I met up with an
older group of nonconformists in the computer industry, a sort of
Austin intelligentsia. By older, I mean above the age of 26. They were
interested in many of the same issues as the young group of
hackers--privacy, encryption, the future of a digital world--and they
all had technical backgrounds.
This loose group of blue-jean clad thinkers, people like Doug Barnes,
Jeremy Porter and Jim McCoy, like to meet over enchiladas and
margueritas at university-style cafes. They always seemed to have
three or four projects on the run. Digital cash was the flavour of the
month when I met them. They were unconventional, perhaps even a little
weird, but they were also bright, very creative and highly innovative.
They were just the sort of people who might marry creative ideas with
maturity and business sense, eventually making widespread digital cash
a reality.
I began to wonder how many of the young men in Room 518 might follow
the same path. And I asked myself: where are these people in
Australia?
Largely invisible or perhaps even non-existent, it seems. Except maybe
in the computer underground. The underground appears to be one of the
few places in Australia where madness, creativity, obsession,
addiction and rebellion collide like atoms in a cyclotron.
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