Free Lunch

The escalators at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City brought me up to the mezzanine so slowly that I could read the T-shirts of all the people passing me on their way down. "Social Engineering Expert," one read. Another had the words "Kill Bill" emblazoned over a mean-looking Linux penguin. On the mezzanine, a cavernous space filled with abandoned computers, dozens of posters were taped to the walls, many featuring a Hitler-esque face over the words "Big Brother Is Watching You!" Several angry geeks in pseudo-goth outfits were milling around bitching about the wireless network.

"It's all Verizon's fault," one grumbled. What else could he say? At the Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference, sponsored by old-school hacker zine 2600, you've got to blame a corporation if the network is busted. I looked around glumly, hoping somebody might have a really giant antenna to pick up free WiFi from outside the hotel, but all I could find were huge stacks of bogus, half-filled-out phone bills. Somebody had been staging a protest – or possibly had simply gone mad – and I could see the bizarre results of his or her handiwork everywhere.

So I headed up to the 18th floor, where Viki Navratilova, a security manager at the University of Chicago, was teaching an enormous room full of people how to build the ultimate Internet Relay Chat bot for distributed denial-of-service attacks. She flashed a slide that had particularly dense code on it, alongside a sexy photo of Jon Stewart. With a cackle, she explained, "Oh yeah, if you've ever seen [hacker] Rainforest Puppy give a talk, he always has pictures of naked women, so this is my answer to that."

I grinned. One day chicks will rule the hacker scene. We're going to start with deadly bot herds and work our way up to gender engineering.

An hour later, I headed to the exhibit hall to put in some time representing my beloved nonprofit, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. There's truly nothing more weird and gratifying than spending hours on end trapped behind a table loaded down with schwag and membership sign-up forms, trying to teach subversives about digital liberties. My strategy was simple. "Want some free propaganda?" I would ask each group of people as they wandered by. I talked to students who'd gotten busted by the Motion Picture Association of America, Canadians who wanted to gloat over their country's recent court decision that file sharing is legal, and a Webmaster who runs a vegetarian porn site (www.vegporn.com) and was worried she might be threatened with an infringement lawsuit by a company called Acacia that claims to own a patent on streaming media.

As I handed out pamphlets and explained U.S. problems with electronic voting to somebody from Europe, I could vaguely overhear questions coming from the next room, where a packed audience was taking in a panel about pirate radio. HOPE is a very unusual geek conference, bringing together media-nerd subversives and dissident techies from all over the world. Where else would you find punk rocker Jello Biafra giving a talk on the same bill as Apple guru Steve Wozniak?

I watched unemployed students mingling with members of the underground media, and I was suddenly and oddly reminded of visiting the Google campus a few weeks ago. It was one of those moments of free association when you find yourself thinking about something that's completely unlike your current situation – almost as if opposites attract on a neural level in the brain.

Like the HOPE conference, Google occupies a large space that's festively and chaotically decorated. When you walk through one of its vast work areas, you find yourself surrounded by balloons, toy cars, hundreds of lava lamps, and workstations arranged in sociable pods without walls. The campus is painted gaily in the primary colors that adorn the company logo, and new employees are welcomed to the fold with caps that say "Noogler" to mark their freshman status. On every floor is a huge, bright kitchen stocked with free snacks. And I'm not talking a few bags of popcorn: there are barrels of candy bars, fruit, and cereal and bins of granola, bags of chips, ice cream, and various other treats, as well as an espresso machine with an endless supply of coffee.