“So what?” The green-and-black flag guy. “Let them arrest us.”
“Well, if we get arrested we can’t do the action. The object is not to merely be arrested. At least, that is not my object,” Nash said. “We do a kind of Busby Berkeley synchronized dance, a serious, deadpan, perfectly synchronized show, with briefcases aloft. We stop people going into the stores and in their frenzy of shopping, not because we physically block them but because we entertain them for a moment, we amuse them, intrigue them. There among the glittering billboards corporations pay thousands for, we engage everyone’s attention out of sheer whimsy.” A girl spoke out from the back of the crowd. “So what the hell is the point? Are we going to even have information for people about the sweatshops that produce the Gap shirts they are buying? Or the way their fast-food restaurants are destroying the ecosystem?” The tone of her voice — the tenor of the earnest whine — contained a sort of tremolo that hung perpetually between an accusation and a dissolve of weary, resigned tears. Miranda found it tremendously unpleasant. “What is the point?” she repeated.
“The point is for us, the players, and perhaps them, the audience, to feel for one second as if we didn’t have AOL Time Warner or Viacom tattooed on our asses,” Nash said. Miranda chewed at her fingernail. He was right.
“And disruption is liberating, especially if it is a formal, organized disruption,” Miranda said. Nash smiled at her. “Mere chaos causes anxiety. Preaching didactically causes boredom. But a formal disruption—”
“Then it approaches beauty of a kind,” Nash said. “Then you begin to really be dangerous.”
After the meeting, she went outside to smoke one of her edge-erasing hash tokes. Nash sat by himself drinking a soda. She walked right past him to where Sissy stood talking to another girl. She left with Sissy, arm in arm, until the next scheduled group began.
The so-called hactivists were up next — the Net geek guys that advocated hacker-type direct action on the Web. She wanted to hear about this, but she especially wanted to see them, the ones who could break laws and destroy things all from the comfort of their homes. Miranda didn’t trust these guys — and naturally, they were all guys. She imagined them to be the same pale, socially isolated creeps who chronically masturbated to Internet porn — not even photos of real women but those cartoon-videogame chicks, the gun-wielding pinups with their glutes bursting out of torn, tight short shorts, all made by some other sweaty, pale guy in a room somewhere. She wanted to check out the kinds of guys who were turned on by these virtual, man-drawn women.
A group of young men crowded the back of the store. They didn’t look all that different from the usual crowd, save a few skinny guys in T-shirts that said OPEN SOURCE or COPY LEFT — GNU/LINUX or simply FUCK MICROSOFT. Nash sat toward the front with a thinly veiled expression of condescension. All at once Miranda felt bad for him again. She wanted to take Nash by the hand and show him how to use Listservs or something. And then, out of nowhere, she thought it. She thought about Nash, in her room at the Black House, in her space. She thought of kissing him and how he would hesitate at first and then kiss her back. She imagined undressing herself and pulling him down on the bed. She imagined his adoring expression. It excited her to be eighteen to someone like Nash. So much more fun than being eighteen to someone who was also eighteen. She really flushed thinking this, and Nash smiled at her because she was staring at him, and she quickly looked away. She turned to the front of the room, where some e-freak pornographer was about to begin.
It was Josh. Josh Marshall, from her old high school. He graduated two classes ahead of her, and certainly she didn’t know him very well, but she used to see him every day. He was not a sweaty little social misfit. No, Josh Marshall was the straightest boy she could imagine. Tall and good looking in an unremarkable, clean way. He wore a uniform of button-down shirt, flat-front khakis or tidy jeans, and brown loafers. Shirts always tucked in.
“Mostly what I thought we could go over is how denial-of-service or flood attacks work and — my specialty — how to hijack sites. You might remember how the address for the IMF meetings was redirected to the green anarchist site. This lasted for about twenty hours. Their site was not altered, we just inserted a program that redirected anyone accessing their address to another site.”
He glanced at her and smiled in recognition. He had never smiled at her in high school. Miranda tried to piece it all together. Certainly Josh was a smart guy. But he was so sunny and so destined for full-steamed establishment success. As he spoke she began to understand. His normalcy was so extreme as to be perverse. No one was that clean-cut, that inadvertent, that unobtrusive. That shy.
“The best kind of hijack is to create an alternate site that looks and behaves just like the real site. I call these parasites. But the links are altered, the information is rearranged so that the truth can be disseminated, but also so misinformation can be posted about where they are meeting and other logistics, as well as some irreverent information just to ridicule them and underline their hypocrisy.”
“How long do you get away with it?” Nash asked.
“If you do it gradually, and don’t shoot your wad all at once, you can string them along for weeks. Monsanto took two weeks to notice. People look at their sites but don’t really ‘read’ the rest of it. And if you imitate their language, and their design, you can often tamper extensively and extendedly.”
“But ultimately detected.”
“Oh sure. Especially if you are giving out false information about meetings and such. It is admittedly a limited gesture, but you can really humiliate these corporate site designers. And these organizations.”
Who would have guessed, Josh? That was how it should be done, she thought. Look and seem straight and law-abiding but actually do things to subvert the status quo. Do something genuinely subversive.
When the meeting ended, Josh walked over to her and asked what she’d been up to since graduation. She invited him down the street to check out the Black House. She didn’t think twice about it — Josh was the kind of guy she generally didn’t get any attention from. She liked listening to him. And she really liked leaving with him.
After everyone left, Nash sat for a while. He didn’t feel like cleaning up the flyers and coffee cups by himself. Even Henry wasn’t around to distract him. Instead Nash lay down on one of the benches and listened to Mingus Ah Um.
It was okay, really, because Josh was her age and that was the way it should be. And Josh was smarter than he thought. Any nagging feelings of doubt, any issues he had with Josh’s character or intentions were not based on anything articulable or objective. He knew his bad feelings came from a little jealousy. The truth was, Nash also felt relieved. He didn’t even mind, too much, when she stopped coming in altogether. He knew that time would make all his twinges fade and eventually go. He knew this because he’d had to let go of things before, as everyone did. It was sad to admit it, but forgetting was a slow, gradual liberation. But knowing this about himself also proved that at some level you don’t completely forget the things you endure. They just fade until it almost seems as though they happened to someone else.
He would get used to not seeing her in the store. And later, when he saw them walking together on the street, he reassured himself that it was a good thing for her, and maybe it really was.