SiSU: - Homeland - Cory Doctorow

Homeland
time with funny quips that cracked one other up. I got the feeling they'd known one other
for a long time, and when we took a break for fresh mint tea -- these guys knew how to
live! -- I asked how they knew one other.
They all smiled kind of awkwardly at one another. “It's kind of a reunion,” Mitch said. “We
all worked together a long time ago.”
“Did you do a startup together?”
They laughed again. I could tell that I was missing something. Wil said, “You ever hear of
the Electronic Frontier Foundation?” I sure had. I figured it out a second before he said it:
“These guys founded it.”
“Wait, wait,” I said. “You're John Perry Barlow?” The guy in the kerchief nodded and grinned
like a pirate. “And you're John Gilmore?” John shrugged and raised his eyebrows. “And
you're Mitch Kapor?” The guy with the Van Dyke gave a little wave. Ange was looking
slightly left out. “Ange, these guys founded EFF. That one started the first ISP the San
Francisco; that one commercialized spreadsheets; and that one wrote the Declaration of
Independence of Cyberspace.”
Barlow laughed like a cement-mixer. “And turned teraliters of sewage into gigaliters of
diesel fuel with tailored algae. Also, I wrote a song or two. Since we're on the subject.”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “Barlow also wrote songs for the Grateful Dead.”
Ange shook her head. “You make them sound like the elder gods of the Internet.”
“Enough with the `elder' stuff,” Mitch said, and sipped his tea. “You certainly seem to know
your Internet trivia, young man.”
I blushed. A couple of times on the playa, people had recognized me as M1k3y and come
over to tell me how much they admired me and so on, and it had embarrassed me, but
now I wanted these guys to know about that part of my life and I couldn't figure out how to
get it out without sounding like I was boasting to three of the all-time heroes of the Internet.
Again, Ange saved me. “Marcus and I worked with some EFF people a couple years ago.
He started Xnet.”
Wil laughed aloud at that. “That was you?” he said. He put on a hard-boiled detective
voice: “Of all the yurts in all the playa, they had to walk into mine.”
Mitch held out his hand. “It's an honor, sir,” he said. I shook his hand, tongue-tied. The
others followed suit. I was in a daze, and when John told me that he “really admired the
work” I'd done, I thought I'd die from delight.
“Enough!” Ange said. “I won't be able to get his head out of the door if it gets any more
swollen. Now, are we here to talk or to roll some goddamned dice?”
“I like your attitude,” Wil said, and thumbed through his notebook and set down some terrain
tiles on the graph paper in front of us. Ange turned out to be a master strategist -- which
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