In this column I'm interviewing a thirteen-year-old boy.

The same gag is used over and over in commercials, in movies, in television, in comic strips--the adult flounders idiotically with his computer, he calls the expert: his nine-year old, his 10-year old, his teenager...and the kid rolls his eyes and fixes it for him. Role reversal in the age of technological baptism.

If a joke is funny there's a grain of truth in it. We laugh at uncomfortable truths.

And man, it's uncomfortably true--my kids know more about computers and the Internet than I do.

Of course, I have deliberately avoided learning a great deal about it. I like to tell an anecdote about Sherlock Holmes -- despite his brilliance he was under the impression that the sun rotated around the Earth. When someone set him straight he was annoyed -- he didn't care if it was true, it was information he didn't need for his work, and useful information was all he was interested in. Okay, so Holmes was an eccentric and it's an exaggerated example. But to me an overwhelming majority of new tech, the new info, is irrelevant -- is essentially a sales scam to get me to buy something I don't need; and the learning curve for utilizing new technologies is often irritatingly steep. So I'm selective about what I learn, what I use, how much I know. I have other learning priorities: history and philosophy. But my kids...oh, my kids are wide open to almost anything. To them it's all an adventure--and all a potential tool to get more adventure, more fun, more, and more...the cynic in me wants to say "more instant gratification", but ultimately it may be that they know what they're doing, on some level.

Wait--could it be? Adults don't necessarily have all their priorities straight?

Nah. That couldn't be true. Look what a great job they're doing running the world...

My son's generation is the first one to grow up completely in the...er, not the SHADOW (my first impulse), but the, ah, GLOW, that's it, of the Internet...

So in the spirit of recognizing the peculiar, special expertise of youth, in this column I'm interviewing my 13-year-old son about the Internet and related media.

His name is Julian. I'm typing this real time, transcribing my discussion with him as we have it. (I have two other, older boys, Perry and Byron, but they're not here today and I have to get this done. Another time they'll shock me with their points of view here).

Julian starts out saying: You couldn't possibly contain all the things I have to say about the Internet in a book, let alone an interview.

What do you most want to say, though? You were complaining about AOL today...

There was a man that, in his AOL profile, he wrote "Life Sucks and Everybody Should Kill Themselves." AOL saw the profile and deleted his AOL account -- he switched to Earthlink --

Yeah great -- I wonder if he's aware that Earthlink is controlled by Scientologists. But let us not get into that. Go on.

It's still a good program; it doesn't matter if it's controlled by them. AOL has advertising thrown at you when you go on and I don't think Earthlink does... Scientology is such a stupid name though. Anyway the guy started an anti-AOL site with downloadable hacking programs that have the power to boot people offline at your will. To totally screw with their heads in hundreds of wonderful ways. You can destroy AOL chatrooms. It comes complete with ready scams to get people's credit card numbers.

Well then Julian it seems to me the guy is a scumbag if he's providing a means for ripping off other people's credit card numbers. I might point out that I myself use AOL (because I already know it and it's easy for me and it seems to me more or less as good as any other system, since in my experience, as with Home, they all screw up).

I'm not saying he isn't. He didn't start that site till after they kicked him off.I'm not saying that justifies it.

But you're sort of fascinated with people who screw with the system and use hacking, aren't you, sometimes? How come?

Yes because it shows how anybody can have such amazing power...

You mean like those guys who caused a bunch of big sites to go down recently with hacking? Individual guys showing their power against the gigantic system?

Yeah but I think it's stupid. If I was going to use hacking, I would use it to prove a point, something political . . .I don't like AOL because it's user friendly.

What's wrong with that?!

When you have user friendly there's not enough options --

But it's the opposite -- user friendly makes things easy --

Not in the way that I mean -- You can't *customize* with it very much. Like Mac, too, it's ironic that when it's user friendly you have less freedom -- if there's a problem then it's incredibly hard to fix because you can't do anything basically --you have to rely on the company to do it. You're at their mercy. It sucks.

Oh so when they make things easy for us in one sense, they actually restrict us in another. They give with one hand and take away with the other.

Yeah and if you don't like AOL you can have the same instant message services with ICQ and chatroom services with Yahoo. Email with hotmail. So screw AOL, they suck. I love the buddy list on AOL but you can get that on ICQ so it doesn't matter. 'Cause with a buddy list system I can know when any of my friends are on and then Instant Message them instantly or invite them to a chat. Instant message them instantly--isn't that redundant?

It seems to me like when I was a teenager kids spent a great deal of time on the phone to their friends, they lived on the phone, and now --

And now you can talk to*all your friends at once* -- so it's like being in a room with them almost even though they're not there. With the new RPG things like Terris -- that's on AOL I must admit, the bastards -- (Daddy don't write that) -- anyway with Terris you can have your own character, any kind you want, any mythical character, you can trade items with them -- or kill them!

And you can do all this with your friends so you have a whole other way of relating to them?

Yeah. Plus you can make free phone calls from the Internet. Oh I just thought of something else that anti-AOL hacking program does -- it can steal people's cell phone ID # so they can make calls off their cell phone --

This guy should be in jail. I'm dismayed by how fascinated you are by this stuff. I hope I don't have to see you only in the visiting room at the prison for cybercriminals.

It's not illegal to put it up, you're allowed to have it as long as you don't use it -- which doesn't make any sense -- and some of the features you can use --

Well you shouldn't assume that info you have on what's legal, at this point, is always right.

I know people at school who have a program where they can take shareware off the program completely free. You know, shareware is like when you download a program off the Internet and they charge you money -- but with this, it unlocks it so you can just download it free. It's wrong.

Are you just saying that it's wrong because you're talking to your Dad?

Um um NO. Of COURSE not. [Julian using a humorous character-voice for that]. I'm fascinated by how easy it is. You can steal 400-dollar programs from the Internet, copy them onto CD and then sell them. But that software is hard to get and you have to be very computer literate to know where to get it. However lots of kids own CD burners and they use them for illegal purposes, they rent a Playstation game and then burn it. Copy it.

But the big action online now for kids is napster and MP3s and stuff right?

Ohhhhh I love napster. It's just wonderful that you can get all this music free from the Internet. I have to say I don't feel bad about it at all. Because people will do it anyways.

Why does that make it right? People will pickpocket other people too--does that make it all right, because people will do it?

No I guess not. But they charge so much for CDs, it's such a rip off. [The phone rings, it's his brother calling to say...] Byron says I screwed up his website (http://pages.bolt.com/me/byronshirley) - go online. Dad -- I don't know what he's talking about, I want to see!  [We argue about this--I don't want to lose focus on what I'm doing and go online--it irritates me, his way of jumping to doing something else like a grasshopper, especially as I worry that the media barrage kids live in now has given my kids a short attention span, but he argues, cunningly, that it's relevant to this piece we're writing, so we go online, I hope briefly...With one hand and in a split second my son skillfully copies the above url, pastes it in the address box on my AOL site to go instantly to Byron's "Azrael's Lair" website where he checks his own contribution to the site, "The Virtual World of Calv5", Julian's review and commentary site, which is all about games -- lots of the latest info on Final Fantasy, etc...I'm irritated to note a few spelling errors, and I grouse, "Why doesn't Byron use spellcheck?" Julian doesn't find the errors Byron is talking about and thinks Byron's computer is "wack". We go back to the interview...checking in online for him seems as vital as getting a drink of water, peeing, or eating].

So about Napster [Julian goes on] -- you know, a song starts out as a CD, someone uses a CD ripping program, they put it in Mp3 form, and once you sign up for Napster it scans your entire computer for Mp3s. It puts all of them in your Mp3 library and when you go on napster people can search for it and upload it from you--

But that sounds like someone can get in your computer through napster in some hacker way -- steal records of credit card transactions or something --

That couldn't happen, there are firewalls and…they can only download from what's on the Internet. It'd be so much easier to use some other hacking program to steal from you. To steal info from someone all you need is their IP address. And a nice hacking program. But breaking into other people's computers is illegal, federal law.
My friend Jay has 530 napster songs on his computer -- He has like a hundred and fifty songs with Eminem on them -- includes all the songs that Eminem made a guest appearance on or bootlegs, live stuff, interviews…I saw an interview with you on napster…if you put anything on tape you can convert it to wav and wav to Mp3.

[A lot of you would be amazed by how much of this I didn't know, by the way].

Julian goes on: Once a song is on napster they download it from you--then there's two copies on napster. Then two people take it from them and there's four and it keeps going till there are thousands of people on downloading the really hot stuff. There's an unbelievable amount of napster songs. Eminem for example once something new by him appears on napster it spreads like wildfire, incredibly fast. I can go in a napster chatroom, and say 'does anybody have the song from Eminem's first album, track seven?' and somebody'll say "I do" and you just right click on their name and click add to hotlist and it puts them on your napster buddy list and shows you *every single song they have* -- and you just click on that song and it's yours -- you can even listen to the song as far as it's downloaded before it's finished downloading --

So you're saying that you can get this stuff from their 'store' of napster titles without asking their permission, just by knowing that they have it?

Yeah they don't care though, it doesn't bother them. That's what you do when you search it just says their name, ping rate --

Whatever that is!

[Wearily:] I'll explain it in a minute if you want, Dad…Oh okay it's how fast you're getting information from the other computer -- like in Internet games -- and you join the one with the highest ping rate in a game.
Anyway what shows up on the napster search screen is their napster name, their ping rate, their connection for example 56K T1, T3 or DSL, the amount of space the file takes and the length of the song--then you just click to download--then you click to download the smallest file with the actual complete song. And the highest connection rate, that's very important. Even though T3 is better than DSL I often pick DSL because people LIE about their connection and pretend they have a T3…because it's cool! So I have to use strategy.

Do you ever feel overwhelmed by all the info you have to absorb to be part of this new youth-online culture?

I feel like there's too much to do at once, too many people to talk to, too many choices, too many files to download -- but I don't actually feel *overwhelmed*, I know what I'm doing.
I like making websites, too. It shows my skill and…I don't know why I like making them.

It's a way to show you've got what it takes to be really accepted in the new online youth-culture maybe. You mentioned to me you heard that there's drug dealing through Role Playing Games?

I just hear that in some RPGs people will meet and sell drugs inside certain rooms -- that's all -- it was happening in EverQuest I heard. I don't know what drugs it was. But it figures -- that'd be the ideal place to sell drugs. Because you can stand around --

In a public place without really being public.

It's not an appearance you can keep a record of easily. I guess they meet customers there and then they make arrangements how to trade the drugs for money in the real world outside the game, like if they're in the same city or…maybe through the mail… None of *my* friends do it and I would never do it.

How about pornography online?

It's easy to see pornography. We have parental controls but I've seen some -- because they TRICK you into it. They say 'click here for a free gift' and it's a link to a pornsite. And the parental controls don't block it. But they will block things like gamepro.com that they shouldn't block! Or the AltaVista translation section! Of course that's mostly AOL again...

And "AOL sucks". We established that.

*            *               *

This interview hasn't been altogether reassuring to me. It's as if my thirteen year old son is able to roam freely in the virtual equivalent of the worst slum in town--it's like he can go into the Tenderloin, and wander among pimps, the sleaziest adult bookstores, drug dealers, and thieves.

But if I take it away--I deprive him of the most vital youth culture happening…one he's already a part of, one he's given some of his consciousness to, one for which he has skills he is proud of, one he identifies with. And if I tried to take it away he'd find another way into it.

I have to trust that he has the intelligence to stay out of its slums…and out of the hands of the molesters, the possible abductors that swim the Internet like diseased sharks...

He does have that intelligence. But I worry. And it's not inappropriate for me to worry.

A whole sociological study could be done in children about the development, and non-development, of moral questions connected with online activity...

It's evolving, that moral and social continuum. But where is its evolution taking it?

It's out of my hands. I'm having to learn to trust my kids...

Ultimately it's not them I mistrust. It's the world.

Copyright © 2000 John Shirley All Rights Reserved

John Shirley is the author of numerous works including the recently re-released, revised editions of the ECLIPSE cyberpunk trilogy, from Babbage Press, and the award winning story collection BLACK BUTTERFLIES. Check out the Authorized John Shirley Website.

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