|
|
|
stoned in a fascist state
Friday, June 13 2003
Lin and Mark, our friends from Brooklyn, drove up to visit us for the weekend today. It was a particularly rainy day, with occasionally long periods of heavy rainfall. It was a warm rain, though, and tended to suppress the biting flies, making conditions ideal for walking around in the puddles outdoors barefoot. A foot-wide half-inch-deep puddle tends to form in one place on the newly-veneered surface of the front door slab, but other than that it seems to be draining correctly.
While Gretchen and Lin prepared a chicken pot pie using entirely vegetarian materials (particularly the wonder fungus quorn), Mark and I went upstairs to the laboratory and fired up an improvised bowl made of half inch copper pipe fittings. It was the first time I'd gotten stoned here at the house since the upstairs became habitable (back around New Years). Mark entered into one of his paranoid monologues about the increasingly fascist nature of the American government - how everything is being done now is by executive order (in other words, decree) and there's no oversight and no one seems to care. "There were plenty of people writing about how bad things were getting in Germany in the 1930s, and it didn't matter." In the vulnerability of my altered state, Mark really scared the shit out of me. It occurred to me that political conditions had deteriorated a lot in the United States just in the six months since I last smoked pot. I'd never really thought about what it would be like to get stoned in a fascist state, but now I have an idea. I could even see fascism being an effective deterrent to the use of drugs having the capacity to induce paranoia.
Later the lights started flickering occasionally. But they weren't dimming - they'd momentarily go to twice their usual brightness and then fall back to normal. "Oh yeah, you're getting some spikes," Mark observed. Somehow this menacing power situation seemed related to the constellations of factors making America an increasingly unpleasant place to live.
After dinner, Mark and I continued our hanging out while Gretchen and Lin had their parallel girls-only conversation. Mark was enthusiastic about the general concept of "hacking" - particularly when it is used to get out the message that things are fucked up in this country. He was telling me that there's now a way for someone experienced with networked phones to hack his way into a company phone network and then say anything he wants over the company's PA system. Mark also told me that there's a way to program dot-matrix highway signs (the temporary kind used near construction) so that they say any message you choose - including stuff like "BUSH LIED - FOLKS DIED" or " 9-12-01: BUSH AIRLIFTED BIN LADEN'S FAMILY BACK TO SAUDI" All one needs to know is the password and how to operate the machine - and the password is often "DOT1" or something similar. But, as Mark was quick to point out, in today's political climate, when people can be locked up indefinitely, tortured, and tried & executed in secret, it's essential not to get caught. After all, everything that jams culture is quickly being gathered under the umbrella of terrorism.
I showed Mark my proudest recent hack, the one where I figured out the pinouts of an old cash register dot matrix display and interfaced it to an Intel PC. By now I was pretty fucked up, but I still managed to plug the card into my experimental PC, fire it up, launch QBASIC, and run the demo program to send arbitrary messages to the glowing green display.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?030613 feedback
previous | next |
