Hacker, Phreaker, Maker, Cook

Tonight is another night for which I had it all planned to hack some code. Like pretty much all such nights, lately, that's not actually what's going to happen. I'm going to write this, instead.



I learned tonight that Stig Hackvan died a few days ago. I haven't seen or talked with Stig since I went to Burning Man 2000 at his suggestion. He's among the many friends with whom I've lost contact over the years, and now the relatively few who've died. As for this friendship, Stig and I became estranged. There was a time, however, where we were quite close.




When I think back on Stig I can't but help think back on that time, roughly the mid-90s, and the things I associate with him. He introduced me to Linux, Emacs, perl, SICP, and the free software movement. We shared interest in cryptography, both as technology and in its social implications. We shared enthusiasm for anarchist politics. He had a diverse collection of hot sauces. I watched Stig pioneer the life of a technomad, and I enjoyed how he relished his hack-van, his Makita cordless tools, his Leatherman, and his telephone plug with invasive alligator clips at the other end. When, years later, people started to talk about "makers," Stig is who came first to my mind.



I remember sitting in his big chair with his Nintendo Virtual Boy on my head, trying to think of how I could transform it into a low-end Occulus Rift. I never did figure out how to do that.



Stig loved free software, and wanted to help the movement by creating a way for programmers to get reliably paid for writing it. About 1995 he had an idea as to how to do this and he asked me to join him in that endeavor. The major project I'd been contracting on for a couple years had folded, and I'd just arranged a short-term contract in Boston. "Fuck Boston," Stig said to me over the phone. He invited me to work with him on his project, and we'd work together on his client stuff to keep enough money flowing. I was tired of the technology in which I had expertise, and the idea of long-term involvement amplifying open source software was more exciting than the corporate drone thing. So I headed West instead of East. Impulsively, on the whiff of a dream, like all good hacker stories.



Except it turned out there wasn't such an uninterruptible stream of work as he had thought. It also takes me more than a little while to learn Linux, perl, and Emacs simultaneously, or even serially. Stig just couldn't provide the sort of opportunity our gentleman's handshake required. So within a couple of weeks after I'd arrived in California I went from being partner in an open-source startup to a frightening duration as a destitute single father. And Stig insisted that I pay him back for his expenses during our brief endeavor.



We kept in touch for a few years after that, but the best part of our friendship had been lost. I paid him that money and helped him out occasionally. We met up at as Burning Man, but we didn't get along particularly well. We didn't fight, or anything, but I was tense and alienated. Stig had been involved with BM since pretty early on, and had long been one of the Black Rock Rangers, but I was not only new to it, but grumpy. I got remarkably little enjoyment out of my first (and likely last) Burning Man. A lot of my memories are of unpleasant things, including watching the US military brazenly deploy non-uniformed agents into the camp, and listening to the woes of people whose tents had been raided by police looking for drugs.



Years went by. I stopped programming professionally. I stopped thinking of myself as a wannabe cypherpunk. Then the tides reversed. Now I'm more immersed in professional software development than ever before, and cryptography is the hottest topic in tech. I don't know what Stig's thoughts or projects were in that duration, but I can say that the things he found particularly interesting and inspiring back then seem only more interesting and inspiring today.



What I liked best about Stig Hackvan was his eagerness to use his hands and his mind to shape his personal environment to fit him like an enormous glove. I've met few who take hacking, as an ideal, so seriously as did he. He wanted his high-tech nomadic ways to enable him to have greater involvement in community. I wonder whether those hopes eluded him. I can't say, because I'm part of the community he didn't have for long.
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