Business

Saturday, Dec 30, 1995 12:38 PM UTC

A conversation with John Markoff

By Scott Rosenberg

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“Takedown” is told from Tsutomu Shimomura’s first-person point of view, but between the two of you, you’re the writer. How did that work?

We spent about a month together talking, and I did a lot of transcription. Then I wrote a draft in a couple of months, and spent another month rewriting. It was a collaborative effort, but the world view is clearly Tsutomu’s. I was trying to capture Tsutomu’s voice. The only way I knew how to approach it was as a reporter. I thought about writing it at one point in a Sam Spade style, but that just seemed too affected.

Tsutomu has an attitude. And it comes back to haunt him occasionally. He’s abrupt. He doesn’t suffer fools easily. He’s really a smart guy, but he’s not experienced in this world of the media — it’s been sort of a trial by fire for him.

It does seem that Shimomura looks down on everyone — even you.

I think Tsutomu is going to take some arrows for that, and I suppose it will be a learning process for him. I mean, this is a very honest book. This is Tsutomu Shimomura with warts. And some of the things that are his strengths are also his weaknesses. He’s been exposed in a very public way that he didn’t ever seek out.

The story climaxes with a dramatic confrontation between Shimomura and Mitnick at the arraignment. How did that feel?

Kevin walked in, in a charcoal sweatsuit, and he was manacled and handcuffed. It was depressing. It brought home the reality that this was not a game. That’s one of the things that Tsutomu says — it wasn’t a game, somebody was going to jail.

I’d been following this guy’s criminal career for 15 years. And I’d talked to him on the phone before. I’d never met him. But I didn’t have an obsession with catching Kevin Mitnick, I didn’t have any anger at him. One of the reasons that that confrontation between him and Tsutomu happened was that at the end of the hearing I walked up to him at the front. I just wanted to say, “Kevin, I hope things go well for you.” And he didn’t have much to say. He just looked at me and nodded.

After all the drama of the hunt online, the drab reality of that scene almost comes as a letdown. The words — even a dramatic line like, “Tsutomu, I respect your skills” — can’t live up to a reader’s expectations.

Yeah. Although — I didn’t understand this at the time — but I believe now that that exchange between Tsutomu and Kevin Mitnick created this entire event. With my wonderful news sense, when I wrote that story, I was going to put it at the end, rather than on the front page of the paper! “Tsutomu, I respect your skills” — I thought, perfect kicker. If the editors hadn’t seen that and said it should be fronted, it would have been an entirely different outcome. But that made the imagery, right? In the mythic sense.

At the end of “Takedown” it’s clear that Mitnick wasn’t working alone, and that some of his cohorts are still at large.

Yes. The story’s not over. To be honest, that’s all I know. I know that the case is not finished. I believe there’s still an investigation. I’m “conflicted out.”

As in “conflict of interest”?

Yes. If anything happens, I’m not going to write about it.

You’ve been criticized for not mentioning, in your first story about the arrest, that your e-mail was being read.

There’ve been a lot of questions raised, and rightly so. I think I made a mistake, but I don’t think it was a grievous error. It could have been handled properly in a parenthetical aside. My editors argued to put that in. But I thought that, because he was reading the e-mail of virtually anybody on the WELL, and dozens of reporters are on the WELL, I didn’t need to single myself out. It was a wrong call.

Did the omission have anything to do with the traditional culture of the New York Times, in which reporters leave themselves out of their stories?

I can’t blame the Times for this. I’ve always felt uncomfortable with first-person journalism, personally. I love Hunter Thompson, but I’m not Hunter Thompson. I was the one who was resisting my editors’ notion of putting me into the story. Then they asked me for a first-person piece, and I did it kicking and screaming.

A lot of people are still scratching their heads, wondering just how big a threat Mitnick was.

Was Kevin Mitnick a national menace? No way. Was this a good yarn? I think so. I mean, it was an interesting sort of morality play for the information age we’re moving into. Was Kevin Mitnick an information-age terrorist? No. His motivation is still a mystery to me. But I’ll tell you one thing: he was an adult. He’d been arrested five times before. He had gone to jail three times before. He was systematically stealing software from dozens if not more computers around the Internet. He was targeting cellular telephone companies and stealing source code that major U.S. companies had spent millions of dollars developing. His motivations are not clear. He was tampering with the telephone network. He was costing Internet service providers tens of thousands of dollars or more just watching him — and they were helpless to stop him.

I don’t think you have to make the leap to say he was some grave terrorist. This guy was a hardened computer criminal. He is a guy who’s been given many chances to get his act together. A lot has been made of whether or not he was “cyberspace’s most wanted.” I made that call when I wrote my first article in July, 1994, based on the fact that the U.S. Marshal service, the FBI, the California Department of Motor Vehicles, several local police departments and several telecommunications companies were all looking for him and couldn’t find him. I think that’s a good story — end of case.

I’ve been sort of pinned with this conspiracy to catch Kevin. I wrote the first story because I was so intrigued with his ability to avoid these people. That first story had a modern Bonnie-and-Clyde aspect to it that I thought was revealing. The fact that people went nuts over the story — that’s something that I didn’t expect. I don’t fully comprehend the way the media works. But I didn’t advertise him as a menace to the world — just as a very persistent criminal. The words that I used to describe him were “Con man” and “grifter.” I think that comes close to approximating what he did.

It’s almost as if the “yarn”-ishness that you identified in the story is what took off. You covered it; your editors took it a step further and put it on the front page; and then the world turned and said, this is a good yarn — let’s see the book! And the movie!

I see that the media touches on certain events and they become mythic. I don’t understand that process, or why. One that I’ve always been struck by is the creation of Apple Computer: two guys in a garage. It’s a national myth. And the media still focuses years later on Apple Computer like no other computer company.

But I didn’t think I was involved in myth creation. Every reporter looks for a good story. And to be honest, it may not be believable, but I thought that my 15 minutes of fame was with Robert Tappan Morris [whose "worm" brought the Internet to a standstill in 1988]. That was a great story that I broke, and it had this same kind of explosive interest. But nobody understood what the Net was at that point. Now, everybody’s on the Net, and it’s a much more personal experience.

In the wake of that story, I was really looking for new things — I was trying to look at new technologies that aren’t related to the Net in Silicon Valley. Internet reporting is the biggest pack-journalism event I’ve ever seen in my life, and I want nothing to do with it. I felt that way two years ago. But you can’t get away from it — I keep getting dragged back in.

What’s the status of the movie deal?

Miramax bought the rights. Apparently they’ve selected writers — I don’t know who they are. The contract is done from my part and Tsutomu’s, but apparently it’s not quite all done. It’s something, again, that I’m trying to distance myself from.

Are you afraid of how the story will mutate?

Yeah, kind of. But my training is as a social scientist. I’ll watch it with great interest. I don’t know what else to do.

One funny story: Miramax wanted to put out a press release after the deal, and they sent me a copy. It referred to Tsutomu Shimomura as “The James Bond of Cyberspace.” So I called them up and said, you know, maybe Sherlock Holmes would be a better metaphor here. They said, no, nobody knows who Sherlock Holmes is. And I thought, okay, I understand where this is heading.

How do you think the popularizing of the Mitnick story will affect the debate about how to make the Net more secure?

For the last six months I’ve been reporting on the claims made by the commercial providers on the Internet that they can provide real security. I think the Shimomura-Mitnick story illustrates really well that we have the illusion of security now, but we don’t have real security. If Tsutomu and I have anything to say, it’s that the country needs to think about privacy and security issues as we step forward into whatever kind of world is emerging here.

I’ve gotten my share of flames on the Net recently for some of my security articles. What I’ve found is, as you criticize existing security technology, there’s a bell-shaped curve of people who respond to you. The people who know nothing think that you’re really insightful. The people who know a little bit think that you’re full of shit and that you’re criticizing something that is quite solid, thank you — they want to know why you’re tearing down these commercial possibilities. Yet the people who know a lot know that you’re precisely right.

The banking community spent 200 years developing systems for safely handling money. We have spent half a decade on how to safely handle information that represents money. We’re not there yet.

Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg is director of MediaBugs.org. He is the author of "Say Everything" and Dreaming in Code and blogs at Wordyard.com. More Scott Rosenberg.

Saturday, Dec 30, 1995 12:06 PM UTC

Mitnick's Malice, Shimomura's Chivalry

Three books on the celebrated hacker case debunk one another's myths

By Scott Rosenberg

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I.   T h e   T w o   P i c t u r e s

Thick glasses, double chin, frowning lips and a bitter stare: Kevin Mitnick’s 1989 mugshot is forbidding — a hacker gargoyle. By the time of Mitnick’s most recent arrest, in February, 1995, the photo had appeared twice on the front page of the New York Times.

No one made Mitnick into a hacker; that was his own choice and responsibility. But the media turned his trespasses into legend. The Times turned that little photo into a receptacle for all its readers’ projections of digital-age paranoia — an icon of junk-food-fed, anti-social computer thievery.

Who might exorcize this demon? How about a young, Japanese-born physicist, ski bum and computer-security expert, revealed in photos as an elfin young man with long black hair — in short, a wizard like Tsutomu Shimomura?

When Mitnick apparently broke into Shimomura’s computer system on Christmas Day, 1994, he threw down a challenge that would lead to his capture two months later. If Mitnick was “the dark-side hacker” (as he’s called in “Cyberpunk,” until recently his only in-depth portrait), then his nemesis, Shimomura, stepped right out of central casting into the role of a Jedi knight.

The story of the Mitnick manhunt, recounted by veteran computer reporter and “Cyberpunk” co-author
John Markoff, broke in the New York Times on February 16, 1995 — setting off a different kind of chase, one involving agents and deals and contracts. This month, the stores will be crowded with the fruits of that second hunt — a complementary trio of books, each, “Rashomon”-like, providing a different angle of vision on the Mitnick saga.

Individually, these volumes are dissatisfyingly incomplete. Put them together, though, and they debunk the very media-legend stereotypes that sold each of the authors’ contracts. Mitnick is no demon; Shimomura is no wizard. Crime and punishment online is a lot harder to score than a Dungeons-and-Dragons-style duel.

II.   T h e   T h r e e   B o o k s

Of the trio, the most eagerly awaited, heavily promoted and apparently most lucrative is the collaboration between Shimomura and Markoff. (Trade reports peg its advance at around $700,000, with additional movie and game deals bringing the tab near $2 million.) Its title reads like a late night marketing-meeting compromise that everyone got to tack a few words onto: “Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of Kevin Mitnick, America’s Most Wanted Computer Outlaw — By the Man Who Did It.”

This force-fed title presages an awkwardness, and an arrogance, that the book, alas, fully delivers on. By the end of “Takedown,” Shimomura has shredded his own courtly image and replaced it with a picture of near-inhuman condescension.

Where “Takedown” provides the view from Shimomura’s corner, “The Fugitive Game: Online with Kevin Mitnick” portrays events from the quarry’s point of view, as recorded by Jonathan Littman, a journalist who was in telephone contact with Mitnick through most of the chase. (Littman has also accused Markoff of being not only an observer but a participant in the Mitnick manhunt.)

More effective in humanizing Mitnick than any of Littman’s exhaustively reported phone conversations are “The Fugitive Game’s” photos. By juxtaposing the now-familiar mugshot gargoyle with a more recent snapshot of a slimmer, amiable regular guy in jeans and a T-shirt, “The Fugitive Game” effectively undermines our natural revulsion to the earlier picture. It embarrasses us into a less knee-jerk, more even-tempered view.

A third volume, a quickie paperback by writer Jeff Goodell with the hype-laden title “The Cyberthief and the Samurai,” offers far less inside detail but somewhat more context, coherence and chronological logic than its competitors.

With this much verbiage and talent dedicated to it, you’d think the Mitnick story would finally emerge with some clarity. Instead, the journalistic free-for-all only ends up muddying the biggest question of the story: Just how dangerous was Mitnick, and how damaging were his exploits?

III.   T h e   H e i n o u s   C r i m e s

Hyperion took out an ad in Publisher’s Weekly for “Takedown” that reprinted the Mitnick mug yet again with these words: “He could have crippled the world. Only one man could stop him. Shimomura.”

“Crippled the world”? Huh?

“Takedown” summarizes Mitnick’s wrongdoings as “reading other people’s mail and stealing their software.” These are certainly immoral and almost certainly criminal acts. I don’t want Kevin Mitnick reading my e-mail — no doubt neither do you. If I were Markoff or Shimomura I’d be pretty mad to find him rummaging around my hard disk, too.

But, as Littman persuasively argues, it’s hard to see what deep national threat Mitnick posed. Among the files he allegedly pilfered from Shimomura’s computer and stashed at various online locations — including accounts he hacked into on the WELL and Netcom — investigators found a big list of Netcom customers’ credit card numbers. That sounds scary. But there’s no evidence Mitnick ever used any of them, and it turns out that copies of this list had apparently been floating around the hacker underground for months.

Mitnick is also accused of stealing proprietary cellular-phone software systems, and that’s of understandable import to company officials. But how do you calculate this sort of damage in dollar figures? Think back on your last few software purchases and “upgrades” and you’ll recall how arbitrary the pricing of “intellectual property” can be.

Shimomura scoffs at the argument that Mitnick was simply a curiosity-driven hacker; he finds no “higher moral purpose” in Mitnick’s exploits — probably because there is none. On the other hand, Mitnick never seems to have made a cent from his hacking, and never escalated from electronic harassment and snooping toward any kind of violence to property or people. If this is how “the dark-side hacker” hacks, we can all breathe a little more easily.

Mitnick seems to have pursued his telecommunications trespassing out of some kind of compulsion (after one of his earlier convictions, he got some minor breaks by accepting a diagnosis of “computer addiction”). Most readers are likely to conclude that he deserves some sort of jail sentence. But did he need to be turned into a demon — a posterboy for technophobic paranoia?

When we embrace reductive pictures for complex issues, we lose the chance to assess what’s really at stake. Hypnotized by visions of duels between demons and wizards, we lose track of today’s far more important conflict over computer security — the battle for privacy and freedom on the electronic networks of the future.

IV.   T h e   R e a l   T h r e a t

“Takedown’s” most valuable contribution to the public debate is Shimomura’s careful explanation of how hard it is to achieve thorough security on the Internet — which was designed as an open network for collaborative research rather than a secure framework for online commerce. The greatest weaknesses, he convincingly maintains, are human rather than technological.

The firewalls most corporations have built around their sites are like digital Maginot lines, he suggests. They lull their owners into a false sense of high-tech safety, while the Mitnicks of the world saunter right past the defenses, employing the low-tech con-artist techniques they call “social engineering.” (Mitnick’s no technical genius, it seems — one incident in Goodell’s book suggests that in autumn of 1994 he didn’t even know what the World Wide Web is — but he has a gift for getting people to divulge passwords and other secrets over the phone.)

Shimomura, touched by something of a hacker spirit himself, has nothing but contempt for institutions and bureaucracies. It’s amusing to compare the passages in “The Fugitive Game” that darkly speculate about Shimomura’s connections to the National Security Agency with the sections of “Takedown” in which Shimomura fumes about all the red tape that’s delaying his basic research grant from the NSA. But when Shimomura criticizes the performance of the law-enforcement authorities he works with, he has a point.

Mitnick’s mayhem, in the end, seems far less terrifying than the ignorance and incompetence displayed by most of the officials who are fumblingly trying to capture him. That ordinary citizens might be easily spooked by shadowy visions of uber-hackers is understandable; that the Feds in charge of prosecuting computer crimes don’t have a more sophisticated understanding of technology is inexcusable.

Through the Clipper Chip, the digital telephony bill and other initiatives, the government has recently sought greatly expanded powers of electronic surveillance: essentially, it wants an open back door into all future networks. “Takedown” suggests that, if legislators create such a door, it’s far more likely to be jimmied by the Mitnicks of the future than to give the rest of us an easier night’s sleep. It’s the legal equivalent of an Internet firewall — providing the appearance of better security while actually opening the possibility of greater mischief.

Meanwhile, the government has blocked the dissemination of the one technology that Shimomura says could make the Net a more private place — digital encryption, a kind of encoding that safely hides one’s data from Mitnicks and gumshoes alike.

V.   T h e   B i g   G a m e

It would be great to think that the Mitnick-book overkill would teach the public more about the importance of online privacy and the nature of true computer security. More likely, it will simply cement some popular myths: there are some creepy, dangerous, overweight hackers out there — and we’d better find some valiant code warriors to protect us from them.

Both “The Fugitive Game” and “Takedown,” with its martial-arts-derived title, envision the Mitnick story as a gaming bout — a kind of intellectual pro-wrestling event with the good and bad participants plainly marked. Mitnick himself put a seal on that image with his courtroom comment to Shimomura: “Tsutomu, I respect your skills.”

Yet the story’s final irony is that this game isn’t the one that matters most. It’s small potatoes next to the one the books themselves are playing: the public-relations game.

The fine suspense of computer-file reconstruction and cellular phone-line tracing pales next to the high drama of self-mythologizing and public-image manipulation. The competition online may have determined whether Mitnick could be found and captured (right now, he’s awaiting trial in Los Angeles, after a plea-bargain settled charges in North Carolina, where he was caught). But the competition in the media will determine how the story is ultimately seen: hero slays monster? or the system catches up with romantic outlaw?

In this game, Shimomura’s secret weapon isn’t his Unix wizardry — it’s his relationship with a New York Times reporter, who snatched him from the obscurity of the San Diego Supercomputer Center and helped transform him into a digital superhero. Every superhero has a vulnerability, of course, and Shimomura’s is his own arrogance. “Takedown” may alienate the public from him as efficiently as the original Times coverage endeared him. (Some of the early coverage of “Takedown” already shows signs of this.)

But this game has just begun, and its real showdown will only unfold should a Mitnick vs. Shimomura movie get made. In the forging of popular myth, Hollywood is always the final battleground.

Of course, given the mediocre box-office record of last year’s “cyber”-movies, we may never see a “Catching Kevin.” And even if we do, given the movie industry’s dim record of faithfully representing the digital world on screen, the resulting film isn’t likely to bear much resemblance to anyone’s version of the story’s reality — Mitnick’s or Shimomura’s, Markoff’s or Littman’s or Goodell’s, mine or yours.

Something tells me, though, that if Kevin Mitnick ever does make it to the big screen, that mugshot gargoyle is going to grimace at us yet again.

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Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg is director of MediaBugs.org. He is the author of "Say Everything" and Dreaming in Code and blogs at Wordyard.com. More Scott Rosenberg.

Saturday, Dec 2, 1995 11:56 AM UTC

Lost Highway

Tripping Down Bill Gates' Road to Nowhere

By Scott Rosenberg

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Each time I run Microsoft Word on my Windows PC these days, when I close the program, the machine stutters a bit, then delivers a glum message:
“WINWORD caused a General Protection Fault in module WINWORD.EXE at 00B6:0408.”

Crash! Another victim of the dreaded Windows GPF. Sometimes, my mind on idle while my PC reboots, I stare at those initials and reassign them:

Godawful Poor Functioning.
Garbage Production Facility.
Going Putrid Fast.
Gates Programming Fuckup!

I know that Bill Gates isn’t personally to blame for the ill manners of my Microsoft Word. But holding him responsible provides a grim kind of satisfaction. By dint of his astonishing success and unfathomable wealth, Gates’ features have become the face of the computer revolution — big glasses, mussy hair and all. When something goes wrong on the desktop, his is the face we want to throw a pie at, festoon with a mustache or, when things get really bad, punch.

In truth, lately Word’s GPFs have turned relatively harmless — they send me an error message but don’t freeze my system. And so I have not bothered to spend the hours I know it would take to identify and exterminate this bug. I do not wish to venture out into Windows’ maddening system directories, with their vast arrays of incomprehensible filenames; I do not wish to disturb things I never knew existed in hopes of solving problems I never expected to have.

Yet the error messages are disquieting. They are little missives from the depths of my PC that declare, “This system has become too complex for you to even think about fixing. You are no longer in control.”

That is an ironic message to receive from Microsoft Word, because the myth of total control is what Gates, his company and his new book of high-tech crystal-ball-gazing, “The Road Ahead,” are all about.

“The Highway,” Gates says, will change the way we work and play. It’s certainly changing his job.

In “The Road Ahead,” a book-and-CD-ROM package, Gates “predicts the future for you” (as Newsweek’s cover put it). And, surprise!, things look bright indeed to America’s richest guy. The “information highway” — Gates generally clips it to a plain “the highway” — isn’t here yet; the Internet is only a genetic precursor, according to Gates. But when “the highway” itself arrives at our doors, with its ubiquitous high-bandwidth digital video feeds, our lives will undergo a seismic change for the better.

This “World of Tomorrow” prognostication game is old enough hat that even Gates admits many of his predictions will soon look comical. The CD-ROM’s video portrait of “the highway” circa 2004 — a world of heavy makeup, bad Muzak and super-efficient cappuccino bars — will make for good party entertainment a decade hence. So will its wide-eyed virtual-reality walk-through of the still-unfinished Gates mansion, the Hearst Castle of the ’90s.

“The Road Ahead,” like an AT&T ad, is built around a ritual repetition of the word “will.” I used the CD-ROM’s “full text search” function and, though it wouldn’t tell me how many times “will” appears, it reported that the word turns up on just about every page.

You will use “the highway” to “shop, order food, contact fellow hobbyists, or publish information for others to use.” You will select how, when and where you wish to receive your news and entertainment. You will benefit from lower prices and the elimination of middlemen that the network’s “friction-free” marketplace allows. Your wallet PC will identify you at airport gates and highway tollbooths. Your children will tap a torrent of homework helpers.

As the CD-ROM narrator breathlessly puts it, “The information flow into your home will be incredible!” (“Get the mop, Martha!”)

At some point, all these “wills” change in character from predictive to prescriptive, and Gates’ friendly if cool tone acquires an undercurrent of coercion. The promise of “the highway,” according to Gates, is that it will allow us all to control our destinies more fully. The not-so-well-buried subtext of “The Road Ahead,” though, tells a different story — of Gates’ and Microsoft’s desperate struggle to maintain control of the high-tech marketplace.

“The Road Ahead” won’t satisfy readers curious for insights into Chairman Bill’s psyche; it mostly has the bland, confident air of an annual report. But in its very first chapter — next to a cute high-school picture of Gates and Paul Allen scrunched over an old teletype terminal — Gates does give one clue to his mindset. He was attracted to computers as a kid, he explains, because “we could give this big machine orders and it would always obey.”

It’s easy to jump on a line like that and make Gates out as some kind of silicon-chip Nazi. But of course he’s only being honest about the attraction computer science has always held for engineers, enthusiasts and precocious children: the appeal of instantly responsive, utterly submissive systems that can be gradually massaged toward perfection.

Though digital technology invites its creators into a world of absolute control, the computer market remains a place of frustrating chaos. Gates long ago adopted the strategy that made Microsoft’s fortune: ship early with imperfect products, seize market share and then upgrade toward an acceptable level of performance. This drives engineers nuts, but it’s sharp business, and it has kept the company on top of the software industry — until now.

The rise of the Internet, Gates freely admits, caught Microsoft off-guard and now challenges its primacy. Most analysts will tell you that the Net threatens Microsoft because it can render the company’s stranglehold on PC operating systems irrelevant. Once you’re plugged into the Net it doesn’t much matter whether you’re using a Windows PC, a Mac or a toaster oven.

That may well be true. But the Net challenges Microsoft on an even deeper level, at the root of its total-control ideology. This is a company — as chronicled in Fred Moody’s absorbing book “I Sing the Body Electronic” — where “vague” is a stinging insult and where the worst thing you can say about something is that it is “random.” “Under Microsoft’s present value structure,” Moody writes, “the sole measure of a person’s worth [is] his or her ability to think analytically.”

Such a culture works fine when you’re producing structures of code — spreadsheets, word processors, whatever. Microsoft’s peculiar institutional genius, Moody makes clear, lies in constantly challenging its analytical engineering mindset with the relentless demands of its ship-early, upgrade-often business strategy. The will-to-control collides with the pressure-to-ship, leaving employees with a deep sense of failure even as they’re reaping untold riches in stock options.
But the Microsoft ethos starts to unravel in an anarchic, communication-based environment like the Internet — where “vague” is a fact of life and “random,” more often than not, is cool. You can’t rely on a seize-ground-early strategy when the ground is always moving under your feet.

The networked future will demand that companies abandon strategies of control and accept uncertainty.

Reading between the lines of “The Road Ahead,” you get the sense that Gates, like many other corporate leaders, can’t wait for the Internet to slow down and calm down — to become less random. But that’s just not the way it’s going to be.
The Net — today’s Internet, tomorrow’s “highway” and the far future’s whatever — is infinitely more complex than any single piece of software, even one as overgrown and bug-ridden as Microsoft Word. It will not stand still long enough for a company like Microsoft to put a product through enough upgrades to “get it right.” It will never be perfected; even its bugs will have bugs.
To thrive in such an environment will require an ability to build systems that are more like self-regulating biological entities than mathematically precise formulas. (Kevin Kelly’s book “Out of Control” offers a good roadmap to this future.) Long-term market share will at best be a byproduct of luck, not planning. (Netscape, take note.) And those who stop long enough to troubleshoot by hand will find that the world has raced by them in the time it takes to track down one nettlesome General Protection Fault.
This is the aspect of the networked future that Gates’ book ignores, for all its ritual mouthing of business school-mantras about flexibility and adaptation. Gates’ “road ahead” is straight and flat, and it promises to put you in the driver’s seat at work and at home. The road most of us will experience will be more of a bumpy roller-coaster ride — fun for many, most likely, but neither smooth nor manageable, and certainly not under anyone’s control.

As we careen down this path, we will find some solacing entertainment in the unfolding saga of the Gates House. Gates’ plan for a wired-to-the-max “home of the future” — rigged with centrally controlled music, “smart” lighting and video-wall entertainment — looks sumptuous, if a little antiseptic, in the demo on the “Road Ahead” CD-ROM. But does anyone really expect it to work? It’s a bug-fest just waiting for Gates’ first dinner party, whose guests will doubtless learn the hard way that the absolute control promised by the computer industry is and always has been a myth.
Buyers of “The Road Ahead” don’t have to wait as long. They can just load up the CD-ROM and click their way to its “Ask Bill” page, where Gates answers questions about the future. The video, which can often be balky on a CD-ROM, works just fine. It’s the grammar that’s buggy. “How will new technologies effect the home?” “How will the information highway effect social interaction?” In question after question, “effect” keeps appearing where “affect” should.
You can just see the proofreaders rolling their heads: “We spell-checked it!” But spell-check doesn’t work when you’ve mistaken one properly spelled word for another. For Bill Gates, his colleagues and his acolytes, language — like so much else that’s human — may just be too random.

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Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg is director of MediaBugs.org. He is the author of "Say Everything" and Dreaming in Code and blogs at Wordyard.com. More Scott Rosenberg.

Sunday, Nov 12, 1995 9:01 AM UTC

Not dead yet?

Total Distortion caps an era of CD-ROM games

By Scott Rosenberg

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If you burrow far enough into the “massive video database” of the new CD-ROM Total Distortion, you’ll eventually stumble upon a full-length anthem of creative angst — a song written by Total Distortion’s chief creator, Joe Sparks, about his own difficulties in completing the long-awaited game.

People say “quit” but not quite yet
Just a few more things to do. . .
We’ve got to saw it off and ship it
In a box
Saw it off and ship it
And send it on out, now.
Total Distortion has been the most celebrated example of multimedia vaporware for so long — close to four years — that it’s hard to believe Sparks and his company, Pop Rocket, have finally sawed off their product and shipped it. Clearly, the operation involved some pain.
What’s in the box? Total Distortion casts you as a music-video entrepreneur — male or female, your choice — combing an alien universe called the Distortion Dimension for hot clips to sell to picky Earthside DJs. Its creators call it a “music-video adventure game;” it’s something like a role-playing game inside a Myst-like environment with a make-your-own-video module at its heart.
You can play Total Distortion and get your money’s worth without ever leaving your “Personal Media Tower” and its video-editing console. (A sort of sophisticated toy version of programs like Premiere, it lets you mix sound, titles and three graphic layers into videos that you can save, trade and even enter into contests at Pop Rocket’s web site.) But to win the game, you need to earn money and “fame points” — and avoid getting blasted to sonic bits by hulking “Guitar Warriors” whom you must face in chord-to-chord combat.
Ambitious multimedia innovators usually shy away from the “game” label. They seek to remove complex gaming elements from their creations — to banish the buttons and inventories and combat systems that traditionally clutter a game’s interface. They struggle to give audiences as transparently lifelike an experience as current technology allows. They want their games to feel like life.
Total Distortion gleefully charges in the other direction: it thumps its game-proud chest, dubbing itself, in one of its many opening screens, a “Great Big Game Thing!” And it translates every aspect of life into a sequence of gaming challenges.
It’s not just a matter of solving puzzles to get doors to open, as in Myst or The Seventh Guest; you must master little games simply for your character to sleep, eat and survive. If, for instance, you don’t learn to shoot down the evil grinning nightmares and, literally, “catch Zs,” your character will pass out from exhaustion — and Total Distortion will perform a nose-thumbing dance of victory over your corpse.
Life as a game: Total Distortion takes that slightly crazy concept to deliberately baroque extremes. Its genius lies in the way the game rewards you as you master it — not only with points but with new raw material for your art. The deeper you travel into the game’s rock ‘n’ roll universe, the more crunched-out music and spiky images you can carry home to use in your videos. If making those videos is enjoyable in itself — and it was for me — then Total Distortion has managed to reward not just your game character but you, too.
The game borrows its hyperactive aesthetics from its MTV-of-the-future subject matter. The Distortion Dimension turns out, unsurprisingly, to be a noisy place, a soup of soundbites — guitar licks, groans of pleasure, cries of “C’mon, baby” and “Not dead yet?” All of Total Distortion’s music was written and performed by the Pop Rocketeers themselves, and they’re featured in many of its video clips, too — along with people they found on the street near their Haight-Ashbury digs. Self-referential? Sure, but in an endearing way. In a marketplace full of junk CD-ROMs cranked out by corporate committees, here’s one that’s lovingly handcrafted — and covered with its creators’ fingerprints.
Strangely enough, the one thing Total Distortion isn’t going to feel like is a technological advance. Razzle-dazzle devices and techniques that looked revolutionary two years ago when Sparks previewed them at trade shows are now relatively common. For all its flash and fun, Total Distortion is less a breakthrough leap onto some new multimedia level than a summation of what’s gone before. It’s more the end of an era than the beginning.
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Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg is director of MediaBugs.org. He is the author of "Say Everything" and Dreaming in Code and blogs at Wordyard.com. More Scott Rosenberg.

Thursday, Jun 1, 1995 6:07 PM UTC

Slap “Jack”

New CD-ROM quiz show serves taunts with its trivia

By Scott Rosenberg

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“On air,” the sign says, only plainly you’re not. You’re sitting at a computer, playing a new quiz-show game called “You Don’t Know Jack.” The voice of a nervous producer counts off the cues, readying for broadcast, and an obnoxious prompter named Cookie starts snapping orders at you as if you’re wired up with earphones.

Before you know it, you’re answering questions on topics like “Communication and Gilligan’s Island,” “Pornography and Ornithology,” “Shakespearean Drink Orders” and “If you reproduce asexually, do you still have to pay for dinner?” “You Don’t Know Jack” bills itself as “the show where high culture and pop culture collide” — and the encounter can feel like a hit-and-run accident.

Unlike a lot of CD-ROM-based multimedia creations, “You Don’t Know Jack” requires no study or manuals; it’s easy to pick up because it so thoroughly mimics a familiar model. “Jack” is game-show television transplanted to your desktop and implanted with a heavy dose of free-floating scorn. Playing it is like choosing a front-row seat at a comedy club: a certain amount of abuse comes with the territory.

The CD’s title is not, as you may guess at first glance, an invitation to make the acquaintance of a fellow named Jack — perhaps, say, the bullet-head who festoons the cover. Nor does it play off the media profile of well-known Jacks, like Nicholson and -in-the-Box. It’s instead a dirtball taunt that’s been coyly shorn of its vulgarity. (Though the game is full of rude references — “Let’s say your friend Norman named his penis ‘Joey’ after a newborn kangaroo,” one question begins — it’s shy of actual four-letter words.)

“You Don’t Know Jack” makes a science of the light sneer. “If you’re good at other trivia games,” the opening screens announce, “it don’t mean Jack now!”

Attitude isn’t something we’re accustomed to from software. Your word processor never informs you, say, that “you can’t write for beans!” And no spreadsheet ever adds up your rows and columns and announces, “Your business model sucks!”

But the makers of “You Don’t Know Jack” understand that they’re in the entertainment business. And the prime challenge for makers of entertainment software is to figure out how to get people to stop thinking of the computer as a workplace tool or an educational device and accept — without feeling too guilty — that it’s really just a high-priced toy.

“Jack” solves this problem by nakedly imitating radio and television — down to the curved-corner TV-screen shapes that litter its design, the mock-soulful jingles that introduce each question and the hyperactive drawl of the announcer, who sounds like a huckster hawking a motorbike sale on a progressive-rock station.

In today’s multimedia marketplace, full of colorless corporate products, such touches easily pass for personality — and “Jack” has proven a surprise retail hit for its publisher, Berkeley Systems, a company better known for its flying-toaster screensavers. “Jack” seems relatively glitch- and bug-free, which gives it a leg up on the competition from the start. And in its own snotty way, it’s genuinely fun. It may be pumped up with post-Letterman irony — but then so are most of us.

Still, you may find yourself a little uneasy after playing the game, and not just as a reaction to its speed and volume. There have been so few genuine hits in the CD-ROM market that every success like “You Don’t Know Jack” spawns a host of imitations. We can now expect a slew of pseudo-”Jacks,” most of them likely to be less clever, less cheeky and more middle-of-the-road.

But obviously “Jack” itself is an imitation, too. It’s media-savvy, has good production values and will appeal to executives in search of prototypes for interactive television programming. But it has sharply limited ambitions for itself: it’s basically a 15-minute novelty. And its dependence on a TV model is depressingly backward-looking. “You Don’t Know Jack” is ultra-hip about what kind of multimedia works right now, but it doesn’t know Jack — or Rudy, or Desmond — about the future.

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Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg is director of MediaBugs.org. He is the author of "Say Everything" and Dreaming in Code and blogs at Wordyard.com. More Scott Rosenberg.