Trump Sky Alpha

by Mark Doten

  There were only a few moments left for the internet.

  Trump, face smudged, last singed strands of hair writhing away from his scalp, was piloting what was left of his zeppelin—the secure inner vault, festooned in rotors—to Mar-a-Lago.

  And there was a last irruption, millions of people pouring themselves into the social media sites.

  Trump still talking, still livestreaming, sailing above the unfolding devastation, justifying and joking and raging, attacking his enemies, and then calling for a big strike, calling for it even as the internet was flickering out.

  He’d announced a big one in New York, but this was an order of magnitude more, the one that would end so much of human life and civilization.

  I saw it screencapped from 4chan and shared onto Twitter: Love Trumps Hate.

  And:

  A Dead Trump Pepe, Xs for eyes.

  Trump, it was said, easily, easily the most hated man who had ever lived.

  A voice somewhere: I don’t want to die.

  And: *mocking voice*: I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die.

  A final rush of MS Paints, hasty Photoshops, Pepes saluting Trump Pepe, Pepes with Xs on their eyes, hearts on their eyes, Trump up there in Trump Sky Alpha, the flag of Kekistan on a zeppelin, the zeppelin itself Pepe’s head, Putin and Kushner and Conway appearing in different iterations, Crying Jordan and Savage Patrick, Side-Eyeing Chloe, even Harambe back again, vultures circling, enemy aircraft roaring in, all of it shuddering and flickering and trying to mutate, it seemed, trying to reach out beyond this, trying to dream up some sort of escape, the image of Canuplin there, all of a sudden, the painting of an old Filipino man, melancholy, impassive, the cigarette frozen near his mouth, Love Trumps Hate, Canuplin amid the Pepes, the bombs that were Pepes, a field of dead Pepes, Pepe with a single tear, Savage Patrick at the helm, Distracted Boyfriend meme, boyfriend’s eyes going from a flayed corpse head to a flayed Pepe head, the phrases Love Trumps Hate and We Love Trumps Hate, shirtless Alex Jones and shirtless Putin and Hillary in a white pantsuit and Obama in a tan suit and Canuplin staring out, cigarette in hand, in a field of Pepes that were laid out on top of the airship, something about that airship and everyone on it and everyone who surrounded it, who flew with or against it, was near some ultimate form, some joke about 1/28, about all the lies about that, all the jokes about that, all of the colossal rage and grief and fear, it was slipping toward something, it was vibrating with certain possibilities, and then the internet was dead (*universe to humans*: retire bitch) and all that was over.

  A convoy of two SUVs and three larger military vehicles took me back to the airport.

  I said to the driver that it had been just two vehicles when they brought me.

  Dark now, he said. Good to be careful.

  At the airport there was no flight, no information on why there was not a flight. I was told to wait at a table outside a shuttered bar and grill. There was a single light turned on above me, the nearby gates dark. Figures walked by using flashlights, beams splintering against the grate pulled over the bar, the taps inside, the empty rows of mirrored bar shelves.

  I hadn’t had a drink in over a year—not since before the Foshay. Here there was a distracting smell, beer that had turned, faint and sweet and rotten, cloying and insistent and only barely there beneath the airport smell.

  I do not think of airports as having a particular smell—perhaps a neutralizing nonsmell, a kind of white noise.

  This one had one.

  The turned beer snaked out of something larger, a smell that belonged to a massive institutional space that was no longer being maintained, a smell I knew from the Foshay, mildew and synthetic fabrics and cleaners and too much trapped air.

  The beer had flipped a switch in my brain—made the smells I had programmed myself to tune out present, unavoidable, something my mind was sorting through and cataloging.

  Or perhaps I was in an avoidant mode, because I knew that I was in a trap.

  I had walked into something, and I had to figure out the angle, the right play.

  The Subversive and Sebastian de Rosales and Jon Postel and Birdcrash.

  That these names had merged and assembled themselves in the room with the internet was a contingent thing that had involved my own searches, certain clicks, choices that were at times barely conscious—the fingers that push the planchette over the Ouija board.

  The pattern seemed obvious, then perhaps I was seeing a pattern where there was none. I didn’t know, didn’t trust myself to know. Or rather I knew I didn’t have enough information to make any determination.

  Yet my mind was still humming with it, the internet, what I thought I’d found.

  I wanted to go back to the internet room. I wanted a sip of the rotten beer. I wanted to be on a plane somewhere else. I wanted to be back on the internet right now.

  The Subversive was a 2015 novel by Sebastian de Rosales that told the story of a boy who emigrated from the Philippines to the US, and went on to form a hacktivist collective called the Aviary that hacked various government websites in the US and the Philippines, orchestrated DDoS attacks against domain name registrars, and conducted a number of other online operations that caused a fair amount of damage, leading up to a massive attack that paralyzed the global internet. The novel received little attention when it was released, but the following year, an organization calling itself the Aviary appeared, headed by a hacker named Birdcrash, and began taking credit for attacks similar to those described in the book.

  I’d interviewed de Rosales for TechMinder in 2017. I had even asked him about that line in his book, On 1/28, Jon Postel will reset the system.

  And it had appeared again on the internet, in the last hours of its existence: the 1/28 quotes about Postel, and others about the first commercial telephone exchange, the fifteen-inch snowflake, the death of Charlemagne, all in a Reddit post (“2015 novel perfectly predicts today’s attacks [SPOILER ALERT]”) that linked a pirate copy of The Subversive.

  It did not mean there was causation, it did not mean that the Aviary had committed the attack; the book read by more people after the publicity boost of the real-world attacks, and in those last hours, people were grabbing on to anything. The fact that a handful of people had posted quotes from The Subversive didn’t mean anything.

  I had been there at the shuttered restaurant for hours.

  A flashlight came by, beam ricocheting through the space.

  It was two women in fatigues.

  I stepped out into their path, hands raised.

  Excuse me, I’m a journalist and I’ve been told to wait here, but no one has come by to tell me what is happening and I need to use the restroom.

  Stay right there, ma’am, said the one with the flashlight. She shined it in my face, and on my clothes, a blue button-down shirt and khakis, a little too big, that I’d been given at Foshay. My hand went to my face, and I felt how my hair was flying around my head, and wondered why I hadn’t put it in its place during all my hours sitting at the little table.

  She spoke on a walkie-talkie, and they took me to another wing. Use the first stall, the woman with the flashlight said. The other woman took a small flashlight out of her pocket and tested it, click on, click off.

  She handed it to me. Don’t be long. Click it off when you’re seated and in place.

  The other one said, Clicking it off wastes it. That’s like a half hour of battery each click.

  You know that’s a myth, the first said.

  I sat in the stall, I didn’t know if I should click it off or leave it on. I pulled my hair back, the light crashing chaotically around the space with its walls and door as I fixed my hair in the rubber band.

  I didn’t like that crazy movement of the light. It seemed important to decide: leave it on, or turn it off.

  It was all for show, but I didn’t know who the show was for, what mattered—they were outside the bathroom—but whatever I did with the light, it was a show.

  I wi
shed that the flashlight was a gun. I put it into my mouth and everything was dark except the faint glow coming from inside my face that indicated the walls and door around me. My head was a little lamp now. Skin and sinew wrapped the form of my skull.

  Who is blue-pilled and who is red-pilled?

  On 1/28, a fifteen-inch snowflake falls on Fort Keogh, Montana.

  I was held in a nearby facility for the next week, and I wasn’t allowed to contact Galloway. Starting on the third day there were sets of questions about what I’d found on the internet.

  My interrogator was a man in his midtwenties. He wore a dark suit, and had a look that I would have characterized in the old world as ambitious. Every afternoon I was taken to his office to talk about de Rosales. He would smile at me the way you smile at something you hate, something keeping you from a prize. How had I known to look for those quotes? What did I know about the Aviary? I had spoken to de Rosales before—had I maintained contact with him? Did I think he was an active member of the Aviary? Was I a member of the Aviary, had I ever spoken with anyone in the Aviary, do I have any associations with the Aviary whatsoever?

  He said, My role here is to be restrained. It is only in extreme scenarios that we go beyond talk.

  He said, What we’re trying to understand is how you zeroed in so quickly on material that implicated de Rosales.

  Yes, I said, a few threads led back to The Subversive in all of the noise that last day. Because of the profile I’d done of Rosales for TechMinder, I was probably more likely to pick out those threads than others would have been. But I can’t ultimately tell you what it means.

  Did it surprise you to find the quotes?

  In retrospect, no. It is not entirely surprising to find quotes from the book circulating. The book is a part of hacker culture, online culture. It was around. You add to that the coincidence of 1/28, it would make sense people were pulling quotes.

  If it was a coincidence.

  Yes, if it was. That’s right. But you saw the Reddit post. “Novel perfectly predicts.” So others were getting to the same place.

  That post had what, five or six comments?

  I said also there were tweets of screenshots from the book. It got around.

  In very limited circles, he said.

  I was told to think hard about my answers. I would not want to make a mistake in any of my answers, he said.

  Canuplin, that painting of him, it was the cover of The Subversive, and that image definitely got around.

  It did, he said. That’s a very good point. It got around.

  He produced a copy of the interview. He asked me to walk him through it—what I had been thinking when I asked the questions, what I thought of de Rosales’s responses.

  He asked me what I had thought when I interviewed him—was de Rosales Birdcrash? Or an associate of Birdcrash?

  I said that at the time I had not thought so, though I had a sense he wasn’t being entirely forthcoming. His presentation was very smooth, almost too smooth, and then his eyes would sharpen, he’d show himself wanting too much, and lose that veneer.

  You felt you were being manipulated.

  I wasn’t sure. I wrote a piece to accompany the interview where I basically laid out the evidence—and there wasn’t any hard evidence that I knew of—that he was Birdcrash. I had thought that he probably wasn’t.

  Do you know what BIND is?

  I told him that I knew that it had to do with addressing, and was thought to be a part of the attack that had brought down the internet.

  Did you know that de Rosales was one of the coders who worked on it in 1999 and 2000?

  No, I said. I didn’t know that.

  Did you know that the Aviary—the Aviary in their Pastebin posts after their first several attacks—they would include lines pulled directly from de Rosales’s novel?

  Yes, I was aware of that. That’s basic stuff—that was in my piece. The Subversive was obviously a foundational text for them. But I’m not aware of evidence that de Rosales was ever part of the actual organization. And the posts on 1/28, again, they don’t prove anything, except that there was text from a novel that certain very online people liked that was relevant to the moment.

  There is quite a bit here that’s relevant. We seem to be in a zone of intense relevance.

  Interview with Sebastian de Rosales, TechMinder

  Have you had any communication with the members of the … how shall I refer to them, the nonfiction Aviary?

  Nonfiction Aviary works fine. No, I have not. And I hope not to, for legal reasons.

  What do you think of what they’ve done?

  My lawyer has instructed me not to make any statements about them, or offer any opinions on them or their actions.

  Surely you have some thoughts.

  My lawyer has cautioned me in the strongest possible terms to not express any judgments at all about the Aviary—the nonfiction Aviary.

  Can you say if you disapprove of any of their actions?

  Apparently there could be legal difficulties in that direction, too. I’m afraid I do not feel legally competent to even outline general contours of what I don’t know, if that makes sense, so I’m going to have to pass on the question.

  Can we move back then, chronologically? You’ve spoken of the childhood portions of this as being based on your own life.

  That was a mistake.

  Why a mistake?

  Because it’s fiction. Because you draw on life sometimes but it goes in other places, for any number of reasons.

  The main character in The Subversive, after he immigrates to America, he becomes a victim of sexual abuse.

  Pass.

  Pass?

  Whatever the question is, pass, pass, pass.

  Let me zoom out a little. The nonfiction Aviary is conducting not only the type of attacks on government websites that you described in the novel, they’ve also announced an operation to expose child abusers and distributors of child pornography on the internet. That wasn’t in your book, but it feels like it fits with the ideas of the book.

  You want me to say “I wish I’d thought of that”? That the real-world Aviary is improving on the book?

  Is that what you think?

  My thoughts. My thoughts. I’m afraid I do not feel legally competent to even outline general contours of my thoughts, or of what I’m permitted and not permitted to say about my thoughts, if that makes sense, so I’m going to have to pass on the question, and really anything about my life, or how my life relates to the book. This won’t be a good interview. Perhaps we should just call it a day. Okay, let’s move on. You wrote this before Trump. Does the context of the Trump era change the ideas of the book for you?

  No, though if I had really been thinking, I would have predicted it in the book. It’s not surprising to see an authoritarian president, a demagogue stoking racial fears and other divisions, because that is where the internet has been taking us.

  If you want The Subversive now, as a reader, how do you get it?

  Out of print from the original publisher, Cyber Prairie Books, who sadly have gone out of business. Not because of any of this, but because independent publishing is hard and they were losing more money than they had to lose. If they had stuck around a bit longer, they would have been able to sell the print run of the book, rather than remaindering it.

  Remaindering it?

  Well, they sold me a carton of the books for cheap, and pulped the rest.

  How many did they sell before that?

  Fewer than three hundred.

  So how do people get your book?

  There are some used copies out there. I understand that it’s become a collector’s item.

  I saw one on eBay for over $500.

  Yes, there’s some demand for it. Unfortunately it’s under something of a legal cloud because of the nonfiction Aviary, so it’s not a project a legitimate publisher can take on without opening itself up to legal exposure that would vastly outweigh any benefits to publishing
it. For a time after Cyber Prairie folded I made it available for free as a PDF and EPUB file on my website. After the connection between the book and the Aviary was publicly made, it was downloaded that day so often that it crashed my site. And then there was the legal issue. Since then, I haven’t made it available, but pirate versions are circulating, I understand.

  What led you to create the Aviary?

  The fiction Aviary.

  Yes.

  There were a number of things I was turning over in my head. Something that’s in the book, almost twenty years ago, John Perry Barlow wrote a manifesto called “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” It’s beautiful and important and quite short, and I encourage everyone who hasn’t read it before to google it and read it now. It’s also, I think, fundamentally wrong. What it does, in rather visionary prose, is carve out the internet as a space that existed somehow after or beyond government controls. The opening runs—please correct the quote for your article—it says, “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather” [ed: he had the quote perfectly]. This has become something of a punching bag in the years since, for a number of reasons that could and have filled several books. For one thing, the internet isn’t some ideal mind-space—it’s physically embodied. It is physical architecture, it’s cable, it’s fiber, it’s massive data centers warming the globe. It runs through countries. I researched the first global telegram for my book, and the final piece of the cable ran through Manila, the transpacific cable itself, it was a copper cable layer, insulated by a layer of gutta-percha latex, then a sheath of brass, then a layer of jute yarn, then a final layer—the exterior—woven from iron and steel wires. The steel wires alone weighed nineteen million pounds. So today it’s fiber-optic cable, it’s maybe lighter, but it’s not really different. It’s a vast work of engineering, it’s objects in space, and people in different parts of the globe have vastly different experiences of the internet and vastly different amounts of political power when it comes to how the internet works. That’s one thing. For another, the ideal that Barlow embodied—what I would call the technocratic hippie libertarian ideal—pretends to a kind of neutrality, and it’s not neutral: it benefits America, it benefits capital. The bodies that control the internet, you’ll see much greater representation there from commercial stakeholders than noncommercial stakeholders. I’m not saying all of the technocratic hippies that created the internet as we know it have gotten rich, many could have cashed out in various ways but chose to labor on behalf of this ideal, which is great—but whose ideal is it? Even something basic like top-level domains—you know how each country has a domain, dot us, or dot fr for france, a dot ph for the Philippines. These were developed from a list by the European-based International Organization for Standards. The list is itself contested, which I won’t go into here. But then to delegate the authority to administer the country code, you have to have someone that the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority considers a trusted partner in that country. And they don’t always certify such a partner, so for instance there’s a guy, a white guy who lives in Japan, a guy who’s been working on the internet for a million years, he controls the domains for a number of what they call orphan country codes in Africa. And, you know, he’s not doing it to make money—he’s not making money—he’s doing it to keep the system running. But you see what an unequal system it is, for people in different parts of the world. So let’s say you’re trying to take back authoritative control there for a new government to set up a means of getting, I don’t know, resources about vaccinations to the people of the country. Or forget that—you just want to use your country’s top-level domain in whatever way you think appropriate. You’re the country, you’re trying to take some authority, and you’re stuck petitioning some white guy living in Japan, proving to him who you are, that you deserve the authority. And maybe you get it and maybe you don’t—you, in your country. And that’s just talking about the country code TLDs. Power reproduces itself throughout different parts of the system in different ways.