After spending Sunday morning at their family home for a quick brunch with their parents, Fae and Finn were both back in Cork early in the afternoon. They both had both had separate plans the same evening: Finn was going to finally go out with Aisling as he managed to convince her to go out for a proper evening date, using the excuse of his family commitments, so he was actually pretty excited at the prospect. Fae, on the other hand, was equally excited if not more to finally have a chance to interview Kathleen, her contact within Cork’s digital underground movement.

As she got back to her flat, she got ready and made sure she had everything she needed: her small tape recorder with three blank cassettes (although she was probably not going to spend three hours there, better have a spare), a couple of pens, her notepad.

She looked at her new DigiBook. It was still in its box. She was thorn on whether to bring it or not: she would not have used it there and then, but she may have wanted it later, on the tram trip back home, to start digitalizing some of the material. Plus, it would have been interesting to see Kathleen’s reaction to it.

She grabbed the four AA batteries that Liz and Andy were also so kind to give her, opened the box and took it out. She opened the manual and quickly located the setup section. She followed the instruction to locate the battery compartment even though it was basically the only opening on the device, and out in the batteries. She examined the case: it did not have any screws. Not ordinary ones anyway, but it did have a warranty seal that was presumably covering the only way to access the devices internals for maintenance or inspection.

It’s really portable — she thought as she examined her shiny new toy. It was about 20cm wide, 10cm high, and a good 2cm thick, to accommodate the AA batteries. The screen was slightly tilted and made the device another centimeter thicker, but it was felt quite big, considering: it could probably fit six rows of text, and easily over 20 characters per row: more than enough for note taking, probably good enough for writing articles too, once she got the hang of it.

She plugged the adapter and connected it to power (she was not going to waste batteries when she was at home!), and moved the main switch to the ON position. The DigiBook small but functional-enough LCD display turned itself on, greeting her with the standard setup instructions.

** Éireann Digital Systems
** DigiBook First-Time Setup
   v2050.1.21.77
!! License not found.
** Please insert your DigiCard to begin the registration process.

Right, of course. Fae reached for her purse, grabbed her aluminum DigiCard, and inserted it into the slot on the left side of the device.

** Reading DigiCard...
** Identity validation in progress...
   ...
** Identity confirmed.
** Do you want to register this device to Fae Consoli (faecon20)? [Y/n]
>> y
** Registration in progress...
** Do you want to upgrade your existing DigiNet and DigiMail subscriptions to include this DigiBook? [y/n]
>> 

She thought about it for a minute. Then she remembered that Liz and Andy had been extremely generous and also paid for some fancy subscription bundle for her! She found the small envelope containing the subscription card and continued.

>> n
!! Please swipe a valid subscription card before proceeding. This unit will turn off in 180 seconds...

These things always made her nervous. She quickly ripped the envelope and swiped the magnetic subscription card in the reader above the display.

** Processing subscription data...
   ...
** Digital Productivity Bundle - Premium activated successfully for <faecon20>.
** Included servies and software:
   - DigiNet: 20+10 MB/month
   - DigiMail: 5 data exchages/day
   - DigiText: 25 documents
   - DigiCalc: 25 worksheets
   - DigiDo: 5 lists, 150 items total
   - DigiCal: 1 calendar (2050/2051)
   - DigiAddr: 150 contacts
** System ready.

Fae could not believe her luck: her friends really outdid themselves this time! A premium productivity bundle was very expensive. She probably wouldn’t have been able to afford it the following year unless either her boss or her friends helped, but she was looking forward to twelve months of digital opulence.

She turned the device off, put it in her bag, and after a last-minute make up check, she was off to her business dinner.

Fae arrived at the pub slightly earlier than expected, so she sat at the table she had reserved and took out her DigiBook. She was going to get a head start with the article and started copying some of the questions that she was going to ask for sure. The display indeed felt very roomy considering the size, and she got the hang of the small keyboard pretty quickly.

“Oh that’s a nice toy you have right there, I am wondering how fast it is… must be at least 4MHz right? Oh wait, they don’t even write that on the box anymore, right?” a familiar voice said to her. Fae looked up and instinctively turned off the device and put it back in her bag. A petite, short-haired redhead approached her at the table, and was staring inquisitively at the DigiBook with her sharp hazel eyes.

“Kathleen! So great to meet you, finally! Sorry, I was just getting a head start with the article… please, do sit down. Do you want a drink to start?”

“A cider would be nice, yes please” said Kathleen, as she took off her long blue wool coat and sat down.

Fae immediately looked for the reference manual that Finn gave her, took her out of her bag, and handed it out to her. “Here, I hope you’ll enjoy this!”. Fae made sure to fit the photocopied manual in the dust cover of a Old Country House magazine, and Kathleen immediately picked up on it:

“Oh Fae! Thank you, I was particularly looking for this particular number, lemme see… wow yes, it has a nice roundup of the most beautiful Chesterfield sofas! Nice…”

Once the drinks arrived, Fae discreetly took out her portable audio recorder and placed it under her small purse on the table, in such away that bystanders and waiters wouldn’t notice but making sure that Kathleen would, as she had agreed to be recorded. There was a bit of live music in the pub, but their table was strategically placed more or less in a separate area off the main hall where the counter was, so the music wasn’t too loud and there weren’t many people passing by: the perfect spot for an interview without risking being overheard.

The two actually got along very well, and from outside you would think they were just two old friends that were catching up after spending some time apart: they kept chatting and asking questions to each other. Throughout the evening, Fae managed to go through two cassettes and started the third, meaning it was going to be over three hours worth of content — and that considering that Fae was very careful to pause the recorder when they had to go to the bathroom or when the waiter came to the table.

Towards the end of the evening, as Fae felt she had enough material for her article, she mentioned about the possibility of going to France and then to Genoa for personal reasons. At that point, Kathleen was taken by surprise and she had to stop for a few seconds to think: she really didn’t expect that. Her sharp, lively eyes instantly twinkled with a brighter light at the prospect of having Fae and her brother as a courier, but of course she didn’t propose anything just then, and rather asked Fae if they could all meet one more time, also because she wanted her to meet her boyfriend and she said that they wanted to get them a small present for her 30th birthday… something that “would come in handy for their trip”. Fae understood that they wanted to organize something for them to carry to France or Italy.

On the way back to her flat, Fae rewinded the tapes and started playing them as she got on the tram. She listened to the whole conversation at 1.5x speed, and she started taking a lot of notes on her DigiBook. She actually carried on when she got back to her flat as well: Jenny was already back from going out (with Matt, apparently!) and Fae told her that she simply had to finish writing down her thoughts while the conversation was still fresh in her mind. She went to bed at 3am, and miraculously managed to get three full hours of sleep, before getting up and getting ready to go to the Examiner: she was hoping to flesh out her article, having it edited and reviewed by the end of the working day.

“Well Fae, I gotta give it to you, one way or the other, you always deliver!” said Pete, as he put down the proof of the article written by the promising young journalist. “Of course, we had to heavily edit it and review a few passages to tone them down a little, especially when you talked about EDS…”

“Pete! Those were the best parts! C'mon” protested Fae who really didn’t like when editors rewrote too much of her articles, especially the juicier bits.

“Listen girl, yes, they were good, but this article is already pretty explosive even without those parts. And I do want to keep printing my paper, you know?” pointed out Pete, and in that moment, it became much clearer in Fae’s mind that what the DigiPunks were saying about EDS was true, all of it: they definitely were pulling a lot of strings in government, public services, and of course the media. She grabbed a copy of the proof and went back to her desk to re-read it a final time. She made a few more edits but nothing that would cause problems when the article got to print. She was pleased: this felt like one of her biggest accomplishments, and she couldn’t wait to see it printed. She was also confident that now she could persuade Pete into give her three weeks off for her trip.

“The Examiner please” asked Finn while handing out exactly 15p to the newsagent. He hardly-ever bought the newspaper, because he claimed he only read the news on the DigiNet, in a very pre-pulse way, like a lot of Gen Zero youngsters started to do at the time. It was a generational thing, almost like they wanted to show their parents they could live “on the line” or whatever they used to say in the early 20s. Today, however, it was different. It was her sister’s big day, almost like if her boss had planned for a special present for her 30th’s birthday: her first first-page article. OK, it was not the main headline, but it was the first column on the right, which continued on page 5, but still, it was technically on the first page. Sometimes he felt a little bit jealous of her big sister. Often, rather, because she was doing everything right, she stayed low-tech as much as possible like daddy wanted, she had the cool job as a reporter for the best paper in the country… but she was his big sister, and he loved her, and he was also extremely proud of her accomplishments, always. This time was no different.

The EDS Shuttle arrived shortly afterwards. Finn got on, put 5p in the meter, and started reading his sister’s column as soon as he sat down. Little did he know that her first-page column was going to change his view of the (digital) world, forever.

---

“That’s a nice piece of kit you have there!” said Kathleen as she approached me, looking at my brand new DigiBook “should be a Z80w running at 4MHz right?” I looked at her, desperately trying to understand what she meant. She looked back at me, waiting for me to confirm her analysis, then smiled a little, trying to do her best not to look too condescending.

Now, that is the problem, she said. I was given that DigiBook the day before by some friends, for my 30th birthday (thanks again A&L btw!), and I was really excited. It is a nice piece of kit I also used to write this article, but I don’t know how it works. I don’t know anything about microprocessors, memory, or what a MHz is, and frankly, I don’t really care. What I do care about is that I can put four AA batteries in it, turn it on, add it to my DigiNet account, and that’s it: I can then use it to write my articles, keep track of contact details of my friends, create todo lists… you know, basic digital stuff.

And that ignorance is what Kathleen and her people are fighting against. They believe that we should know what a microprocessor is, how it works, how many kilobytes our DigiBooks and DigiTerms can hold, rather than how many documents or todo lists my subscriptions allows me to create.

I am the practical and stubborn type, and I still didn’t really understand the point though. Sister, you are talking about things I can’t see, but my subscription tells me about things I can understand and touch (metaphorically).

“What if I tell you that the maximum number of documents that you can have is an artificial and arbitrary limit added by the manufacturer? Your DigiBook probably has room for more than 25 documents! Think about it: if you paid for an Ultra subscription, you would have twice the number of documents as a limit, but the hardware is the same”

More documents on the same machine! Now that is something I understood pretty quickly. We are so used to subscribing for literally everything in our digital life that we forgot that limits imposed by subscriptions are just arbitrary constraints decided by someone, rather than physical limitations of the device itself.

But there’s more. The trend in the latest 10 years has been one of progressive black-boxification of tech. Consumers no longer know what they are actually buying, specifications became pointless and irrelevant. We only care what a computer can do, not how it can do it, while Kathleen and other people like her want to go deeper than that.

But who are these people like Kathleen?

“We don’t have a single name, although some have emerged over the years: Hackers, Tinkerers, Scavengers… some went as far as looking for a conspiracy-loaded, almost-cabalistic term like The Circuit. Luckily it didn’t stick.”

I call them DigiPunks. A homage to the characters portrayed by authors like William Gibson but at the same time more grounded in our neo-digital, low-complexity, post-Pulse reality. When I told Kathleen, it made her chuckle.

“The Pulse was a terrible thing. But, in a way, it gave us a second chance. We want to get the most out of it, but lately the corporate world and the government don’t seem to agree. They are now making these devices, and they work fine, but they are not even selling them to us, they are selling us the privilege to use them for a short time”

It is no secret that technology is being deliberately dumbed down by a few, very influential corporations. And that is something that has happened only in the last ten years. In the first 2-3 years after the Pulse, people in Ireland cared only about the basics: securing food, home, shelter. Then came the salvagers, the scavengers, the tinkerers that desperately wanted to turn our post-Pulse technological relics into something useful. Year 5 to 15 was the brief but intense golden age of post-Pulse ingenuity, that saw independent re-invention and innovation in neo-computing: a more rugged and resilient way to re-use the silicon that survived, 1980s-era processors like the 6502, 6809, and Z80.

Then, things started to change. International agreements aimed at standardizing, controlling, and artificially crippling technology in the name of safety and EMP resilience, effectively banned independent technological innovation. Suddenly all machines had to be licensed, government-approved, audited, standardized.

“In the last ten years, we effectively lost all our rights to the digital world: we have no right to repair, no right to learn, no right to innovate, not even right to own a device anymore. Everything changed, except us, of course”

In a world where programmer is a term that only reminds people of television broadcasting, we are suddenly only allowed to be spoon-fed bits of our digital reality. Did you ever try to open a DigiBox? You can’t. Or replace a broken screen on a DigiTerm? Of course not. There are licensed technicians for that, and manufacturers are there to help, even if that means denying our digital rights.

Now, in 2050, pretty much everything that DigiPunks do is effectively illegal. They open up devices, break license seals, take out DRE [Digital Right Enforcement—Ed.] chips, swap EEPROM modules, connect unsupported peripherals, and… write code. They use a plethora of programming languages that are not just pre-Pulse incantations: they actually work on all our standardized devices, too! Lately, they started coded away subscriptions, showing that their need is purely an economic one, and nothing else.

“We are not doing anything wrong. We kept doing what our fathers were doing, before the Pulse. Up to 10 years ago, people like us helped rebuild society, but now… we are forced to do what we love in secret, as it is frown-upon at best, and just downright illegal at worst.”

In a world where knowledge of how a computer works draws suspicion of the authorities, hundreds, maybe thousands of DigiPunks are working in basements, in the back of hardware shops, and literally anywhere where they can remain undisturbed. They exchange electronic components, they share knowledge of the internals of the machines, they give devices new lives past their two-year subscription expiration.

But how do they talk to one another? How do they preserve their knowledge?

Some call it The Mesh. It is hard to explain unless you are knee-deep into their underground word. From what I could make out, it is like a network of devices connected via radio, that mirrors their organization: no central nodes, no masters, just an endless web of equally-important nodes, exchanging radio packets. Like a free (both as in cost and as in ideology) DigiNet, sometimes slower, sometimes faster, definitely more unstable, but everywhere.

The Mesh transcends national boundaries and connects thousands, perhaps even millions of like-minded individuals. It is what DigiNet could have been, without artificial, corporate-managed boundaries and limitations.

Imagine DigiForum, but limitless and times 1000, hosting anything from personal ads to arrange technology exchange (traditional money is very welcome in this world), to entire libraries of now-forbidden knowledge. There are people from France, Germany, Italy that access it daily, from their countries, but they all understand each other. How?

“It is simple. All content is in English. It is not mandated, it is not a requirement, but rather a necessity.”

In today’s world of hyper localization, local-first supply chain, in a world that where globalization was completely destroyed in a single instant, by the Pulse, The Mesh speaks a single language. Here in Ireland it makes things easier, but in other countries which made their local language an expression of reborn national pride, it can be challenging.

Still, their InterPost system enables them to get in touch with one another, where ever they are, thanks to Postmaster hubs that store and forward messages to virtually anywhere in Europe, if not the world. And if something is too hot to discuss openly, they have tools to encrypt and decrypt messages, allowing only those in possession of a passphrase to read them.

After talking to Kathleen about her world for over three hours (I asked her to explain some of these concepts several times to me before they settled in properly!) , I felt I still had several questions to ask her, but one of them stood out, and I asked her right when she was putting on her coat, before disappearing.

I asked her why she wanted me to tell her story, why she wanted the ordinary Digizen to be aware of all this.

Kathleen looked at me for a couple of seconds, without answering, and then said to me:

“The new normal is wrong, and we want people to realize that. For sure things will not change overnight, but the more people learn how to use their brain, the better. We owe it to our ourselves, and to our children. We have the right to learn, repair, improve, innovate… we should not trade them for the privilege to use their crippled technology.”

That was the last thing that Kathleen said to me before she went back to her world. I looked at my new DigiBook, turned it over, desperately looking for an opening, for a screw to turn and unlock its secrets. Nothing. Just shiny black box with a single sentence on the back that read:

Property of Éireann Digital Systems, to be used only with a valid subscription license and returned upon expiration

---

“Finn, are you gonna get off?” said Paul patting Finn in the arm.

Finn got up and got off the bus. As he automatically walked towards the main entrance, he focused on the big sign right next to it:

Éireann Digital Systems

Powering the New Future

For the first time since he started working there, something inside him was telling him that he really did not want to be part of that future.