A disoriented bat flies overhead as Emmanuel Goldstein begins his keynote speech from a graffiti-filled stairwell in the corrugated steel and cement corpse of Titan-I missile silo.
“This is definitely a moment in hacker history,” says the editor of 2600, the Hacker Quarterly, to the dusty crowd of sunburned hackers, many donning orange hard hats.
It feels like a scene straight out George Orwell's 1984 , but this isn't science fiction. Mr. Goldstein is speaking to a group of students, parents, entrepreneurs, security analysts, programmers, academics and scientists – all with a ravenous appetite for analyzing, deconstructing and manipulating everything they can get their hands on.
An estimated 400 of them have gathered here, in early July, in the central Washington desert near Moses Lake for ToorCamp, North America's first hacker camp. An extension of the popular annual convention ToorCon, this four-day event has attracted hacker collectives, or hacker spaces, from Canada, Austria, Germany and around the United States.
Despite the postapocalyptic setting – organizers rented the property from a solar and wind hybrid-energy company that has a lease on the land – their intent is anything but malicious. These hackers have come to dance, live out their Mad Max fantasies and discuss their projects in nearly 30 talks and workshops on topics ranging from “Crypto Boot Camp” to “Astronomy for Hackers” to blacksmithing.
Like many of the attendees, event organizer David Hulton calls hacking an art form that's not limited to the more sensational acts of mischief that have given the term such notoriety. “It's really the drive to learn the workings of something, like you know, learning to play the piano,” says Mr. Hulton, who is known as h1kari online. “And really good musicians create amazing symphonies. So I think hackers are people who really want to learn how something works and then they find all sorts of interesting ways to manipulate it.”
Take Isaac Marcum, a self-described “herbalist, alchemist and brainwaver,” who leads a talk on “hacking the human brain with sound.” He has been experimenting with binaural beats – using headphones that emit separate low-frequency tones in each ear – and light synchronizations to naturally change states of consciousness. “It can help improve your attention span, induce lucid dreams and alter your sense of perception – naturally,” says the slender 25-year-old from Seattle, who posts free binaural tracks on his website, psychesonics.org.
Later that night, he invites people to his homemade yurt, which is set up with headphones, a box emitting red, pink, purple, blue and white light in step with the different rhythms and a huge deep-red Turkish carpet.
Other ToorCamp subjects are more ambitious. A Brooklyn, N.Y., resident who only goes by his pseudonym, Samulus, gives an unscheduled talk about his quest to build an open-source Bussard fusion reactor, which he says has the potential to create “cheap, clean, abundant energy.” He has been working on the project for about a year, documenting his efforts on prometheusfusionperfection.com.
Then there's the Make a MakerBot workshop, led by the MakerBot founders, Zach Hoeken, Bre Pettis and Adam Mayer.
In the cool depths of the silo, a dozen or so hackers – including a soil scientist from Berkeley, Calif., and a corporate lawyer from Palm Beach, Fla. – work together for about five hours to build this 3-D printer, which oozes out plastic replicas of any object its owner is smart enough to program or find the digital design for online. A MakerBot intern even prints frames for his glasses with the printer.
With their new model kit unveiled in April and retailing for only $750 (U.S.) – compared with the lower-end $15,000 price tag on conventional 3-D printers – Mr. Pettis, Mr. Hoeken and Mr. Mayer hope to democratize the means of production.
“The ultimate goal,” Mr. Pettis says, “is for everybody to have one and go to the store less and make more. You need a doorknob? Great, print one out.”
The inaugural camp has its moments of levity. Johannes Grenzfurthner, founder of monochrom – an art, philosophy and technology group from Vienna – holds his final performance following Mr. Goldstein's keynote speech. It's an appropriately ironic way to begin the July 4 celebrations, which culminate in one big dance party. Dressed in a military uniform and standing over a communist flag in a missile silo originally built, essentially, to blow away the communist threat, Mr. Grenzfurthner plays a visiting Soviet ambassador, named Nikita Perostek Chrusov, from a non-existent country, Soviet Unterzoegersdorf, “the last remaining appendage republic of the USSR.”
Created in 2001 to commemorate the first decade since the fall of the Soviet Union, Mr. Grenzfurthner's non-existent republic (which is actually a small Austrian town) is a continuing project meant to question the relevance and truth of history and cultural collective memories.
ToorCamp's eclecticism is precisely the draw for most participants. “It's like a 21st-century renaissance of the common man,” says Will Knoll from Protospace, Calgary's new hacker space, as he drives home at the end of the camp across the barren desert landscape.
“People just want to be well learned in all kinds of subjects: technology, art, everything. My poetry and archery isn't so good but I'll pick that up later,” he cracks with a smile.
Special to The Globe and Mail
