Shock And Awe...From Phones

"...the mobilization power of the internet was one of the Egyptian opposition's most potent weapons..."

Main Beach, Laguna

On Friday March 19, 1976, I loaded my scruffy '67 Chevy Malibu, made a right on Pacific Coast Highway in Laguna Beach, CA, and pointed the hood north towards San Francisco.

I had a hundred bucks in my pocket (gas was hideously cheap back then) and a dream of the writer's life in my head. After a year and a half, I had finally tired of Laguna's beautiful women sun-bathing topless on its beaches, Pacific sunsets perfectly framed in my kitchen window, the sweet smell of the avocado grove across the narrow road from my bedroom in Bluebird Canyon, and a series of cushy outdoor jobs. What was I thinking!

Somewhere near San Luis Obispo, roughly where southern California begins to fade, the Malibu  developed homesickness in the form of a knocking sound beneath my feet. Figuring that car-misery loves company, especially if that company just happens to be a mechanic, I picked up a hitchhiker (Dear Millennials, this act of faith should not be confused with the death-wish that picking up a stranger would be today).

Creative Anachronism

He was a cherub-like being with a thick scraggly beard, glasses and a head full of tangled curls; alas, he could not identify the cause or possible effect of the occasional knocking sound (it later proved to be a broken U-joint). He was on his way to Santa Cruz to attend a "jousting" contest, and I immediately thought maybe he was a wayward member of Kesey's Merry Pranksters, except that he seemed too young. Instead, he was a member of The Society For Creative Anachronism. No, he was not an early Reagan supporter, he was on his way to one of this society's medieval pageants ( http://www.sca.org/ ).

"...But quickly lost in the swirl of revolution was the government's ferocious counter-attack, a dark achievement that many had thought impossible in the age of global connectedness..."

You might think that this would have been the most interesting thing about my young passenger. You would be wrong. The most interesting thing he told me was that he and his grad-student friends from Stanford and Berkeley had been participating in a Department of Defense project. They were using the universities' mainframes to communicate and invent games with one another. He could speak to someone across the country or around the globe on a computer and they could speak with him through this new network ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET ).

Tahrir Square, Cairo

Naturally, I thought the guy was totally nuts, but I now recognize that this was the first time I had ever heard of the Internet. 1976. He may be sitting by his pool counting his billions while I, Dear Friends, live out my own dream in these humble words.

I dropped him by the side of the road and continued on to San Francisco, where I met my friend Karen. The next day, Saturday, I called a friend of a friend and got a construction-labor job. I began Monday. On Tuesday, my boss offered me a free apartment in the building we were renovating on Fillmore Street. I parked the Malibu one last time on a steep hill across from the light blue French-American School on Alamo Square with its tennis court with a chain-link net.

"...just after midnight on Jan 28, a technologically advanced, densely wired country with more than 20 million people online was essentially severed from the global Internet."


During the last two weeks, as Egyptian youths and others gathered in their square, determined for myriad reasons to bring down Mubarak's homegrown version of Creative Anachronism, I could not help thinking of that conversation with my hitchhiking friend. I wondered what he might have to say about the power of global, free services like Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter to connect hopeful people and put fear in the hearts of hapless leaders.

Finally, we may have seen the real shock and awe of the Defense Department after all these years, not falling from planes, but ringing and glowing from phones through its own invention, the weapon of mass construction, the Internet.


Ed Note: The quotes used above are from a Feb 16 NYT's front page article by James Glanz and John Markoff, available at The New York Times . In addition to being a Contributor to The Rye (NY) Record, we are now writing a series of profiles and features  for Volunteer Square