CULT OF THE DEAD COW

How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World

By Joseph Menn

Our story begins at the end, at a fund-raiser for Beto O’Rourke. The attendees are drawn from the Bay Area start-up and tech security world and the host is Adam O’Donnell, an early member of the “original hacking supergroup,” the Cult of the Dead Cow. A cow skull hangs in the hallway as a reminder to those familiar with the group’s underground origins — like O’Rourke himself, another early member once known by his handle Psychedelic Warlord. The co-host is Facebook’s chief security officer, Alex Stamos, a “prominent protégé” of the group. At Facebook, we learn, Stamos was “quietly helping” Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

In “Cult of the Dead Cow,” Joseph Menn unspools the history of this group, tracking their evolution from apolitical hobbyists to performance artists and culture jammers attempting to expose security flaws, to human rights and internet freedom advocates and eventually to security advisers for powerful institutions. But first we return to the early days of the group, also known as cDc, when many of the main figures were teenagers. True to the politically fungible countercultural style that has characterized the online world ever since, an ironic riff on “The Anarchist’s Cookbook” appears in the cDc member Kevin Wheeler’s online bulletin board Demon Roach Underground, which also mocked Nancy Reagan’s anti-drugs “Just Say No” campaign. Some brought the influence of fringe culture — “UFOs, secret societies and B movies” — while others shared utopian ideas about a moneyless future society and a libertarian opposition to censorship.

In early discussions about the group’s name, an original member, Brandon Brewer, still a schoolboy, knew that “we wanted it to be weird” and “to thumb our nose at the establishment.” The group’s name and symbol, a cow head with X’s for eyes, was influenced by an iconic industry of Texas, Menn explains, the place where they started out.

Another member, Jesse Dryden, who was also the son of a member of Jefferson Airplane, wanted the group to be shaped by a previous counterculture generation, including phone hackers and the Yippies. Dryden “helped turn cDc into a 1990s successor to the Merry Pranksters,” writes Menn. Dryden also counted as a family friend John Perry Barlow, whom Menn describes as a “freewheeling Grateful Dead lyricist and early fan of online communities who would be a major influence on cDc.” Barlow was also a founder of the libertarian organization the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Dryden helped set up HoHoCon, a hacker conference model that brought together all the different strands emerging in the hacker world and creating greater real-life networks.