Leaving Reality Behind: Inside the Battle for the Soul of the Internet

Ten years on, the demonstrators outside Spross’s party lacked the impact of the previous generation but shared their spirit. They hung around in small groups, rousing themselves at the arrival of each new limousine.

One individual stood out from the crowd. Seventeen years old with carefully spiked blond hair, he wore a scruffy black leather jacket emblazoned with the words ‘Nazis Raus’ – Nazis Out – and bright-green Doctor Marten boots he had customised himself. The young man Herbert (though he later adopted the name agent.ZAI) was spotted by a producer from Swiss National Television who was on the talent trail for the youth programme Seismo, which needed reporters and presenters. When approached, Herbert railed against the authorities and talked about his involvement in the Students’ Union that he helped run at his high school. He was invited to a casting, where his fast-talking wit quickly secured him a starring role.

Herbert worked for the production for the next year, gaining special permission from his school to attend recordings and meetings. A two-hour discussion programme for young people, each episode covering a single topic, Seismo involved numerous guests, a live audience and band performances. The shows were brash, arresting spectacles that were always staged in strange locations – on one occasion it was set among the machinery at a water-purifying plant. Herbert gave compelling performances, interviewing guests and presenting recorded segments. The contrast between this spirited, jagged young man and Switzerland’s elder politicians and pundits made particularly engaging television.

Seismo taught Herbert much about the inner workings of the media, of which he was a keen and diligent student. The show also brought him a certain kudos. The press described him and his three fellow youth reporters as ‘lively, competent and cheeky’; they were interviewed and had their pictures published in the media, and occasionally Herbert was recognised in the street. During the course of that year he became more self-regarding than he had been before, and dyed his hair black to show off his good looks and intense eyes all the better on-screen. For the first time in his life he had achieved a kind of recognition. In a world where the old and comfortable truths of youth rebellion – the battles between East and West, between capital and labour – were no longer so easily grasped, the delights of the media and the celebrity that it brought were all the more enticing. It was a seduction that, as the years went on, Herbert found himself unable to resist.

At high school Herbert was not having such a good time. His bristling intelligence together with his rebelliousness annoyed his teachers at the straitlaced and traditional establishment that had a reputation as the proving ground for the Swiss elite. So he left, travelling to Basel to attend the most radical of all Swiss schools, the Anna Göldin-Gymnasium, named after the last Swiss witch to have been burned at the stake. The school was anti-authoritarian, governed for the most part by the students themselves, who democratically set and enforced the rules. But even in this most liberal of environments Herbert soon became embroiled in conflicts with both students and teachers. His free spirit did not flourish: without qualifications he moved back to Zürich.

The move left Herbert at a loose end, and by the spring of 1991 he was keen to find a place where he could feel comfortable and use his estimable skills. With a group of political activists and friends he broke into an old gas-meter factory called Wohlgrot and occupied the site. It was situated right in the centre of town, just behind Zürich’s main railway station, and included a cluster of buildings surrounding a courtyard, and a villa where the factory manager had once lived. The place became a popular and heavily populated squat, the most significant of countercultural happenings in the city since The Movement, and its existence was proclaimed by a huge parody of a station sign. Instead of ‘Zürich’, it read ‘Zureich’ – ‘Too Rich’.

During the coming months Herbert spent much of his time in the squat. With a café, a bar, a cinema and a concert venue, the place quickly took on the character of an underground cultural centre; it was illegal, for a start, but perhaps its most subversive feature was the ‘junkie room’, where heroin addicts could go either to shoot up or to receive medical help. But, as with Herbert’s radical school, amid the anarchy at the squat there was conflict. Late in 1991, when the new dance-beats of techno had arrived in the city, the squat’s first rave was held in a basement. A squatter threw a teargas grenade into the crowd in protest because he considered techno too ‘commercial’ for this fiercely anti-capitalist space. Herbert and his friends and everyone else present were forced to make a speedy exit up a narrow staircase. The event turned him against the puritan spirit of the protestors.

As time wore on, the idyllic utopia that Herbert had envisioned became the venue for more and more rancorous arguments. As he remembers, ‘We wanted the villa to be a special place, a nice place, but the others took over and it became dirty and fucked up.’ And so he began to dream of organising something independent, something over which he could wield more control.

Herbert’s yearning for his own thing resulted in his decision to stage a shocking performance. It was the summer of 1992, and Switzerland’s 156 numbers – the equivalent of America’s 1–900 numbers and Britain’s 0898 numbers – had just appeared and had immediately become synonymous with phone sex and pornographic chatlines. Hungry for this latest sordid, circulation-boosting story, newspaper editors had given the subject acres of newsprint, simultaneously titillating their readers with the details of what the phone services offered and condemning the lucrative schemes’ operators. To Herbert, too, this new phenomenon presented a glimmer of opportunity.

He remembers, ‘I wanted to be a pioneer at any price, because everything else seemed to be too boring.’ What he wanted to do was run his own 156 number, to use this very new technology to challenge the hypocrisy of the media and to pointedly shock the culture of the dull, lifeless and extraordinarily wealthy city of Zürich. He loved The Sex Pistols, the British band who in 1977 had reached Number One in Britain in the week of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee and subsequently shocked the nation with their angry lyrics and by swearing on national television. Perhaps Herbert’s scam could do the same. Zürich, after all, had a history of bizarre events. Dada, the art movement that first shocked polite society by performing nonsense poetry, making collages and championing tomfoolery in the face of the horrors of the First World War, had begun here, and went on to influence almost every aspect of conceptual art in the twentieth century.

Herbert also liked the 156 idea because it made him feel like a grown-up. ‘We wanted our own company, our stickers, our logo, our publicity,’ he recalls. The 156 line might even make some money, and he particularly liked the fact that this partly entrepreneurial venture would irritate the pious protestors, the po-faced squatters and the bickering politically correct alumni of his old school, all of whom were critical of any sort of commerce.

Herbert registered a phone line and set about gathering a team to execute the project. He called on his old friend Juri to handle the technology and set up the equipment. Juri was an apprentice electrician, but hated the dull monotony of a professional life that demanded so little of his skills. He had spent his younger years locked in front of computers, trying to break into computer networks as part of the tiny and highly specialised underground world of phone-phreakers and hackers. As he would later prove, he was extremely talented when armed with a computer, a modem and a few bits of elegantly written code. In person he was shy and rather wordless, and computer technology provided him with a way of communicating with the world. At high school, where Herbert met him, Juri shoplifted-to-order computer accessories for his classmates and ploughed the profits back into his enormous phonebills. He was tall and clumsy, with an unmemorable face; his fearlessness was the key to his successful career as a hacker.

Another friend whom Herbert contacted for help was Alberto. Herbert and Alberto’s families had known each other for ever; by 1992, Alberto, two years older than Herbert, was already committed to a career as a student of architecture at the Zürich Technical University. By contrast to the scruffy punks and slackers squatting the Wohlgrot, he was always neat, his vivid dark eyes framed by delicate black-rimmed glasses. Herbert and his friends had nicknamed him Master Proper, the name of a cleaning product. More distant and ultimately more calculating than his friends, Alberto would in the years to come bring a cold, intellectual grounding, the brains to their sloganeering rebellion.

Thomas was the third of Herbert’s friends to be recruited. Tall, with a rectangular-shaped head, he posed as a violent bruiser and loved what he considered to be the glamorous chic of motorbikes and guns. He would happily spend hours cooking barbecues, drinking beer and watching Formula One. However, this muscled exterior concealed a clever soul; Thomas was a gifted storyteller, and laced his deft observations with a dry and inscrutable humour.

The name that Herbert, Juri, Alberto and Thomas chose for their scam was HIRN-lein, meaning ‘small brain’ but in Swiss-German sounding just like ‘brain line’.

Soon the posters they had painted were pasted all over Zürich. They screamed ‘BLOODBATH’ in large print, alongside an assurance to readers that the words had been splattered with real pigs’ blood. Herbert ascribed the action to a new organisation called Verein der Freunde Monopolistischer Märkte (VFMM) – The Association of the Friends of Monopolistic Markets – a joke at the expense of the anti-capitalist squatters.

Anyone who responded to the gruesome poster and phoned HIRN-lein’s l½-franc-a-minute line (about 50 pence Sterling, or 90 American cents) was greeted by machine-gun fire and the screams of a hysterical woman. This was followed by the moralising and portentous voice of a man: ‘Dear listener, is this what you want to listen to? Is a bloodbath a reason to call us? It is sad if not tragic that you too are part of this pitiable crowd who feels attracted by a bloodbath, a massacre, even misery and death of fellow human beings.’ In the background, symphonic film-music reached a crescendo. The narrator continued in an imploring tone: ‘You have dialled this number; reflect on it, be honest with yourself. Is it worth throwing life away to obscene lust?’ The tape ended with HIRN-lein’s slogan, ‘The Modesty of Truth’.

Hardly anyone but their friends called, and the story was not picked up by the press. Only Marc Ziegler, a prosecutor known as ‘the hunter of the 156 numbers’ for his determined attempt to shut down the more pornographic lines, seemed to notice HIRN-lein at all. When interviewed by a reporter on a local radio station about the 156 phenomenon, he said that someone should take the HIRN-lein boys by the ear and give them a good talking-to.

Still they remained desperate for a reaction to their work, and thus recorded further tasteless stories and produced yet more shocking posters. It was a poster bearing the slogan ‘Somehow we find it completely perverted to fuck in front of a dead body’ that provoked a complaint to another Zürich prosecutor, Lino Esseiva. He then launched a pornography investigation against Alberto, as registrant of the phone number – the boys had discovered that it was illegal for Herbert, as a minor, to have the phone line registered in his name, so had cautiously transferred it into Alberto’s, the only one of the group who was over twenty years old. Alberto was summoned to Esseiva’s office and closely questioned about his intentions; his response was to cleverly explain that HIRN-lein was a media-and-art experiment, rather than a porn line. This seemed to satisfy Lino Esseiva, who accepted that the group’s actions weren’t criminal – even if he thought they were disgusting.

The boys were happy that their oeuvre finally had been noticed. They cheered themselves on with the thought, ‘The more people hate us, the better.’ To up the ante, Herbert asked his friend Nico Wieland to write a letter to Tages-Anzeiger, Switzerland’s most popular broadsheet newspaper. After outlining his puritan disdain of the antics of HIRN-lein, Nico signed off: ‘I rely on the tiny remains of intelligence that are left in our society to fight this and other perversions.’ The letter was published and had the desired effect: the much dreamed-of journalists started calling.

To the boys’ delight, the journalists mostly wrote sanctimonious condemnations. ‘We are the Saddam Husseins of the 156 lines,’ Herbert gloated in response to press questions. When a journalist from Switzerland’s biggest tabloid newspaper called, they told her that they were students who believed in the imminent arrival of extra-terrestrials and wanted to use the line to finance the building of a landing strip in Ethiopia. The credulous journalist agreed to meet them, and under the expert supervision of architecture student Alberto they spent the whole night drawing plans and building a model. The following Sunday the tabloid ran the headline ‘Hallo Ufo, bitte landen!’ (‘Hello UFO, please land!’) accompanied by a picture: Thomas, in jacket and tie, with a map of Africa; Alberto, smiling under his spectacles, with his model of the landing strip; and Herbert, in a baseball cap, holding a poster bearing their 156 number, looking like a geeky high-school student.

Herbert also used his contacts to persuade Swiss National Television to carry a report on their youth show. He dictated his terms. Instead of giving interviews, Alberto pretended to be a phone-line addict; Juri and Thomas, in suits and ties, played the HIRN-lein entrepreneurs; and Herbert acted as the group’s chief ideologist.

The project was a triumph in media manipulation, but after a couple of months Herbert had to wind it down – for all the publicity, it hadn’t made any money.

By the spring of 1993, Herbert again felt under pressure to make his way in the world and find something new to do. More than anything, he hated the idea of getting a job, of joining the plodding masses in their grey offices. He wanted something that combined the adrenaline hit of his TV performances with the thrill of HIRN-lein’s provocation. But most avenues were closed to him because he had not graduated from high school. One hope of an interesting life came in the chance to go to art school in neighbouring Austria, where the entry requirements were less rigorous than those in Switzerland. To bolster his resolve and to prevent his return to Zürich, he gave up his apartment and gave away most of his belongings. After a lavish final HIRN-lein party, Herbert left for Vienna.

At the same time, his friend Hans – another failed student from the Anna Göldin-Gymnasium – decided that he would also apply. As large as Herbert was small, Hans was a skinhead whose mood-changing drinking habits and aggression made him a dominating force. His real love, however, was more sublime. ‘I wanted to be a poet, a voice in the world,’ he remembers. He had spent his teens writing acres of poetic rants that he described as WORDWAR. In ‘Reality’ he wrote, ‘my brain is splattering in the flames’ and that he was suffering ‘the permanent reduction of the physical-body functions, the retracting of the limbs, mutilation of the extremities, medical dependence on the higher lifeforms in the body’. Much of his poetry was nonsensical, testosterone-fuelled adolescent ranting, but it had energy and force nonetheless.

The relationship of Herbert and Hans was intense, borne of teenage enthusiasm for each other. Together they felt much stronger and more likely to succeed than they did on their own. Though they were not lovers, they behaved like a couple – finishing each other’s sentences, sharing confidences and trust in one another. Hans had a kind of immediate and spontaneous courage that fired Herbert up, and in the past they had goaded each other into doing increasingly outrageous stunts. But their friendship masked a rivalry and was, in part, an expedient alliance. ‘I know that I am greedy,’ says Herbert, ‘but Hans is endlessly greedy. I always said that, if you let him, he empties the buffet without caring about other people.’ Hans remembers, ‘We decided to be friends rather than enemies.’

Enthusiastically the two forged plans of how they would conquer Vienna together. Herbert used an illustrated portfolio of the HIRN-lein project to gain a place in the graphics department of the Vienna Academy of Applied Arts. Hans was determined to be radical, so chose not to submit any images to the same department. Instead he presented the text of the WORDWAR poems and was summarily rejected.

Despite this set-back, Hans and Herbert were not ready to give up their desire for a common future and Hans moved to Vienna anyway. They were so short of money, though, that they were forced to share a tiny bedsit, which they crammed with their video cameras and computers. They formed another association, Elastic Worldwide 4D, which was little more than the name and their enthusiasm; days and nights were spent taking drugs, making computer animations and talking about their future. And at some point they discovered the Academy’s department of visual media, run by Professor Peter Weibel, a man whose strange role in the seventies art scene they found very appealing.

Weibel had been a member of an art group called the Viennese Actionists, a bizarre descendant of Dada. The Actionists performed some of the most unsavoury and sadomasochistic public performances to have ever been described as art. One member of the group was arrested following a performance during which he sang the national anthem while masturbating. Weibel himself was led around the centre of Vienna by another Actionist, Vallie Export, on a lead as if he were a dog.

Herbert and Hans applied to join Weibel’s department together, but were required to submit their portfolios as individuals. Both boys were offered places and both were delighted. But by the autumn of 1994 this was not enough. They wanted to create a larger vehicle for their ambition, and felt that their combined skills alone were insufficient for them to make it to the big-time. So they decided to gather together a group of like-minded friends.

Herbert’s HIRN-lein collaborators were also interested in doing something else. Alberto continued to study architecture; Thomas, to everyone’s surprise, had enrolled at law school, but felt uncomfortable with his conservative colleagues; Juri was still an apprentice electrician and was desperate to give it up.

Herbert also got in touch with a couple of other friends, who had lent a hand at the beginning of HIRN-lein: Peter, a singer and charmer, and Franco, a keyboard player and guitarist, both of whom used computers to make and record music. Aged fourteen the pair and Herbert had founded their first club, the Gesellschaft für professionelle Amiga-Anwendung (GPA) – the Society for the Professional Use of the Amiga – to feed a shared enthusiasm for Amiga computers.

The Amiga computer was released in June 1985. The lineage of the computers dominating the market at that time could ultimately be traced back to the telegraph; the user could communicate only in letters and numerals, typing in complicated commands that would appear on the monochrome screens. By contrast Amiga was the first truly multimedia machine, with capabilities for sound, moving images and colour. At the launch Blondie’s Debbie Harry sang along to one. The computers were marketed under the tag line ‘Only Amiga Makes it Possible’; even Andy Warhol was said to own one.

The Amiga was never very popular but did develop a cult following. In a forerunner of today’s free-software movement, Amiga enthusiasts created an entire set of publicly available software which they distributed via bulletin-board systems and through small-advertisement sections in the back of magazines. And, in the mid-1980s in Switzerland, Herbert and his friends Peter and Franco jumped on the bandwagon. They produced a regular fanzine for their pro-Amiga society and recruited hundreds of members from around Europe – mostly from behind the Iron Curtain, where kids were desperate for contact with the computer magazines and software of the West. The society eventually disbanded, but the three boys remained friends.

While the others were provoking Zürich with HIRN-lein, Peter and Franco had set off on a pilgrimage to the heartland of world rave-culture: Manchester. The place was engulfed by the latest, ecstasy-fuelled dance phenomenon – Newsweek even splashed its cover with the city and its clubs, under the title ‘Madchester’. Peter and Franco had gone there thinking that it would be the perfect proving ground for their band, SuperSex, but they landed in the most violent part of the city, Moss Side. They met a lot of musicians, but nobody really understood why they had come. ‘We wanted to feel like pop stars – at least for a couple of months,’ remembers Franco. They finally ran out of money and their immigration status became perilous. Back in Zürich, both were only too happy to hear from Herbert.

In the early autumn of 1994, Herbert sent an invitation to his chosen friends, requesting their attendance at a meeting in the Swiss resort of Weggis on Lake Lucerne. Herbert titled the invitations ‘The Company – The Family’ and outlined his and Hans’s ideas for possible collaboration. The front of the invitation asked, ‘Fun, money and the new world?’ On the back was the icon of an attaché case in front of an emerging and radiating sun, in the centre of which was a dollar symbol.

The Magnificent Seven – Herbert, Alberto the brainy architecture student, Juri the shy hacker, Thomas the muscled law student, Peter and Franco the musicians, and Hans the radical poet – piled into two cars and drove the two hours from Zürich to Weggis. A century previously, Weggis had been an opulent resort that had played host to royalty and celebrity. It was also the place where Hans Arp, one of the founders of Dada, had come to break away from the tradition of representational art.

Amid an alpine landscape of old farmhouses, stables and orchards, the location for the meeting was an eyesore of a seventies concrete apartment-building. The borrowed apartment might in another time have been the location of a family holiday – happy snaps taken on the long balcony, the snow-capped mountains as backdrop.

As the boys rolled out their sleeping bags and cracked open beers, they were still uncertain as to what was about to happen. Their motivations and aspirations were a confused desire for fame amalgamated with a determination for political change and a belief in the power of art. All seven of them shared a rebellious sensibility, wanting to poke fun at and denounce the overbearing and monotonous tone of the society in which they lived. They all hoped that this meeting would produce something new and innovative that would further their collective anarchistic take on the world. More than anything, they hoped they could find a way to control their own destinies, to save themselves from dull, office-bound careers. Like young men the world over, they were also in search of visceral excitement and both emotional and geographic adventure. As Herbert puts it, ‘All of us were extremely greedy – for excitement, for drugs, for success.’

For a week they sat around the dining-room table in the holiday apartment and deliberated about their future. Everyone had been asked to prepare a paper to present to the others about their special interests and aspirations. Herbert submitted his thoughts about commercial sponsorship. Hans spoke about corporate identity; he admired Andy Warhol and the way he had used the aesthetic of commercial art to satirise and celebrate advertising. Peter, the plastic pop-boy, and Franco, his tall charming collaborator, talked about music and the use of multimedia, and about their desire to be pop stars, like David Bowie, the Sex Pistols or Madonna. Alberto lectured about Archigram, a 1960s collective of architects who became famous for their visions of ‘plug-in cities’.

The arduous meetings lasted for up to eighteen hours a day. The atmosphere was combative and exhausting. ‘We were searching for ideas, but it was no fun at all,’ Peter recalls. ‘The process of creating a group with these people who are so different was very strenuous.’ For Alberto, the very impossibility of agreement was the purpose. ‘It was a test, whether we could manage to spend one week together. It had a symbolic character,’ he recalls. Herbert taped all the meetings with a cheap video camera, convinced that they would later have some historical value – and because they all wanted a record of them in case arguments broke out in the future about what had been agreed.

The group acknowledged that, in this ‘multimedia’ world, becoming ‘pop stars’ or just being ‘artists’ would not necessarily guarantee their success. They spent hours discussing their collective view that the world was undergoing a ‘multimedialisation’ – by which they meant that the separate disciplines of text, images and sound were collapsing together, since all now relied to a greater or lesser degree on computers. The co-operation between artists of different media was required. They saw the success of manufactured boy-bands and avant-garde art groups as a demonstration of the need for some kind of collaboration. Also they had all witnessed the power of their combined forces in the clubs that Herbert had so avidly formed in previous years: the HIRN-lein, the Society for the Professional Use of the Amiga and – to a lesser degree – Elastic Worldwide 4D.

Instead of a club they decided to form a corporation. Says Juri, ‘We were kids who pretended we were doing business.’ Previous generations might have blanched at such a commercial take on youth rebellion. But this group felt no guilt. Capitalism dominated the world and had just ‘won’ the Cold War; the Berlin Wall had crumbled only a few years before. Indeed, brands – of sneakers, in fashion and music – were often the heroic icons of the moment. ‘We were fascinated by multinational corporations – millions of people, one name, one brand. Like Sony,’ says Alberto, who especially admired anything Japanese.

For these young men it was as if there was no alternative to ‘a company’ as an engine of ideas, cultural change and defiant rebellion. The bickering, political correctness of the Old Left in the squat and in the radical Anna Göldin-Gymnasium was hardly a compelling alternative. Indeed it was clear that the furthering of their opinions would be better done by creating a corporation and a brand than by employing the outdated and singular methods of music, art or literature. This was how to triumph in the nineties.

It was as if they were going to turn on its head the behaviour of big-brand corporations that ‘steal’ the cool of rebel music and the élan of street fashion for marketing their burgers, sneakers and clothes. As a lyric of Peter’s favourite band, Chumbawamba, said, ‘They think it is funny turning rebellion into money’. Now Herbert and his friends were going to steal from the power of the dominant corporate ideal and turn it to their own defiant ends. And if it could make some kind of profit too, then all the better.

The boys set out to codify this ‘just do it’ philosophy into the constitution of their corporation. But they could not finally do away with the collectivist ideology employed by the protesters and squatters. They agreed that on the inside they were to be a collective, that no one would have any hierarchical power over any other, that everything was to be agreed by democratic vote. Once a rule was agreed it would be followed like a corporate diktat, and policed with determined and aggressive diligence. The first rule to be instituted was that no one was allowed to eat during meetings – it was considered ‘unprofessional’.

Despite this theoretical agreement, in practice Herbert exerted his influence. ‘He was very much in the centre of the group because he established the rules,’ remembers Franco. ‘He was the only one that still had energy at the end of the day, when everybody else was totally exhausted. These were the moments where his opinion got accepted by the rest of the group.’

Since part of the group would be living in Vienna and the others in Zürich, they also discussed their modus operandi. They felt that they were in need of what they called a ‘virtual office-system’. Juri, the hacker, suggested that they might use the Internet rather like a special kind of phone or fax machine, for swapping information – just a boring utility. Like most of the rest of the world, the others had little idea what the Internet was. By 1994, the Internet still had a comparatively small number of people connected to it, and the majority of those in the backwaters of the scientific-research community, in the corporate offices of Silicon Valley, or in localised enclaves, like the rave scene in San Francisco.

Juri knew his way around the Internet, but it was far from simple. The software that was used, such as it was, had been written inside the academic computer-science community and was not really intended for the average home-user. Getting online was hard in itself, and asked for dogged determination. Modems were expensive and their installation involved the typing in of many seemingly random and complicated series of numbers and letters, user names, and passwords. Mistyping meant failure to connect, with no friendly error-message – often just a blank screen. The difficulty of the logging-on process cloaked a uniquely powerful network that was about to leap into the public consciousness.

The network’s success owes much to one man, Jon Postel. By 1994, he had twenty years’ experience – first as a graduate student and eventually as a professor – writing and editing a number of key documents that formed the foundations of the Internet. These described how computers would be able to communicate with each other. The Internet is not so much a radical new technology but rather a set of brilliantly written rules that computer scientists call Standards. These rules are consistently applied by all computers across the network; without a set of Standards computers live on the Tower of Babel, unable to speak to each other because they do not share a common language. Like the internationally agreed size for cargo containers, or the regulations of the Universal Postal Union, Internet Standards are not especially complicated – but when the network grew large and ubiquitous it became an extraordinarily powerful way of trading information.