BRINGING DOWN CIVILIZATION, PART II

Alright, let’s follow things out a bit further. The more disrupted, disorganized, and destabilized the system becomes, the less its ability to expand, extend, or even maintain itself. The greater the degree to which this is so, the greater the likelihood that Fourth World nations struggling to free ourselves from systemic domination will succeed. And the more frequently we of the Fourth World succeed, the less the ability of the system to utilize our resources in the process of dominating you.

Ward Churchill ³⁰⁹

BRIAN SAYS, “ BROADLY DEFINED, HACKING IS A PROCESS OF EXPLORING in and negotiating with any given universe, understanding it and interacting with it on an intimate, personal, and unrestricted level. Hacking, then, is incompatible with civilization.”

“Why?” I ask.

“We both know the answer to that,” he says.

“I want to hear you say it.”

“From the beginning civilization has been based on enclosure. Land held in common for the common good was closed off and became the property of the powerful, with any exploration or experience of that area possible only with their permission. Personal direct experience of the divine was closed off, too, made possible only through the priests of the powerful, and the books they wrote. The Bible comes to mind. The gaining of knowledge through personal direct experience has been closed off as well, as we’re supposed to trust scientists—the other high priests of the powerful—to tell us what’s what. Those in power close off our water. They’re closing off our air, or I guess you’d say they’re making it so the air is so foul it closes off our throats: our throats actually refuse to take it in. They close off our time: by closing off our access to land they make it so we have to pay rent and pay for food, which means they’re stealing our time, stealing our very lives: labor for the common good and labor for our own good got replaced with working for the man. It’s all of a piece. For several thousand years now those in power have been hemming us in, closing off our possibilities. And hacking is all about reopening those doors that have been closed on us.”

“How?”

“Well, here’s a literal example: if you encounter a locked door and you want to get to the other side, you can pick the lock, or you can break down the door. I prefer the former. A hack puts brain over brawn, but I achieve the same end as somebody who forcefully overcomes these artificial limitations on his movement. This concept applies to many such devices.”

“Makes sense.”

“Hacking is at least as much about ideas as about computers and technology. We use our skills to open doors that should never have been shut. We open these doors not only for our own benefit but for the benefit of others, too.”

I have heard two other primary arguments against bringing down civilization. The first is that the collapse of civilization will be a disaster for women, and the second is that the collapse of civilization will be a disaster for the natural world. Both of these arguments have come from people who fully recognize that civilization is already a disaster for both women and the natural world. They just think its collapse will be worse.

The first argument is that as the current social fabric unravels—especially if it unravels cataclysmically—women will, as always within a culture that oppresses women, bear the brunt of it. Civilization’s collapse will bring with it a world where women are used, a world foretold in movies like Mad Max and A Boy and His Dog. A line from the latter gives a flavor of this possible future and also makes clear the movie’s gender politics: when the character played by Don Johnson comes across the body of a woman who has been gang-raped and murdered, he says, “What a shame! She could have been used three or four more times.” Unfortunately I do not think we have to wait for some science fiction future for this worldview to be made manifest. That these gender politics already manifest a strong cultural desire is revealed not only by the fact that this movie is considered by some a cult classic (or in fact that it was made at all), but even more by the audience response. A typical post from a film fansite runs: “How can you not like this film? Boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy recovers girl, AND FEEDS HER TO HIS DOG! YES! I recorded this movie off of PBS and I’m glad I did. . . . First and only time I ever saw nudity on PBS.” Here’s one more, just to show the first one wasn’t a fluke: “One of the best (sickest) post-nuclear nightmare flicks I ever seen. What could be better than a horny teenage Don Johnson walking around the deserts of America with a telepathic dog, helping him get laid [sic]? I hope my post-nuclear apocolypic [sic] life style would be this good.”³¹⁰

It’s late at night. I’m in the studio of a college radio station. I’m on air, talking about taking down civilization. A woman calls in, raises the concern about mass rapes as this society collapses.

I respond, “Mass rapes already occur. We already live in the midst of a culture of mass rape. How many women do you know who haven’t been raped?”

“Not many,” says the woman on the line.

“None,” says a woman sitting at another microphone in the studio.

I continue, “It’s just that most of these rapes are committed by those close to these women. Their fathers, brothers, uncles, cousins, neighbors, lovers, and so on.”

I see from her face that the woman in the studio knows what I’m talking about.

I go on, “That’s not to say rates of rape might not go up. You raise a great point about the relationship between a breakdown of communities and an increase in rape. I’m guessing there are two main reasons for this. The first is that as communities collapse individual men may take out their frustration on women through battery and sexual abuse. Is that your understanding, too?”

Both women say, “Yes.”

“And the second reason is probably that as ‘law and order’ breaks down police will be less able to protect women.”

A positive murmur from the other end of the phone.

“But the first presumes that men don’t already do that and in any case is an explicit acknowledgment of the abusive—and terrorist—nature of current gender relationships: if anything causes me as a group frustration, you as a group are going to pay the price. And the second presumes police protect women now. But they obviously didn’t protect the women you know who’ve been raped, and in most cases I’ll bet they didn’t do anything to help the women afterwards, or to protect other women from the men who raped them.”

“That’s right,” says the woman on the phone.

The woman in the studio leans forward, says, “I know of exactly one man who got arrested for raping a woman. The trial was an absolute nightmare for the woman. Most of her family sided with the assailant, her uncle. The defense and the judge both somehow simultaneously acted like it didn’t happen and like she brought it on herself. Never mind that both of those couldn’t have been true. She regretted that she even brought charges.” The woman pauses, then says, “She told me later that if she wouldn’t have been fully aware of what the cops and the courts do to women who kill their rapists, she would have shot him dead. But that’s a crime the judicial system loves to sink its teeth into.”

I agree, then add, “Here’s something else to think about. If the destruction of communities leads to higher rates of rape, as it often seems to, then right now the rapes are just being exported. Civilization and the global economy destroy communities all over the world. That’s what they do. In order for us to maintain our lifestyle, we have to import resources. The importation of those resources requires the destruction of communities in the colonies. The communities are destroyed so the resources can be stolen, or the resources are stolen and in the process the communities are destroyed. Either way this exploitative lifestyle leads to atrocities. I can see how women in the colonies would be praying for civilization to come down before it destroys their communities, before it leads to their rapes.”

I pause a moment before continuing, “If someone is really concerned about rape there is plenty of work to be done right now both here and in the colonies. Plenty. And even if your primary concern is whether there will be mass rapes—or rather more mass rapes—when civilization comes down, there’s still plenty you can do. Teach women self-defense. Teach them how to use guns, and because guns will eventually run out of industrially manufactured bullets teach them how to use bows and arrows. Teach them how to use different types of knives. Teach them how to kill assailants with their hands. Not only teach them how to fight back, but even more important, teach them to fight back at all. Once they’ve determined to fight back everything else is technical. And more important even than this, form protective collectives where both men and women are prepared to defend each other. Those collectives need to be put in place now, because whether or not we bring it about, civilization is going to come down. And in fact, even if civilization doesn’t come down for a while—for far too long—then these protective collectives would be important anyway. We need to protect each other from rape and other forms of exploitation in any case: the cops sure as hell aren’t doing it.”

Both women agree.

“And one more thing about bringing down civilization,” I say. “If you care about women, it means you care about human beings. And if you care about human beings you have to care about landbases, because destroying landbases destroys human beings. Civilization is destroying our landbases. Civilization needs to be destroyed.”³¹¹

I break open more crab legs. I don’t normally eat crab, but these are destined for the dumpster anyway.

Brian says, “Hackers are frequently cast as disobedient; that’s a shame. We don’t disobey the law, per se. We simply ignore it. Our actions operate independently of the artificial constraints that have been put on us.”

I put down my crab legs to take some notes.

He smiles, then states, “You flatter me, writing down what I say. Usually people only do that when they’re preparing an indictment.”

I start to write that down.

He chuckles.

I look at him hard and say, “Who are you?”

He laughs again, throws back his head. He says, “I’m just like you. I’m a human being who has a fondness for his species, and other species, and life. I’m someone who tries very hard to think clearly.”

“That’s difficult,” I respond. “No one wants clear-thinking slaves, because they might start to think about the whole system that enslaves them.”

“It’s a very strange game we all end up playing. It’s a very strange game we have to play if we’re to allow this system to continue. We have to think we’re clear-thinking as we don’t think at all. We have to feel like we’re in control as we have almost no control over our lives or our communities. We have to pretend we own things as they in fact own us.”

“Just the other day someone said to me that ‘we’ need to continue deforesting because ‘we need’ the paper and wood products.”

“All of these devices are ultimately superfluous,” Brian says. “The needs are artificially created. Who needs printed circuit boards? We need air and water and food. We don’t need software (especially Microsoft). This culture specializes in giving people diseases, then selling them the cures.”

“But they’re not real cures . . .”

“Oh, no, or you wouldn’t have to keep on coming back. Maybe I should say the culture specializes in giving people addictions, then selling them the smack.”

The Dutch sociologist and drug addiction counselor Kees Neeteson has written, “Modern Western culture has to contend with a shortage of satisfying existential ideologies. For centuries a reduction has taken place from spiritual toward materialistic thinking, culminating in today’s technological consumption society. This society depends on mass production and mass consumption, on ideologies which are superficial [and] therefore easy to manipulate, and on advanced technology and military power. One of the results of this process is that the average individual cannot obtain enough meaningful satisfaction from common social life.”³¹²

Addictions move in to fill the void of meaning once filled by relationship to community and most especially relationship to landbase. In his book Rational Madness, drug and alcohol abuse counselor Ray Hoskins calls addiction “a false path to meaning based on false beliefs, inept coping behaviors, and a basic self-centeredness which treats symptoms instead of coping with reality.” Sound familiar? It might not, because this pattern of only treating symptoms (if even they are treated) is so pervasive in this culture as to be almost invisible: water to fish. According to Hoskins, “When this symptom-treating model becomes a major part of a person’s life, he is in an addictive process, a process in which he regularly uses addictive behavior to cope with internal and external problems.”³¹³

Hoskins says this another way: “Addictive Process is a coping style in which a person habitually responds to reality by using fix-oriented behaviors to produce desired feelings rather than by responding directly to the immediate demands of his life.”³¹⁴

He gives a silly example, which on reflection is no sillier than most of our behavior: “Imagine yourself at a friend’s house and the friend is sitting with you in the living room and complaining that his house plants are dying from a lack of water. All the while he complains, he eats from a large bowl of chocolate-covered raisins. You know there is a sink in the kitchen and you have even seen a pitcher for watering house plants. Yet your friend is just sitting there eating candy and complaining, rather than solving his problem.”³¹⁵

Of course this perfectly describes our collective response to a planet being killed. We complain about it as we eat our chocolate-covered, pesticide-laden raisins.

He continues, “Addictive coping follows the above pattern. It always focuses on self-medicating feelings, rather than on solving problems. When you look closely at it, it is always just as crazy as the behavior in the preceding example. Yet, for some reason, it is widespread.”³¹⁶

It doesn’t really matter whether we’re talking about an addiction to heroin, television, consumerism, power, or civilization, the process of addiction emerges when a person enters a closed circle of self-medication that is not directed at solving one’s problems but rather at providing means to temporarily forget they exist. This addictive behavior then takes on its own logic for the person who is addicted, a logic that makes no sense to those outside the addiction. This nonsensical logic is based, according to Hoskins, on unrealistic fears, an immature perception of the world, and on faulty yet unchallenged premises. By this point in the trajectory both of this analysis and most especially this culture, I would hope that readers can articulate for themselves the unrealistic fears, the ways the culture inculcates us into immature perceptions, and the faulty and unchallenged premises that are guiding this culture toward its self-and other-destructive end. Hoskins further states that addictions are attempts to fabricate feelings of security when security is otherwise absent, physical sensations for the benumbed, and feelings of control or power over oneself or others for the powerless. And finally, Hoskins makes clear that so long as addictions are present, the primary problems the addictions are meant to mask can never be solved. I’m sure by now readers can fully grasp the implications of this statement.

Brian says to me, “There is no ignoring the black blood. This culture lives on black blood. Something needs to cut that artery.”

“The sooner the better.”

“To impair the oil and electrical systems as much as possible would, I think, be a great start toward taking down civilization. And there are a lot of ways we can do that.”

“Like what?”

“I’ve always been partial to joining hands and singing songs. We can burn candles, too. That will bring down civilization, I’m sure.”

“Yeah, but only if we simultaneously send pink bubbles of love floating toward the refineries.”

He rubs the bridge of his nose between his forefinger and thumb, then says, “You’d really want a team of people to do it right. One approach won’t work in every circumstance, and one set of skills won’t do it alone. This culture has a myth of the lone superhero saving the day, but a lone hacker can’t bring it all down any more than a lone bomber, a lone writer, a lone tree-sitter, or a lone candle-wielding pacifist.”

“We need it all.”

He nods. “My interest is computers and related electronics. We’ve discussed software; there is the hardware side, too. Have you ever heard, for example, of HERF guns?”

“I’ve heard the name, that’s all.”

“You’ve heard of e-bombs, right?”

“Oh, yes.”

“They’re in a similar class of weapons. E-bombs send a violent pulse in broad patterns. HERF guns, if designed and used carefully, provide a merciful, high-precision method of targeting hardware without involving explosives. You can take out computers but not the operators.”

“Are they expensive to build?”

“Well, I usually dumpster dig the materials, so the most I’ve really spent for parts off the shelf is ten dollars. So there are no major economic barriers to home manufacture and use. You can spend more, according to how you acquire the parts, but I’ve never handled a model that would have cost more then two hundred, even with all new parts.”

“Are they easy to build?”

“Well, that’s the problem; if you do build and use them properly, you can take out any susceptible electronics within fifty to one hundred feet. If, on the other hand, you don’t build or use them properly, you could end up electrocuted, and very dead.”

“That’s very bad.”

“The radiation poses a threat, also. It must be carefully directed to its target and away from the user.”

“So it actually is quite dangerous.”

“No. All I’m saying is that poorly assembled, they become human cookers, usually the operator. Well assembled and well used, they’re quite safe. I’ve designed and built several, with delightful results. Enthusiasts just need to be taught how to build and use this particular piece of technology by someone who already knows how to do it. Then if you’re reasonably careful it’s not dangerous at all. I think everyone who has an interest on a personal level in fucking up computers should explore e-weapons. But, and here’s the point, only under experienced direction.”

“I see.”

“Programs, on the other hand, aren’t going to smoke anyone. I definitely don’t see any of these sorts of concerns emerging from someone exploring the use of computer viruses or worms.”

I take another bite. I really like Chinese buffets.

“But I’m actually far more interested in information. The best I can offer there is a disruption of communications, not only human-to-human, but human-to-device and device-to-device.”

“How does that work?”

“Well, so far as the former, much human-to-human communication these days doesn’t include voices, with their inflections and so on. It’s just messages of dehumanized numbers and text. That means messages can be forged with tremendous ease. This is just one way that, fantasies of the elite aside, a technological society is inherently less secure than a natural society. Barriers to forging communications are no longer sociological, but technological. That’s a fundamental issue for us: relationships inhibit fraud.

“Disrupting communications between humans and machines, or machines and machines, is easier still. Suddenly the entire stream of communications is inhuman. These transmissions could be forged by a machine, an invisible third party, a virus, a bot, or even by the device itself.”

“And why would someone disrupt these communications? Would someone hack into an oil pipeline or something?”

“That’s not the direction I prefer. Eventually the fail-safes kick in. Similarly, the reason Y2K didn’t do what many hoped is that the power grid isn’t really computerized. Picture big red manual switches, and you’ve just about got it. The main thing that’s computerized is billing.”

“Oh, damn.”

“As long as they’ve got these physical fail-safes, computers are relegated to communication instead of control. Computers give the orders and humans hit the switches, if they deem it fitting. Hacking this is good for mischief, but not disabling or impairing the machinery.”

“Damn, again.”

“Right. We want things to go down so hard they can’t come back up. In order to accomplish that we have to recognize their thresholds of operation and we have to understand their various recovery features. We want to target devices or processes that could not be easily restored. So far as power generation, to provide one example, if you take out a part of the facility for which they have no spare parts (for instance, a giant stator that had to be specially manufactured), it can’t be easily replaced. Suddenly you’ve moved from the realm of inconvenience to impairment.

“That much we can do without computers. But here’s where hackers could help, specifically using computer systems. Now remember, computers get involved because they carry information. So a hacker could distort the information between one computer and a person, or between a person and a person.”

“Meaning . . .”

“Let’s say that stator or another vital component of the power plant is supposed to run below a certain temperature. Excessive heat destroys it. How do technicians know how hot it is? They don’t touch it with their hands, and they can’t keep checking dozens of thermometers. They read information they get from a computer. What happens if you feed information to them that causes them to run the component hot, for example by telling them that the cooling system is operating at a higher capacity than it actually is, and further convinces them that the component in question is running along fine, while in all physical truth it’s destroying itself?”

“You could do that?”

“I have, in fact, for the sake of demonstration. I haven’t smoked anything; my interest is merely to make certain it’s possible. Little has been done to secure these computers and I’m quite confident they would come down hard under a coordinated effort. Hell, just before those cascading blackouts, we had a crash without even trying, and those effects were minor compared to what we could have had on our plates.”

“Speaking of which . . .” I get up to fill a plate of my own.

When I get back, Brian is even more excited than normal. He says, “I just remembered, do you want a Linux server? I brought you one in my car. They’re great fun. You can run a chatroom, host your own websites, interrupt satellite communications . . .”

“Brian, when we talked before, you said a dozen people could bring it all down. Do you still think that?”

“All of civilization? I think that’s optimistic, and I actually don’t think it will all come down at once. It will come down in waves. I think that twelve hackers could take down the electrical grid of all of North America, a blackout lasting for months. That blackout itself would take out key components. Of course those in power would immediately start retooling, and because they have more resources than we do they’d eventually be able to come back online. We’d have to hit them again in the meantime.”

“What would it take?”

“Guts. And a small, tight, harmonious group of people achieving a degree of intimacy that is foreign to the West, who are ready to live and die together, who are each aware of what the others are doing. When the numbers get bigger, you’ll need other cells with other goals. And of course if you’re going to hit the power grid you’ll have to be the last one standing, which means you have to be off the grid yourself.”

“Of course,” I say, as though I, too, have thought of that before.

I want to be wrong. I want to not believe that 90 percent of the large fish in the oceans are gone, and I want to believe that the climate isn’t changing. I want to believe that you can import resources without those resources having to come from somewhere else, and without there being any cost to taking those resources. I want to believe I’m not living on land stolen from the indigenous, and that indigenous peoples aren’t still being driven off their land. I want to believe that men don’t rape women, and that parents don’t beat children. I want to believe wild salmon still run strong up the stream behind my home.

Or maybe I want to believe that the way things are is the way they’ve always been. Salmon never ran this stream. Passenger pigeons never flew over great forests of American chestnuts in the east. Bison never ran the plains. Rivers have never been safe to drink. Breast milk has always been contaminated with carcinogens. Cancer has always killed our loved ones. Men have always raped women, parents have always beaten children. Social structures have always been dishonest, authoritarian, and repressive.

Or maybe I want to believe this culture and most of its members are not insane. They have not fabricated quadrillions of lethal doses of plutonium-239, dangerous for 250,000 years. I want to believe the authority figures who run this culture are beneficent, or at least not malevolent—driven mad by a social structure that rewards the unbridled acquisition of power—and that I can trust them to do what is best for me and those I love.

I want to believe there are not two million dams in this country, that animals are not tortured in vivisection labs and factory farms. I want to believe we can continue to live the way we do and not (continue) to destroy the planet.

I want to believe the culture is reformable, that if we just make several minor and one or two not-so-minor changes that things will be all right.

I want to believe that none of it matters anyway, that after I die I’ll go to heaven or some other place as beautiful and unpolluted as this place once was. I want to believe that the purpose of life is to detach myself from this world I once loved and thought wondrous but I’ve now been taught is a source of pain.

I want to believe that if I’m just a good enough person, if I can just love enough, be kind enough, that the atrocities will stop on their own. I want to believe that bearing witness to the suffering is enough. I want to believe that writing will take out dams. I want to believe that symbolic action is a substitute for nonsymbolic action.

I want to believe that the natural world will take care of the problems this culture has created, that hurricanes and heat waves will destroy the power grid, that earthquakes will destroy dams. I want to forget that I too am part of nature, and that just as I am asking hurricanes to do their part that they are asking me to do mine.

I want to believe that hackers will solve our problems for us, that they will destroy the power grid, with no effort, no responsibility, on our part. I want to believe I have no skills to offer, and I want to believe that the world doesn’t need all of our skills, no matter what they are.

I want to believe there is nothing I can do, or better, that there is nothing to do. Then in either case I need do nothing, I need take no responsibility. I need be answerable to no one, to no landbase.

I want for everything I’ve written to be wrong. I so want that.

“So,” I ask Brian, “will hackers save the day?”

He laughs again, but this time does not throw back his head. “Not by a long shot. Most of us are more eager to escape civilization than dismantle it; that’s why we jack into the machines in the first place. Hell, everybody living here can feel that things just ain’t workin’ on this side of the screen.

“Reclaiming the Earth needs to be a combined arms operation, including people who know their way around the boondoggles that have been erected: telecommunications, programming and logic, hardware, information systems, databasing, pyrotechnics, heavy machinery. We’ll need specialists familiar with power generation systems, types of machinery, valves, and so on, energy specialists, people capable around extreme high voltage and current, people who have studied the energy infrastructure, and so on. Even people without those specialized skills are necessary. Each devotee can make a unique contribution, and together we can do quite a lot.”

I respond, “It’s like I always talk about: if space aliens were doing this to our planet, or if the godless commies had invaded, suddenly lots of us would discover we had skills we hadn’t before thought about. And suddenly lots of us would use those skills.”

“You and I have been talking about the big blows,” he says, “and those are very important, but I think it’s also important for people to make smaller strikes wherever they can. Anything to impede and impair the functioning of this extractive economy.”

“Once again, what steps would we take if we recognized the government was a government of occupation, the economy was an economy of occupation, the culture was a culture of occupation?”

“I think we’d obviously see a lot more sabotage, and we’d also see this sabotage move up the infrastructure.”

“That’s a critique,” I say, “I have of the Earth Liberation Front. It seems they’re not really leveraging their efforts. It’s one thing to burn an SUV, but what would happen if they began to move their way up the production pipeline? Where would be the most effective places for them to hit?”

“Those are questions,” Brian says, “that more people need to ask.”

“The good news,” I respond, “is that more people are.”

I’m in St. Petersburg, Florida, and it’s hot. It’s late November, but it’s still hotter than hell. I’m talking with another military man, and I’m marveling at all of the useful knowledge taught to GIs at taxpayer expense. I’m also thinking that this knowledge might be a sparkling example of some of the master’s tools coming in handy for dismantling the master’s house, or rather his economic system.

We go to the beach. The sand is white, almost blinding. There aren’t many people here. That’s good. We want to talk.

He says, “We were taught in the Army that when we move into a country one of the most important things we want to do is disrupt the delivery of raw materials. If you can disrupt that flow, you disrupt the entire economy. If you disrupt the economy—and keep on disrupting it—you stand a much better chance of winning. Simple as that.”

I think of the American and British bombers pounding the Nazi rail lines, and I think of Russian, Belgian, Dutch, French, Czech and many other partisans doing the same. I think of Federal forces in the American Civil War slowly strangling the Confederacy through a blockade and through cutting rail and river lines for transport of materials. I think of German General Erwin Rommel’s complaint, looking back on his loss at El Alamein, the turning point of World War II in North Africa, that “the battle is fought and decided by the quartermasters before the shooting begins. The bravest men can do nothing without guns, the guns nothing without plenty of ammunition, and neither guns nor ammunition are of much use in mobile warfare unless there are vehicles with sufficient petrol to haul them around.”³¹⁷

The military man says, “The vast majority of stuff is delivered via three methods: train, truck, and ship. We can ignore air since the amount transported is trivial. Of these, trains and trucks are the easiest to get to. The U.S. rail system, and I would be amazed if Europe’s was any different, is wide open. There are tens of thousands of miles of unobserved track that could be taken out with nothing more than a crowbar. When I was a kid we used to pull spikes all the time, just for fun. It takes no time at all. Similarly, millions of miles of roads could be disrupted temporarily by any number of means.”

“You learned this in the military?”

“Absolutely. What did you think they taught us in all those classes? What do you think the purpose of the military is?”

He’s smiling, so I don’t feel chastised for my naïveté.

He continues, “The purpose of the U.S. military is to fuck up the infrastructure of the countries where the United States wants to steal resources or maintain a military presence to use as a staging area to steal somebody else’s resources. That’s what they taught us how to do. Roads (especially junctions), rail lines, ports, and virtually everything else associated with transporting goods has been a military target since day one. So we talked about them quite a lot. But even more than that we were taught to think about the system as a whole and to analyze it looking for the flow of production and goods: both those required locally and those essential elsewhere. We were taught especially to look for choke points, places that some necessary items must pass through.”

I think about my term for these places: bottlenecks.

He continues, “We were also taught to look for transportation segments that are secluded or otherwise isolated, and to look for ways to disrupt the flow of materials even without overt actions.”

“What do you mean?”

“If we couldn’t blow a bridge, we could still stage a traffic accident. One of those at the right place at the right time could be very useful.”

“You were taught that . . .”

“Yes. And you paid for it.”

“What else did they teach you?”

“Probably the most important thing is that for this type of activity to be effective it has to be directed and sustained. You must know your area and what resources it requires to function economically, and you must direct your efforts toward interdicting the flow of those resources. You have to know how to get the most bang for your buck.”

I smile, thinking I should have known it would be impossible to talk to two military personnel without at least one of them using that phrase, and thinking also that he’s talking about what I call leverage.

“Of course we were taught about security as well. Never get caught. Never get caught. Never get caught. That was hammered into us.”

We sit on the sand in the shade, still hot, and look at the water. It too, is white, and blinding.

He says, “Although they taught us many technical skills, the main thing the classes and the practice did for me was to shift my way of thinking so that now I am constantly evaluating where are the points of greatest stress in any structures and infrastructures that I see. Once you’ve made that shift in your thinking and perceiving and once you get some experience you begin to understand that all of this work is much easier than it seems.”

It’s still hot. I don’t know how anyone lives here.

He says, “Natural gas.”

“What?”

“That’s something else they taught us. You know, folks talk all the time about how the military dehumanizes people, destroys their individuality and creativity, and that may be true in some ways, but there are other ways that they taught us to be very creative. We were repeatedly taught to survey our surroundings and find what commonly available resources we could use to achieve our ends. Our exercises always included—no, required—the innovative use of household materials.”

“Like what?” Even theoretically, I find all this stuff incredibly fascinating.

“You’d be amazed at what you can do with gasoline and soap flakes. . . .”

“You gonna tell?”

“Napalm. And you can make pipe bombs out of black powder.”

“They taught you how to make pipe bombs?”

“It’s the military, Derrick. It isn’t Boy Scout camp.”

“Where does natural gas come in?”

“The delivery of energy is even more fundamental to the system than the transport of raw materials. And not only is the electrical grid wide open but so is the natural gas supply line. Here’s an example of just how easy it would be to safely take out a natural gas pipe. Buy a car battery, a piece of glass tubing, and some plastic gloves. First, pour the acid from the battery into a suitable container, then go to one of the millions of gas pipes or relay stations around the world, attach the tube to the pipe with tape molding putty or whatever, pour the acid into the tube, and then walk away and let the acid eat through the pipe. Your onsite time is maybe two minutes.”

“They taught you this in the military?”

“Care of Uncle Sam.”

Have I mentioned lately that I’m glad I’m a writer?

Do you remember the bolt weevils, the farmers who downed power lines in Minnesota? It ends up that not only farmers down power lines. Just today I saw a newspaper headline: “Sabotage blamed for power outage: Bolts removed from 80-foot Wisconsin tower.” The article reads, “Someone removed bolts from the base of a high-voltage electrical transmission tower, causing it to fall on a second tower and knock out power to 17,000 customers, police said. The bolts were removed from a plate connecting the legs at the base of one of the 80-foot towers, causing it to knock down the other as it fell Saturday evening near Oak Creek, a Milwaukee suburb, police Chief Thomas Bauer said. ‘It does look like it’s for the purpose of weakening the structure so it would fall,’ Bauer said. The incident caused a four-hour outage Saturday for 17,000 customers, including General Mitchell International Airport in Milwaukee, Bauer said. Screening equipment was shut down and flights were delayed as passengers and luggage were screened by hand, said Pat Rowe, airport spokeswoman. Downed wires from the towers lay across railroad tracks much of Sunday, delaying passenger and freight trains from Amtrak and Canadian Pacific Railroad, Bauer said. Train service resumed Sunday evening after authorities cut the wires, he said.”³¹⁸