversary of September 11 was just around the corner come up in any communications she’d had with anyone she didn’t know?
The whole time she just kept thinking: Mark Brumfeld, Mark Brumfeld, Mark Brumfeld, Mark Brumfeld, Mark Brumfeld, while actively thinking to herself, Whatever you do, don’t say Mark, or Brumfeld, or Mark Brumfeld. For as long as she could remember she’d had a problem where when she knew she wasn’t supposed to say something she’d find herself right on the cusp of saying it, aloud. Loudly. Shouting it, even. Like in the rare instance when she was around small children she found herself right on the verge of saying “fuck,” or back in Ohio in synagogue with her parents, she had an almost Tourette’s-like desire to shout out “kike” as loud as she could. When she was somewhere very high, she had a deep, giddy desire to jump. Not something she wanted to do, or would do—but it was still a conscious act of self-possession not to do it, the wrong thing, the damaging thing, the irrevocable thing being her reflexive response.
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