The first time I destroyed my family computer I didn’t even get blamed for it. Like all 90s
parents, mine viewed computers as frightening and temperamental, more beast than
machine. Computers weren’t something you could control or manage, like an alarm clock or
fridge-freezer. They were unknowing and unknowable, divine and satanic, deathly serious
and despairing pointless. As a result, when our computer failed to boot after I visited one of
the more exotic corners of the information superhighway, they chalked it off as an act of god.
These things happened. Get that nice anti-virus man on the phone and he’ll sort it out.
The next time it happened, my parents began to connect the dots (there were only two dots
so this wasn’t especially hard). An interrogation was scheduled for after dinner and the
repairman was called again. Under cross-examination, I feigned ignorance and demanded
concrete evidence that I had been at fault (we would be deep into the new millennium before
my parents would learn about search history). My father, a fair man, retired to consider. After
a tortuous wait, he delivered his verdict: not guilty… but don’t do it again.
The third time they had me bang to rights. I had been downloading what I believed to be an
Age of Empires first-person POV mod (I know, I know) when my cursor took on a life of its
own. It raced around the screen like a wind-up toy, burrowing through folders and executing
flamboyant commands. I called for help and my parents joined me to watch the show at the
computer desk (a now sadly redundant piece of furniture). After a while, the cursor’s
movements took on a frustrated, agitated manner. Our family was so technologically
ill-educated that we hadn’t yet braved email, let alone internet banking or shopping, and so
the hacker’s spoils were meagre. The most interesting thing to be found, hidden deep within
a nest of a dozen folders all marked ‘Private’ (I considered this high-security in 2002), was a
draft to a stand-up routine I had been working on for the school talent show. After a few
moments of reading, the hacker’s cursor seemed to visibly tremble with despair, and they
soon evacuated the computer. In a touching farewell, they left a simple scrawl in MS Paint:
‘Don’t download random files’. They also deleted my stand-up.
By the fourth time, I had developed just enough technical nous to fight back. Trouble struck
after I signed up to a website promising high-quality, ad-free episodes of LOST even before
they even appeared on TV. This was alluring bait (Jack and the gang had just discovered the
hatch and things were heating up). Using my email address as a username and ol’ faithful as
my password, I signed up. Almost immediately I began noticing unusual activity in my email
account. Drafts appeared and disappeared, confusing error codes warned about exceeding
send limits, and messages arrived in my inbox before being deleted in front of my eyes. It
was exciting and mysterious (like LOST!) but also frustrating and incoherent (like LOST!). It
was time to strike. By now, having been sat down by the IT guy after his latest call-out, I had
some weapons at my disposal. Specifically, I changed my password for the first time and
triggered a hard log-out. Disaster averted. Unfortunately, in an act of inexplicable good faith,
I then downloaded the episode that had been sent through to me (lost.exe) and riddled my
computer anyway.
The fifth time was later that same week when I tried the exact same thing on a second LOST
website. What can I say, I was enjoying the series.
The sixth time belongs to all of us, a shared Millennial coming-of-age tale: I discovered
Limewire. You know the rest. But unlike my previous assailants, what I enjoyed about my
musical hackers was their creativity. They weren’t trying to loot my computer, or harvest my
machine for some anonymous botnet. Instead, I would download a song (almost certainly In
Too Deep by Sum 41) and immediately my display would rotate 180 degrees, or my CD-rom
tray would open and close thirty times in a row, or my desktop background would be
replaced by a screenshot of my desktop background. This was art, this was joy. Plus, half
the time the song would still download, so I could rock out while I tried to stop a full-volume
‘BOING’ sound effect playing whenever I clicked the spacebar. (And that’s before we even
get to Bill Clinton.)
The seventh time marked the end of an era. The Long Nineties was ending, online security
was improving, the internet was becoming more regulated, and my own idiocy was, if not
disappearing, at least being redirected towards other spheres. Those of us who had grown
up with the internet were no longer suitable targets. We were capable and cautious, and a
sterile online infrastructure had been built around us. Instead, hackers took aim at the
outliers: the lonely and the desperate, or the rich and powerful. I fell safely somewhere
in-between. Still, there was just enough time for one last dance. One final irresistible piece of
bait, one last little link promising an extraordinary bounty. And can you blame me? Who
among us wouldn’t want to see 14 shocking photos of what the cast of LOST look like now?
Joey is an Irish writer. He lives in Norwich, England.
