st. jude gets verbose

st. jude gets verbose

Jude Milhon, alias St. Jude, can be described as one of the online world's first true cybercelebrities. Jude was a member of a "lefto-revolutionist programming commune" in Berkeley, California, that managed to create the famous Community Memory project, the first public online computer system. While in with the crew at Mondo 2000, this outspoken "modem grrrl" and "cypherpunk" has authored and co-authored several books over the past few years, including such classics as The Cyberpunk Handbook: The Real Cyberpunk Fakebook. A self-described "future hacker," she is rarely without something to say on nearly any topic. verbosity's official punk guy, Corey Welton managed to keep Jude still long enough to get this interview with her.

verbosity: anarchist, libertarian, you mention variations of these "splinter factions" in yr co-authored lit, The Cyberpunk Handbook: the Real Cyberpunk Fakebook. Where do you stand politically on issues these days? Do you get involved in political organizations often, or at all?

jude: yes, i'm a devout anarchist. wanna see my official Anarchist Membership Card? politics as usually defined just wears me out. i'm better at agitprop... i want to meet my political needs by writing stuff to inflame people with longer attention spans into doing actual deeds.

verbosity: While we're on the subject of yr books--one which I'm sure you don't mind discussing--how did you get to know and work with R.U. Sirius and Bart Nagel? Or was this whole book a wash, and merely data transmitted online, so that you've never actually met these guys F2F? (Think we could manage to to pull an interview with them, too, heh?)

jude: egad. RUSirius STARTED mondo2000... he's the maniac responsible.... the way i got to know him was we were doing a lot of weird things in parallel, and so our paths were noneuclidianly bound to cross... and Bart Nagel is the artist who did the layouts that (no hyperbole) REVOLUTIONIZED paper journalism-- changed for good what a zine looks like.

and so, yes, i've met them f2f, i didn't just make them up, and i've worked with them for more than six years, and i cherish their brains, and yes, you can barrage them with questions... bart is egon@aol, heh heh heh, and r u is rusirius@well. (ed note: Since they needn't be barraged with mail, even though jude was kind enough to give us these addresses, I'll compromise. I won't make links, and I'll display them just as she gave them. If you want to mail the guys, figure it out.)

verbosity: You've been a subscriber to the WELL for a good while, now [a finger client returned to me a good 6+ year registration, heh]. Was it "unnerving", "exciting", or pretty much unknown when it was discovered that Kevin had broken into the system? Did WELL make this immediately know, or was it kinda suppressed? Then again, if answering this question would, ah, instigate you, don don't have to answer.

jude: i really don't care a rat's ass whether anybody looks at my email. The only dangerous stuff in my directories is the ideas, and welcome to them. that's for starts... [hey, how obnoxious can i get, here?] i'm not all that territorial online, but then i'm not a touchy alpha male who's on his files like a dragon on a twinkling midden, then, am i? when this happened, i got some info out of 2600-- kevin's well directory, which was unprotected-- so i went in there and discovered that it had been used as a drop, that's all... no file protection at all [777] for the recent files, and read-only for the older ones... so it was an information stash being used by a number of people. not very incriminating for one lone nerd. i told markoff about this, and he was not impressed. i further told him that a hacker friend of mine had dealings with kevin in the past and was not blown away by his expertise... he was not the superhaquer that he was purported to be. ( my friend is, on the other hand.) er, what was the question?

verbosity: Finally, in closing, the one question the world [or at least we have] has been dying to know... why in the world do you have an '@aol.com' addy? Is this some sick joke? or do you just keep using those silly disks that the company sends out? Personally, I like them just fine as coasters, but...

jude: see here, shitwit, (a disgusting thing to call someone, eh? i made it up this week) i love AOL... it makes cross-platform data transmission easy, and i live by yes, cross-platform transmission of data. i'm not only a programmer. i'm a designer, a writer and a graphic artist, and AOL wrings those bulky suckers through the wire... A1-fool PROOF. i been using AOL for over six years; it was me who forced writers for MONDO2000 to send stuff over the online. before that, MONDO had typists with names like Sunbeam in tiedye sandals typing paper printouts back in, arrrrrrrhh. hey, i'm doing some user interface design right now for Sun-- the Java Wallet. god, that impresses ME. i even get to do the drawings, o joy. i love getting $$ for art.

stjude@aol.com

[back to verbosity]

Corey Welton is an official haqr-gonnabe. In the meantime, he's busy recovering from the AOL question in this interview. Thanks to St. Jude for being so cooperative!