Interview with Internet Death Machine: hacktivism, privacy, philosophy

There was a time sixteen years ago when I was first introduced to an artist known as Internet Death Machine (IDM). This dopamine-packed industrial nerdcore hacker music fuelled caffeine-driven late nights, providing the energy I needed to commit countless hours of intrusions and subsequent inspiration.

Whether your hacker music of choice is YTCracker, Dual Core, or any others, IDM has been the soundtrack of my life as a hacker because his music offers something we all can relate to: the free flow of information, the war for privacy, and hacktivism. Whether you purchase his songs or pirate them makes no difference to him. Either way, his message to the world is released.

Recently, his music was featured on the official DEFCON 32 soundtrack, the biggest hacker conference in the world. This is the story of a hacker philosophist whose contribution to the hacker subculture has resonated for nearly two decades.

I crossed paths with IDM in 2008 because we traveled in the same circles within the Anonymous collective. I was a musician myself, so we had much in common. We became friends instantly, even though I didn’t know the scope of his popularity at the time, especially within Anonymous since nobody else was producing professional studio-quality heavy hacker music like he was.

The philosophy behind his hacker music

I spoke with IDM about the ideology behind his music, which resonates with a unique, radical hacktivist vibe. Instead of defining it by a specific genre, he describes his music as an attempt to capture an era he calls the ‘Golden Age of the Internet,’ deeply rooted in the media, games, and entertainment that featured industrial music.

“So, the late 90s to early 2000s I would say. So it's more about capturing an era than it is about genre,” he said.

“For me, the concept of hacking and being a hacker is a lot more political than it is technical – the idea of boundaries with regards to identity and data, because in this day and age, our identity is data. Currently, the status quo is extremely asymmetrical in the inverse of how it should be. So, we have very little access to information about the forces that govern us, be they corporate or government itself, and those entities have free access to everything about us. And so, really, the thing that’s important to me about hacker culture is that it's a way to fight back against that. I think that it's really one of those things where awareness is extremely important.”

IDM explained how so many people sacrifice their data on the altar of convenience. He believes this is a fatal error on behalf of society, and if we don’t challenge this, we risk normalizing a world where privacy is a privilege, not a right.

“I think that this is a large mistake,” he said.

We’ve seen the ramifications of it. Go to any website, and your privacy is opt-in, instead of opt-out. That should be enough to illustrate what I’m talking about.

He expounded further on his hacker philosophy, explaining that he focuses mostly on data but, more importantly, on data ownership in general. For example, you can physically own your devices.

“Things that you buy you own. And so that’s the real problem. The current capitalist’s zeitgeist is that you’re going to buy things, and then you’re not going to own them anyway – which is bizarre.”

He said that consumers and private citizens could not be at a greater disadvantage in the world as it is now. This is because, when you consider everything he has explained about his beliefs, the hacktivism community views everything they engage in as vitally important to our society and its future – whether we want to acknowledge it or not – however romanticized or idealistic that may seem.

Anonymous, hacker culture, and love

Funnily enough, I was the first hacker he met who wasn’t associated with Anonymous at the time. My own introduction to the collective was coming a little later, where I would be known by the alternate alias ‘74K71x’.

My group, the Electronik Tribulation Army, was at war with Anonymous and launched a doxing campaign to unmask many of their members, as anonymity was a requirement for membership. Interestingly, many of my members, including myself, were also members of Anonymous. Thus, it was at a time before I joined that we met.

IDM used computers since he was five years old in the early 90s because his father owned a personal computer. One of the first things he had to figure out was how to use DOS 6, which was a pre-Windows stand-alone operating system because he had this game called Where in the World is Carmen San Diego? His father bought it for him but never installed it.

The early hacker-tinkerer in him found a way.

Growing up, he scored high on an IQ test and qualified to attend a specialized school called Pine View, where he learned Visual Basic programming in second grade. “That was a mistake,” he said, laughing.

He explained how QBasic (short for Quick Basic), you could set the frequency and an ADSR envelope. He used to do Nickelodeon theme songs in Basic. For example, there was this show, ‘Are You Afraid of the Dark?’ and he would make the computer beep the tune. By now, he was doing this in Middle School.

“There were no cellphones back then, so it was unclear to the teachers what was going on. I would do silly things like set a delay and then launch the program. And so we had these computers in Middle School that were basically terminals with a 4MB RAM drive, and yeah. I would do this,“ he said.

He ended up getting suspended from school. However, he taught the other students how to replicate the process for revenge purposes.

His first introduction to the world of hacking began around 2007 and was less than pleasant. This was because he found himself in a powerless position within an existential situation that was inherently abusive. What do hackers do when powerlessness threatens to incapacitate them? They find a way out – a way to overcome. When a hacker has had enough, they make a statement.

“The internet was a much simpler place,” he explained.

“The bar for sort of circumventing security was much lower. It didn’t really take a bright person to do it.”

In an effort to shift the power dynamic, he ended up compromising a bunch of the abuser’s accounts. He also forwarded incriminating emails to the person’s HR department, a devastating blow that effectively brought the individual to their knees.

Around this same time, he described starting to get into some problematic philosophy. “You know, Niccolò Machiavelli-things like that. I had decided that it was better to be feared than loved.”

This ultimately came full circle to bite him. Later, after finding love, the woman he was with found out about what he had previously done and was afraid, and left the relationship because of it.

“I will say that, you can make that decision to be feared rather than loved. But it is very hard to go back if you change your mind. And so, I think that was an important lesson I learned.”

His introduction to the group Anonymous and its notable electronic mischief started in 2008. More importantly, he said that the Anonymous he belonged to back then is very different from what people associate today.

From someone who was there on the scene near the start of this global phenomenon which is Anonymous, he emphasized that the core philosophy of the group is still very important today. It was simply the collective disembodied sentiments of internet users because they all appeared under the umbrella of this same name.

“You’ve had a lot of different eras. You know, the sort of official anti-Scientology mission that happened, which was a little ridiculous to champion that singular cause. But really it ties back to these image-boards. Of course, everyone knows the origin of Anonymous. Anonymous is a term that was the username that was used if you chose not to give a username.“

“Anonymous, the username that is not a username, begins to develop a personality of sorts. I think that is important. I think that sort of philosophy that you should be able to present an idea completely disembodied, immune to ad hominem attack, so that the idea must be evaluated on its own merit. This is the Anonymous I am familiar with. It has a lot to do with freedom of speech and the presentation of ideas in a fair manner. I think that this is very important today. I think we’ve lost that. I still hold that ideology very close. It is a wonderful and beautiful concept.”

“My introduction [to Anonymous] was bizarre,” he said, taking a moment to recall his origins and the principal force that started it all.

I became tangentially involved with Anonymous as a member of a trolling group called the 'PN’ (for those who know). It was my introduction into the whole imageboard culture and things like that.

This is where he was first baptized into the world of electronic mischief. For example, the group programmed malicious scripts for the online game Second Life to try to break the server. This cyberattack actually made the news. They used the Linden Scripting Language (LSL) to program, for example, a self-replicating cube.

“The problem was because of the way the game was set up, they just had no ability to deal with bad actors. So, at one point, they started implementing what they called ‘security features’. So, at first, there were account bans. Then they moved to IP bans, and we’d simply use the early TOR network with a proxifier and some other software to make sure we used only the port used for authentication.”

“They started to do hardware bans – here’s where it started to get stupid because the client was open-source. So, N3x15, who was another member of the ‘PN’ who came up with this, he took the username of whatever the account was that you were using and salted the hash of the hardware ID. So every time you made a new account it looked like you had a new computer. And this is where the sort of like urban legend that there were thousands of us comes from. There were only about 15 of us total.”

“We tried to do funny things, and generally terrorize the other players. We weren’t really considering ourselves players. I believe our motto was: ‘Some people play Second Life. We play people.’”

Final thoughts on Anonymous

IDM shared his views on Anonymous as the interview came to a close. He emphasized the importance of understanding that Anonymous is a philosophy, but it is not a political party, nor is it a force behind championing any particular cause. He also stated that when Anonymous aligns itself with specific causes, it narrows its scope and diminishes its value.

This is the reason why so many of us who were on the scene during those early years lament over the current dynamic of Anonymous. On one hand, it has evolved. But on the other, the relationship Anonyomus has with each other has grossly diminished because its present ideals are no longer clear.

“It's simply a philosophy that information and ideas can be presented in a disembodied manner, independent of identity. That is the only way that ideas are truly free.”