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The most interesting story of 2008 (and it's only January)
For those of you who don't obsessively read internet news sites - let me let you in on a secret: we are now officially living in a cyberpunk novel.
Firstly - a hacker group called anonymous has declared open warfare on the Church of Scientology for murdering people, generally being insane and filing suits against YouTube for the release of the now famous Tom Cruise video.
While the idea that a loosely assembled vigilante hacker group is capable of crippling an entity like the CoS is amazing already, it gets even better given the context of this Penthouse interview with L. Ron Hubbard Jr from the '80s:
Penthouse: He was trying to perform an abortion?
Hubbard: According to him and my mother, he tried to do it with me. I was born at six and a half months and weighed two pounds, two ounces. I mean, I wasn't born: this is what came out as a result of their attempt to abort me. It happened during a night of partying --he got involved in trying to do a black-magic number. Also, I've got to complete this by saying that he thought of himself as the Beast 666 incarnate.
Penthouse: The devil?
Hubbard: Yes. The Antichrist. Aleister Crowley thought of himself as such. And when Crowley died in 1947, my father then decided that he should wear the cloak of the beast and become the most powerful being in the universe.
Penthouse: You were sixteen years old at that time. What did you believe in?
And it just gets better from there, going on to detail his father's fascination with, among other things, phenobarbitol, cocaine, espionage, moon children and siphoning people's souls. It's a fascinating world we live in, people.
The most interesting thing to me by far is that we apparently now live in a world where the balance of power depends so much on information that small groups of dorks can totally fuck with an organization as large as scientology. i find that at once exciting and disturbing like most things in the world today
Adam_L : 2008-01-25 14:02:31
I can totally see this being made by a lot of young kids. Real hackers no doubt, but watching it more I think about how so many hackers are just children.
Can you imagine if in years, the CoS was destroyed by disgruntled children - those who to this day have been overlooked as harmless. They are not only less harmless on the internet but also faceless, and some of those kids are more socialized on the internet than in our actual realm. In the eyes of the system, hackers are hackers and they really don't know anything about them, middle school kids and 40 year old IT security techs alike are perpetrating the same kinds of cyber crime and are getting the same sentences.
If the future saw the emergence (as certain visionaries predict) of a centralized role for virtual reality, the internet, and all that eschaton hibbery jibbery, these cyberpunk criminal kids would be looking at the credibility they've always dreamed of.
Kids who can obtain and learn to use power may just force us to educate them differently, wouldn't it? Like it or not they seem to be making a difference, or at least have started trying.
gerbix magic : 2008-01-25 14:01:35
I'm scared to say anything about anything about CoS. I am afraid of my own paranoia. I am afraid my paranoia is a projection of LRon's paranoid fantasies. I am someone else's paranoia; I am a figment of his delusions. My ego dies into the perpetual rebirth of LRon's bank account.
Well, all kidding aside, I AM in fact bothered and excited by this recent inflammation of anti-CoS news. Why do you think Germany, of all places, would have outlawed CoS? Germany!? Do you think they might have reason to be skeptical of such a group? Is there any precedent that might put them on edge? Hello?!?
The comments posted here do not reflect the views of the owners of this site.
If the future saw the emergence (as certain visionaries predict) of a centralized role for virtual reality, the internet, and all that eschaton hibbery jibbery, these cyberpunk criminal kids would be looking at the credibility they've always dreamed of.
Kids who can obtain and learn to use power may just force us to educate them differently, wouldn't it? Like it or not they seem to be making a difference, or at least have started trying.
The comments posted here do not reflect the views of the owners of this site.