After a couple of weeks of choosing not to engage even when addressed directly after he posted a video one afternoon, Mark found himself engaged.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
IT WAS A TUESDAY WHEN MARK FIRST ALLOWED himself to chat, and he did so against his better judgment. Silence—who posted so much, and so often in disagreement with himself, that it became clear to Mark over time he was not just one person, but a handle many users used—started talking about how funny Isaac’s latest missive was:
As soon as he typed it Mark felt a monumental sense of regret. After weeks of looking and waiting, he’d allowed himself to see how things went in these chats, to hear how people talked and how they talked about him. But more than that, even just less than a month was long enough to settle into a rule-based routine: He could get online after running TOR. He could log on. He could read what people were chatting about. On occasion he could post a link to one of his own videos when it was finished.
But he would not allow himself to engage in unfettered discussion. Users had asked questions of him, addressing him as Isaac or Boomer1, but when they did it felt almost as if they were asking someone else, and he’d followed his own rules, hadn’t engaged. His voice was on his videos, and he posted them, but he did not chat as Boomer1.
Now, all in one single contentious line he’d broken his own well-honed rules. It was like after years of being a wallflower finding oneself out on the dance floor, in the middle of the circle, everyone waiting to see your moves.
No one typed anything for a second. Mark watched the cursor on his desktop blink and blink and blink for what felt like a whole day until a new line popped up:
Mark came to feel over the course of a month that he had developed almost a friendship with these guys—or women, Mark had no way to know for certain, though in his head between the cursing and the taunting and the general overall trolling, all the bro-ing and brutha-ing, even against all he’d learned in his academic life about not making heteronormative assumptions, he allowed himself to assume they were guys. While he wouldn’t have been able to articulate it himself, part of what felt so freeing in those rooms was the sense of being alone in an unerotic, unromantic space—the idea of Cassie or for that matter any woman listening in or even seeing what he was typing was ridiculous. The fact of being alone here, almost like going all the way back to the sausage-fests of parties he and his guy friends had in middle school, while sitting in the basement where he grew up, was part of the sense of safety. Much of it. He’d had a close friend in high school, in the very Baltimore where he now sat, whose nickname was Costco based on an anecdote that had stuck to him and never let go, so the idea of these online kids giving themselves ludicrous online handles didn’t seem all that extreme. It did, on the other hand, confirm them as boys.
The main users who cropped up were Coyote and HHH, whose usernames made more sense to Mark once he asked after it, having in a couple of days learned to stop with capitals, and the ending punctuation, and the correct spelling, and the multiple independent clauses, if he was going to fit in. Simplify, simplify, simplify. That was the way to enter their skaz. Type like you were writing the liner notes for a Prince album—it was growing clear that Prince’s approach to written language may have been the single greatest linguistic influence on Internet writing, an article Mark might once have wanted to write for TUT but which didn’t even cross his mind now. In fact, the very idea of publishing in traditional venues seemed silly now that Mark was growing inured to typing on-screen and posting online, the long gestational period for even an e-mail becoming some quaint habit of a former self, a long-surpassed and ancient culture.
It wasn’t easy after twenty-two years of school, growing inured to the rules of grammar and typography, and years of magazine editing in between, growing more meticulous than he had known he could be, but there was a wild, addictive freedom in learning never to hit Shift—ever; to unlearn typing commas and periods at the ends of sentences and independent clauses, so as not to sound too stiff—like after years of wearing suits and ties to work, showing up one day in a T-shirt and sweatpants:
At his cubicle at the magazine, or even in the library studying for his Ph.D. comps, Mark might have felt infantilized, embarrassed to be engaging with these guys. But back in his parents’ basement, back at home, it felt almost a natural consequence of all the moves that had led up to it. Here he was sitting in a space free of encumbrance, free of—he had to admit—Cassie. It didn’t mean he loved her or wanted her any less—but it
was that he’d found a space where his love for her was held in abeyance. A jewel case for the Pump Up the Volume soundtrack was in the CD tower right next to the bureau in the basement where he was sitting at that very moment, filed between Syncronicity and Paul Simon’s first solo album, records he’d listened to with his closest friends throughout their teens, like the tangible referent to memories of having been seventeen once—and thinking like he was seventeen still, fourteen years collapsed like a browser window on his desktop in the stroke of a key.
It struck Mark that this was the most immediate effect of spending so much time online: he rarely kept track of time, and he even more rarely used his memory. Looking at that backlit screen, making jokes, making his missives even, while he was looking at the computer, he wasn’t remembering. He wasn’t remembering his old job. He wasn’t remembering the glory of a gig with the Willows at Pete’s Candy Store on a Tuesday night. He wasn’t remembering the feel of Cassie’s hand on the back of his neck. He was engaging, engaging, engaging, making new words and thoughts and ideas. It was the inverse of listening to music. With music, you listened, but you also let it wash over you as it evoked memories. You put on the original album version of “Sweet Jane,” the seven-minute version complete with the heavenly wine-and-roses bridge, and you heard it. But part of your brain also returned to the last time you heard it, and the first time you heard it. Kissing Cassie became kissing Jill Lebowitz on her parents’ bed in ninth grade became kissing Jill Lebowitz’s younger sister Lilith on her parents’ bed in the eleventh grade. Like the way smelling decaying leaves for the first time in fall might evoke previous falls, childhood falls, a synaptic palimpsest of trick-or-treatings, the collapsing of time across years into the evocation of memory.
But that didn’t happen online.
Online, in a chat room, you were online. In a chat room. The world fell away and there was just text on a screen, the muscle memory of QWERTY as you typed. A stream of characters sped out before you, became words and moved toward the top of the screen forever. Lost to time and to memory, too.
The more time Mark spent in IRC chat rooms, learning more of the channels there, the more he found there must have been dozens of people who used the handle Silence, exchanging it as they wished. He did a LexisNexis search on them—even after being out of magazines for almost six years he hadn’t broken himself of the habit of doing thorough-going Boolean searches on LexisNexis, had kept his password for the service and it miraculously still worked—and found a piece in Wired about it. “Silence” was so broadly used as a handle that it had become a kind of loose anarchic organization, one that had acquired some notoriety after executing DDoS attacks on selected targets over the course of the previous couple of years. They shut down websites, humiliated bank executives they targeted as enemies by revealing private information that led to their firings—they referred to it as doxxing—overwhelming their private servers. In the immediate wake of the whole Too Big to Fail debacle (Mark looked up at his CD tower where Hammer’s 2 Legit 2 Quit sat like the etymological antecedent to global economic catastrophe), they’d shut down the websites of all the biggest banks in the country. They destroyed the personal websites of television reporters they felt had done the most to allow those banks to get away with impunity—Mark had read about organizations like them when he was in grad school, had even considered pitching a story about one to a magazine at one point, but at the time, as Mark Brumfeld, even just interacting with a single member of a group like Silence seemed dangerous enough to consider it twice. If he crossed them, they could destroy him and he knew it.
Now he was chatting with any number of Silence members on IRC chat rooms without giving it a second thought. It wasn’t the most reckless thing a revolutionary had ever done—at the time it seemed like it might vie for the least reckless thing an American revolutionary had ever done—but it was natural and organic and it gave Mark a sense of purpose in the least purposeful-feeling period of his years since being a teenager. Factions of Silence were looking for a way to capitalize on their growth, had been for months, and the Boomer Boomers could be the right iteration for them. Mark knew it and so did they, he felt. He did not discuss meeting with any of them, didn’t know their real names or where they lived or what they did for a living—shit, he didn’t know what a single one of them even looked like or what state let alone city or neighborhood they lived in—and he did not conspire in any tangible way. But they chatted with each other on IRC chat rooms every day after his first interaction with them, sometimes five, six, seven hours a day.
Then Mark got into his car and drove to play basketball.
He was living three different lives, separated by fixed borders, and he breathed it all like the air that feeds a flame.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
MARK WATCHED WITH BOTH GLEE and dread as the Boomer Boomer attacks began in earnest at the end of the summer. They came in three distinct waves. Not one of these waves was controlled by any entity, after its coming into existence as an attack. Mark continued his own missives unabated throughout. He continued chatting on chat rooms and living his other lives, and all of them stayed boundaried by what he felt confident were their inherent borders.
The first wave came to be called Disturb. It came in the form of DDoS attacks on notable baby boomer icons. The last week in August there was an attack on the AARP website. For an hour the organization’s site was down, which would not have occurred to many as odd. In an IRC chat one of Mark’s correspondents told everyone to have a look over there. Mark typed the URL into his browser, and watched as, in place of the site, attackers put up a single photograph of Joni Mitchell, onstage, a smile on her face. No audio. Just Joni Mitchell’s Canadian face, and underneath it in block capital letters:
I AM AS CONSTANT AS THE NORTHERN STAR.
It was a week before the site was up and running again.
Over the course of that week, Mark read in the Times that someone sent a series of blacked-out pages to the AARP office’s fax machine, so that the machines ran out of toner over and over—between the website attack and the fax machine attack, all communications out of the organization’s D.C. office were shut down. Later that week papers reported that someone had sent thousands of pizzas to the AARP office, called their phones constantly. It all sounded trivial, but when a Times story reported that the site’s being down alone was costing a million dollars a day, it seemed less inconsequential. The attacks were reported in The New York Times, on BuzzFeed and Gawker and RazorWire, on all the major networks.
Silence claimed credit for the attacks. On a single video distributed on an IRC chat room Mark had never visited before—it was impossible to keep up with them all even if you tried, and he did try—called #styxxstyxxstyxx, wearing a David Crosby mask and speaking through a vocoder, with a Jerry Garcia poster hung upside down on the wall behind him, the speaker said, “This looks like a Boomer Missive. But this is not a Boomer Missive. This looks like Isaac Abramson, Boomer1, but it is not Isaac Abramson, Boomer1. It is Boomer2. This is Boomer Action Number One. This country has lived long enough with the hegemony of the baby boomers and their profligacy. The time has come to start hitting back. We have shut down the American Association of Tired People. What will you do? We are Silence and we are myriad and we contain multitudes. Resist much, obey little. Propaganda by the deed. Boom boom.”
This Boomer Action was not an Abramson Missive. That week Mark watched as hundreds of new videos showed up on YouTube, none of them his, all of them new Boomer Missives or new calls to Boomer Action, all of them different but also the same: a young man sitting in a basement, wearing a David Crosby mask, with an upside-down Jerry Garcia poster behind him. The Jerry Garcia posters were most of them a little different, the walls different colors, as was the skin on the exposed necks and arms of some of the people posting. Each posting made an attempt to take on a new moniker—the highest Mark saw was Boomer137—but there were some duplicates, as new videos were being posted nearly every hour. The
y were shared on Facebook, tweeted on Twitter, Instagrammed on Instagram, and soon thereafter, reported in the mainstream press.
When Mark saw the first Boomer Action video, instead of pride, he was overcome by paralyzing anxiety. His tongue felt too big in his mouth. His eyes felt as dry as the silicate packets they packed into freeze-dried fruit containers. The Boom Boom movement was supposed to be his Boom Boom movement. In his previous life as a magazine editor the central aspect of his job was curatorial, and it was near complete—he could take a ten-thousand-word story back from a writer and cut it down to five thousand words, four thousand. Pay a 20 percent kill fee and wash his hands of it if he wanted. He could add sentences of his own into the text and leave it under his writer’s byline. Then copy would go on to the fact-checking desk, where if a fact was wrong it was cut or altered. He could lose his job if a single sentence went into print incorrectly. Then the piece went on to the copy desk, where sentences were vetted again. And again. He would give over changes to the rules of grammar or the fact of empirical inaccuracy and otherwise he had total control. If there was any drawback to his job as a writer and as an editor it was that at times he wondered what actual impact he had on people, on politics and events that mattered so much to him. But at least he had control. At least he was meticulous. At least what they put out was factual, empirically sound.
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