But that's how it always starts. Bright kid with a tough childhood, unhelped by the education system, finds an outlet...
For Jake, living in the Shetlands, the internet became his everything. It was where he made friends and socialised. "It's where I learned almost everything I now know. The thing I miss the most is Wikipedia. I mean, at school I learned to knit. I'm actually a pretty good knitter now." Jake had a somewhat difficult childhood, and that (combined with the knitting lessons) led him to drop out of school at 13, shortly after his stepfather was killed in an accident.
What's immediately apparent about Jake Davis (and about a lot of the people involved with Anonymous) is just how bright and intelligent he is. And how the internet is where they find an outlet for their intellect – an outlet that somehow seems to have eluded them in real life. "These weren't just normal individuals who found themselves in extraordinary circumstances," says Parmy Olson. "They really were extraordinary individuals in extraordinary circumstances."
What I find so interesting about Davis is how completely he seems to have been let down by the education system. It entirely failed to uncover or nurture his talents. "I literally have not a single qualification to my name," he tells me at one point, and looks rather sheepish. Davis rose to prominence in Anonymous and then LulzSec not because he was some expert hacker – he wasn't; his technical skills were limited – but because he is a naturally gifted writer and communicator. Among other things, he controlled the LulzSec Twitter account, from which issued forth a stream of jokey pronouncements, the last of which had the feeling of prophecy to it: "You cannot arrest an idea," he said. Which may be true, but almost exactly a month later a team of police officers burst into his living room, and then flew him by specially chartered plane to London, a place he'd never been to before. "It was like going to the future or something," he says.
I liked the journalist's education in 4chan terminology.
Everyone is a fag: there are newfags (newcomers) and oldfags (old-timers) and fagfags (homosexuals) and moralfags (those perceived as taking the moral high ground). I realise that I am a newsfag. But I can't spot the plans to conquer the universe between the casual misogynism and the Aids jokes.
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