“I HAVE A HORROR OF BEING OBVIOUS”:INTRODUCTION TO WEB OF ANGELS
BY CORY DOCTOROW
There’s nothing like a first novel. The first novel is a vessel for every notion, eyeball kick, world-building conceit, character tic, and linguistic flourish a writer has ever conceived of. First novels are thick in a way that no subsequent novel will be. It’s true that “every novel teaches you how to write the novel you just wrote,” but your first novel also teaches you to write novels.
You’re holding Mike Ford’s first novel. It is a remarkable, innovative, strange, and dense book. It’s not easy to read, but it is a stupendous book.
If you’ve heard anything about this book, it’s probably something like, “John M. Ford wrote a novel that presaged all of the major themes and conventions of cyberpunk in 1980, four years before William Gibson published Neuromancer.”
That’s not a bad hook, but there’s a lot more going to the story.
Cyberpunk was already brewing when this novel came out. Gibson’s debut short story, “Fragments of a Hologram Rose,” came out in 1977, in a small-press ’zine, and it was part of a long-running foment in the field that sought to fuse technological speculation with avant-garde literary experimentation, a kind of successor to the New Wave movement, whose tide was on its way out.
Gibson was hardly alone in staking out this new territory. Brunner’s Shockwave Rider came out in 1975, while William S. Burroughs’s Blade Runner (which supplied the title, but not the plot, for Ridley Scott’s 1982 film) came out in ’79. John Shirley’s proto-cyberpunk novel City Come A-Walkin’ came out the same year as Mike’s Web of Angels.
So cyberpunk’s early stirrings were well underway when this book came out, and this book is part of the genre’s pioneering early history. It is prescient—and not merely because Mike got lucky and called the network at the center of the book’s action “the Web”—and it presages many of the real and fictional struggles of hacker heroes and antiheroes in the years to come.
However, the fact that this book was so prescient does not mean that it should be thought of as a shared ancestor of the cyberpunk we know today. Rather, Web of Angels represents a kind of sister species to the main line of cyberpunk—like H. floresiensis or H. neanderthalensis, a kindred species that coexisted with us H. saps, interbred with us, but vanished long ago. The themes in Web of Angels were largely forgotten and independently re-created by subsequent cyberpunks down the line.
There’s a good reason that Web of Angels did not spawn generations of books that refined its themes: timing. You see, Web of Angels was published in 1980, and because it was published in 1980, it is mostly a book about phone phreaks rather than a book about hackers.
Long before we connected our homes and our pockets to the internet, long before dial-up online services and BBSes popped up like mushrooms around the country, long before the standalone PC arrived in our living rooms, the Bell System—the phone network—was the only way that everyday people could interact with a computer.
Every time you picked up your indestructible Western Digital phone—leased from AT&T at an exorbitant monthly fee, which the company was able to charge thanks to a law that made it illegal to use any other kind of phone—and dialed a number, you caused a network of lumbering electromechanical and fully digital computers at the phone company’s “central offices” to perform computational work, connecting your phone to some distant handset.
For a certain kind of transgressive, curious, anti-authoritarian, and technically minded person, the phone network was an irresistible lure. Self-taught phone hobbyists figured out how to perform surreal and delightful stunts, like making a call between two adjacent payphones that transited through exchanges that stretched around the country—or the planet. They took over the primitive phone message systems appearing in large businesses and transformed them into party lines or communal voice mailboxes where like-minded souls could leave messages for one another.
They called themselves “phone phreaks,” and their culture was the forerunner of hacker culture. Not every phreak became a hacker, and not every hacker trope, practice, and ethos owes its existence to phreaks, but the hacker of today would be a very different person if not for the phreaks that came before.
Phreaks differed from hackers in one very important respect: their relationship to the system they were exploring. Today’s hackers investigate (or invade, or sabotage) any of the billions of computers that we have connected to the internet, and even early hackers had dozens or hundreds of systems to explore—computer systems used by the military, by insurance giants, by government agencies, by private labs. But for American phreaks, there was really only one adversary: the Bell System, AT&T, the Death Star.
AT&T was a cruel and remorseless monopolist. At the time that Web of Angels was published, the company had been fighting regulators over its monopoly practices for sixty-seven years, and two years later, the DOJ would finally prevail, shattering Ma Bell into several “Baby Bells”—the RBOCs (“are-bocks” or “Regional Bell Operating Companies”).
The Bell System was twined around the state. As it predated upon and extinguished smaller phone operators across the country (especially the rural phone co-ops that were the successors to the New Deal’s electrification co-ops), it cannily accepted “punishments” that required it to provide universal service across the country, and to ally itself with emergency services and the public safety apparatus, working with local and federal police agencies to develop protocols for criminal surveillance. (Years later, the Snowden revelations would make it clear that AT&T never halted this practice, and that it was far and away the most complicit and active commercial partner in the NSA’s illegal mass-surveillance campaign.)
Anti-monopoly enforcers seek to guard the state from corporate power growing so strong that it usurps the power of the state. AT&T’s shrewd strategy was to accept “punishments” that caused it to become a deputized arm of the state, the original too-big-to-fail American company. The DOJ almost broke up AT&T in the early 1950s, but then the Pentagon stepped in to rescue it, arguing that the US military could not effectively prosecute the war in Korea if AT&T was not left intact to serve as toolsmith to the US invasion force.
AT&T was thus rehabilitated from a predatory monopolist to a national champion, a guardian of safety and security. This, in turn, transformed the parasites, explorers, wreckers, and builders who trespassed upon its authorities into threats to public safety, to the national interest itself. AT&T’s enforcers found enthusiastic allies in the American criminal justice system, who aggressively policed AT&T’s network policies on their behalf. A 1981 episode of WKRP in Cincinnati features a comedic meltdown by Dr. Johnny Fever, who breaks a Western Digital phone and flies into a panic at the thought that “the phone cops” are coming to drag him away. The joke was not really a joke: phone cops and real cops worked together to break down doors and drag away “toll thieves” who figured out how to beat the company’s high-margin long-distance rates.
The crime of “toll fraud” really amounted to “felony contempt of monopoly,” but AT&T had a winning strategy for disguising its parochial interest in maintaining its monopoly pricing and control over telephone handsets, by conflating the organized crime syndicates that systematized toll fraud with the kids and weirdos who set up free conference calls and the basement inventors who created tone-generating boxes that let them defeat long-distance tolls.
It was a profitable sleight of hand for AT&T, one that provided cover and government support to harass, demonize, and even imprison the early phreaks.
Indeed, the first salvo in the hacker wars that were to come was fired by AT&T, when it sicced the FBI on some phreaker-cum-hackers who had posted a bureaucratic document describing the management of a local 911 system and sparked a nationwide wave of arrests, as documented in Bruce Sterling’s The Hacker Crackdown.
The FBI’s Hacker Crackdown marked a turning point, and not just in law enforcement’s relationship to the anti-authoritarian, high-tech underground, but in that underground itself. Phone phreaks operated an oral culture—inevitably, since the fundamental unit of phreak social interaction was the phone call. Phreaks learned to be phreaks from other phreaks, and mentor-protégé relationships were common.
The Hacker Crackdown concerned an article published in Phrack, the seminal hacker e-zine that was founded in 1985—five years after Web of Angels (2600: The Hacker Quarterly commenced publication in 1984). The rise of BBSes and their archives of “tfiles” (text files filled with bragadocious accounts of daring hacker exploits, as well as manifestos and lies) and e-zines represented a profound shift in the hacker’s journey.
With these files to hand, a hacker wasn’t nearly so reliant on mentors: these documents (along with the painstakingly retyped internal documentation harvested from the dumpsters of Ma Bell, IBM, and other tech giants) were the raw materials of a self-directed study program, albeit one supplemented by online forums and chats, and the odd hacker get-together. (Phreaks did have some written culture, notably the Youth International Party Line—later changed to TAP—published by Abbie Hoffman and Al Bell in the early 1970s.)
The thing that makes Web of Angels such a book of its time—and so definitively a cousin to cyberpunk, rather than an ancestor—is how much of a phreak book it is.
Its protagonist, Grailer Diomede, learns to be a “Webspinner” after he is taken under the arm of a much more accomplished spinner. Their mutual adversary is Bell Stellar, a galactically metastatic version of Ma Bell, one that has actually devoured the state that once protected it, winning for itself the right to deal out lethal retaliation to anyone who threatens the integrity of the network that binds the distant worlds together.
Ford’s hackers—the Webspinners—play Websets, strange computer terminals that interact with Bell Stellar’s computers on their behalf. These are played like thumb pianos, by means of up to 256 sliding levers that have to be finessed with the skill of a pianist. These bear a striking resemblance to the Altair 8080, the first successful personal computer, released in 1975 as a kit that you assembled and programmed by means of switches on its faceplate. At the time that Web of Angels saw print, the Altair was in decline, being supplanted by the Apple II Plus, which was much closer in form to the PCs that we use today, with an alphabetical keyboard and a screen, rather than blinking lights.
In 1982, two years after the publication of Web of Angels, the US Department of Justice broke up AT&T, sixty-nine years after its first action to crack down on the company to end its strong-arm tactics. At the time, AT&T’s apologists reacted with horror, claiming AT&T as America’s national champion, its bulwark against the ex-fascist copycats of Japan, who would surely destroy America’s tech sector if not held in check by Ma Bell (the Yellow Peril scare talk of the day is eerily familiar to anyone who’s listened to Cold War 2.0 hawks rant about China).
In reality, AT&T was a boot on the neck of the American high-tech sector, and its breakup—along with IBM’s twelve-year-long turn in antitrust hell, which tamed the company’s predatory instincts—led to the creation of the PC industry and the network era. The cyberpunk era, in other words. An era where you could have your choice of computers at home, and not just interact with the central office’s switching system by means of a standardized Western Digital phone that was the only device you were legally permitted to connect to the network.
We can think of Web of Angels as a contrafactual, a cyberpunk novel for a future that never arrived, one where AT&T once again rebuffed America’s antitrust enforcers, where IBM slipped out of their grasp with its killer instincts intact. It’s a cyberpunk novel for a world where we never got the forty-year interregnum between the breakup of AT&T and the rise of Big Tech, in which starved and demoralized antitrust enforcers allowed the internet to be converted to “five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four” (to quote Tom Eastman).
Copyright © 1980 by John M. Ford
Introduction copyright © 2024 by Cory Doctorow
