Should You Buy Captain Crunch's Book?
(Original)
Legendary hacker's book was #metoo'd on Kickstarter. Now he's selling through Indiegogo. Should you buy it?
That is the questions I will attempt to answer with this review. To date, the only review of the text that I can find online is a paid placement with a professional review company used by publishers. To that end, it is my hope that this article will clue you into who Captain Crunch is, if you don't know already, and to answer any questions about how his book relates to the recent allegations against him, if you do. I also hope to provide enough information about both the social moral context in which his tale and book publishing take place, and enough technical information about the text itself, that you can decide if you are comfortable supporting his Indiegogo campaign, which is currently the only way to receive a non-review copy. I am working from an advance press version of the book, so minor textual differences may exist in the published work.
Captain Crunch is an archetypal American Anti-Hero, having lived long enough, while famous enough, to see his own reflection blink in the mirror of public opinion. He was forged in the crucible of Cold War nuclear bomb tests. Literally. As a child he suffered radiation burns to his arms and face, from the fireball of a Nevada-desert bomb test. The same explosion caused an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) which completely melted the wiring of the RV in which he was traveling at the time, killing it dead in the middle of a desolate stretch of highway.
All of a sudden, the twilight turned into the brightest day I have ever seen. The light was so bright I had to shield my eyes. It was a fierce light, kind of blue, and extraordinarily bright. I could even see the bones in my hand, like an x-ray. The heat generated by it burned my arm and I had to pull it in. I noticed that the power lines were glowing red hot, as well as some of the barbed wire fences along the road. The camper died instantly and wouldn't start, so we were stuck. Luckily, we were facing the blast, so the shockwave that hit a minute or so later didn't knock us off the road. It arrived as a wall of dust rushing toward us. The wind nearly blew the camper over and skewed it into a weird position. We believe the wheels were actually lifted off the ground, since it wasn't sitting in the same place as when the engine died.
After the dust settled, we realized the radio was also not working. Nothing electrical was working. No lights, no radio, no ignition. My arm had started to blister. We had no choice but to sit there until someone could come and rescue us, which eventually happened about four or five hours later after they reopened the road. One of the first cars that we saw pulled off the road and gave us some assistance. We looked at the engine and noticed burned rubber all over from the ignition wires. They had melted.
I call him Captain Crunch (unabbreviated, unlike the cereal) because that is the handle under which he is most widely known. His government name is John T. Draper, and he's a child of the military industrial complex of the United States of America. His father was in the military, and so was the friend's father who was driving the RV that fateful day, when they just happened to be inside the blast radius, the last car to start down the remote desert highway before the Army closed it.
The origin of his moniker is widely known in hacker mythos, and simple to summarize. He met some blind folk who had determined how to "hack" the telephone system, and they showed him how to do it with a whistle that came in a box of Cap'n Crunch® cereal (note the abbreviation, and U.S. registered trade mark symbol). As Draper recounts it in the book:
A few days later, Denny [Draper's phreaking mentor] called me again and said he was on a conference line, a kind of party line that could accommodate about eight people. Denny and Jim [another blind Phreak] were on there of course, and they introduced me to another two, JD and Bill Acker. I began to realize there was more to these guys than I first thought. They were a connected and organized group, and seemed to be inviting me to join ... we talked about what my 'handle' should be. Most people had just chosen their first name and city, like Denny San Jose or Bill from New York. Well, John San Jose was already taken, so I said, 'How about Captain Crunch?' They thought it was pretty funny, since I wasn't that good at using the whistle, but the name stuck.
Indeed, it did stick. The subsequent Esquire article would cement it in the public anecdotal consciousness forever. It also might be the first instance of a true "online pseudonym" in a social network environment. If so, it's just one of many firsts for which The Crunchman, as he also sometimes styles himself, can take credit.
I could here go into a considerable list of the innovations Draper can claim credit for, and it would eat up considerable word count, but a simple retelling of the book itself is not the purpose of this review. Suffice it to say that he, more than any other human being alive today, could be considered the epicenter of the online world. He stands, certainly, in the pantheon of hackers, head-and-shoulders above anyone else who ever got caught, and had their exploits exploited in print. Or, rather, he is the giant shoulders upon which all the great technological genius playboys of our time do stand. Literally. With a bodybuilder's physique and a homeless surfer's fashion sense, he is a nerd out of his own time, in more ways than one.
However, the level of genius that allows one to operate on Draper's level does not translate into easy reading for the lay-reader. Thankfully, the book is not simply an uninterrupted block of Draper's own screeds, but rather something of a collage, assembled by a close friend, of narratives from different people who have known Draper, interspersed with a lot of hard-core Draper. I say hard-core having studied analog electronics at a university level, and having worked as a tech journalist for twenty years patiently explaining amazing technical innovations to people who refuse to read anything over a grade five level. Draper does not embrace such limitations, especially when bragging about how he constantly improved upon everything Woz designed. He seems to presume that the reader must know as much as he does about electrical circuit design, or at least as much as Woz does, and simply writes it out precisely as he thinks it. Given my background, I found it both refreshing, and also impenetrable. Some sections would have benefited greatly (from a readability point of view) by the inclusion of actual diagrams, as the concepts being communicated are quite abstruse.
Watching his friend's dad's RV's wiring disintegrate in a nuclear flash had more than just a painful physiological effect on Draper. It also evolved his thinking. The EMP effect was completely unknown to the public at the time, and the event seems to have infected Draper's young mind. His brother relates that Draper would beg, borrow and steal all the batteries he could (as they were quite expensive at the time, especially for young boys) and then short them out with bits of wire, causing the wire to smolder and burn. This seems a direct antecedent of the wire burning he experienced inside the EMP zone. This fascination with electricity would drive him into the arms of the Army, where he would specialize in radar maintenance and live out his martial tenure in Alaska and other radar-dependent installations across the American hegemony. Victims of "Montauk Boy" programming mention exposure to high-power radar effects as one of the conditioning tools used by the CIA (Montauk is a radar station in New York) but the book's discussion of radar base life seem the complete opposite of that: Total boredom.
All that happened in the ancient past, however, and the point of this review is to critique the book through a thoroughly modern lens; in light of the #metoo movement, and specifically a recent article by Buzzfeed's Kevin Collier
The article alleges that Draper uses hacker conventions to prey on young men (and implies boys, but doesn't support that implication with any evidence.) It caused quite a sensation in the hacker community when it published, with several hacker conventions agreeing to ban Draper, apparently at the behest of the reporter and innuendo alone. It just happened to come out two weeks prior to the close of the Kickstarter campaign funding the publication of Draper's book.
Immediately after bringing up Harvey Weinstein (a rapist) and Roy Moore (a pedophile,) the article asserts that "Draper's actions were well known to at least a core of people who had regular contact with him." In a sense this is true. My own relationship with Draper began less than a month before the article was published, and I did receive one warning from the community.
Draper refused to comment on the allegations when contacted by Buzzfeed, but did give a later interview to The Daily Dot:
"I apologize if my exercise program caused anyone to feel uncomfortable in any way. That was never my intention," Draper told the Daily Dot in a video-call interview. "If something was perceived as sexual or creepy in any way, that is one thing. But there was nothing intentionally or explicitly sexual towards anyone."
Draper said these "energy workouts" were an "applied kinesiology exercise" taught to him in 1990 by a team of Californian medical professionals to help him cope with the pain and immobility caused by a difficult spinal injury. The practice of applied kinesiology is an alternative - and scientifically disputed - chiropractic therapy for muscle strengthening and stimulation. Draper claims it helped him, and he became an advocate of the practice.
"It was a series of techniques, which I loosely called 'energy blockage removal,'" he said. "It consisted of muscle stimulation using applied kinesiology, interspersed with traditional exercises such as squats and push-ups, with weight applied, either by carrying weights if there are any available, or if the friends had enough leg strength, carrying my bodyweight, or vice versa until I was no longer physically able."
While denying they were a ruse to engage in nonconsensual sexual contact, Draper acknowledged that he may have become erect while performing some of the energy workouts, which reportedly involved leg massages and jumping on the participant's back.
Draper refused, via a spokesperson, to respond to any questions from BuzzFeed regarding the allegations. In an apparent attempt to clear his name, Draper's team insisted on speaking to the Daily Dot for approximately 45 minutes about his medical status before allowing the interview with Draper to proceed.
As the administrator of the Facebook group "Phrack Magazine" I was responsible for mediating a group that quintupled in membership over the course of about 2 months. I accomplished this by inviting several guest moderators, including infamous hacker jailbird Barrett Brown, "Godwin's Law" coiner Mike Godwin and, when a friend introduced me, John "Captain Crunch" Draper.
Needless to say, his appointment was a huge coup for the Phrack group and its readers. Draper is responsible for, if not inventing phreaking, at least popularizing it, and Phreaking (along with Hacking and Anarchy) is the magazine's foundation. Although the magazine is old, dating back to 1985, Draper is much, much older. The original article about him, which he considers the root of many of his current problems, was published by Esquire Magazine in 1971.
Prior to working with him at Phrack, the contents of that article were really all I knew about him, other than his popularity. When I had to set up entry questions for the group, I polled the membership, and the overwhelming majority of members voted for "Who is Captain Crunch?" to be the main challenge question for new users.
Once I announced his place on the moderation team, I received the following messages from a former Phrack Magazine editor and member of the moderation group:
That was the only warning that I, as a member of the community working with Draper, received, and I filed it with all the other unsubstantiated rumors I hear as a tech lifestyle reporter. It's true that I was bedazzled by the glamour of his celebrity, as he was, in a sense, someone who I had modeled my whole life after. I had a massive pre-existing mental image of him, as evidenced by a conversation I had with an old hacking friend from my youth at the time:
As this was before the Buzzfeed article, the sexual allegations didn't even register in my perception of him. I want to like him. Without this guy, there would be no Apple, and he has the same damn problems with their crummy touch screens I do. I thought it was hilarious.
The Buzzfeed article delved into Draper's relationship with Apple, stating that Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak told them that Steve Jobs once told him that Draper asked Jobs to sit on Draper's back, and this was "out of the ordinary," although it's unclear if that quote is Woz's take on the incident, or Jobs' take, as the quotation is tightly-cut and illegibly placed in a sentence referring to both men.
The article states that "In 1971, Draper showed his design to two fans, Jobs and Wozniak, who, with Draper's blessing, began selling an improved version. As Jobs said in 1994, the product was integral to the company. 'I don't think there would have ever been an Apple Computer had there not been blue boxing.'"
This statement handily imputes, via the unimpeachable words of a dead man, that Draper was the "third partner" in the nascent Apple corporation, providing the wisdom and inspiration for the tech behemoth. In truth the two Steves did not have his blessing when they began selling a device based on his design. If Buzzfeed had bothered to ask Woz about that, he could have told them about it, as he does in the forward to Draper's book:
Eventually, Jobs suggested selling Blue Boxes in the dorms at Berkeley, and we did this a lot. I kind of regret this because I helped others cheat Ma Bell. I took care to always pay for my own long-distance calls, and to only use the Blue Box to explore the phone system. For example, I could connect to a London operator and convince her that I was a New York test board operator and get her to connect me, via satellite, to Tokyo. Then I'd have the Tokyo operator route my call to the phone in the next dorm room and when you spoke in one phone, you'd hear it a second later in the other.
Draper also recounts this meeting, and the ensuing chicanery on the part of Jobs, later in the book. The two college boys, inspired by the Esquire article about "Captain Crunch," had managed to reach him by calling a radio station where he worked, and had invited him to come see the Blue Box that they had built using information from Bell technical documents and the article. Draper takes up the tale here, after teaching them how to build a proper analog box, dismissing Woz's digital prototype as unsafe to use:
I was adamant that they understood the importance of reducing failed call attempts when using Woz's box. These attempts also dropped trouble cards at the switching equipment, identifying the bad trunk's location and the call's origin. Enough of these will cause unwanted attention and it could take as little as fifteen to thirty minutes to identify where the call was coming from. It was a dangerous game to play and could lead to some serious visits from federal agents.
Don't get me wrong, Woz was cautious in his own way. He had even jumpered his phone to another line on campus as a precaution against being located. After I explained all of my concerns to him, he said, "I want to make an overseas call, but I don't know who to call." After thinking for a moment, he said, "I want to call the pope.'
I said, "Okay, why not? I don't see any reason why you would want to call him, but I guess you have your own reasons."
After about five tries or so, we were able to get the Vatican online and eventually were connected to an English-speaking member of the Vatican staff. He said the pope was sleeping and unavailable, as it was four-thirty a.m. in Rome. I handed the phone to Woz, who said, "This is Henry Kissinger, I must speak with the pope and I want to confess immediately for all my sins." Even though Woz was very insistent and somewhat convincing, they refused to wake up the pope. He really cracked me up, and we instantly became lifelong friends.
We laughed hard afterwards, but I felt it necessary to emphasize again my warning about the quality of the tones his Blue Box generated. He assured me that he was not interested in using the box to make free long-distance calls, but was more interested in the technology and novelty of it. Steve Jobs sat listening and watching.
Woz didn't give me any indication that they were going to build and sell them, but Jobs, being the entrepreneur of the bunch, had his mind firmly focused on the possible profits.
When I next met up with them and they told me their plans, I was totally against the idea, especially with the issues their box had. Woz thought I was being overly paranoid, but after a few months, I think he realized I had good reasons for taking so many precautions. Although he heeded my warnings to a degree, they ended up selling them to people not completely clued in to the situation, and hence a few of them were eventually caught.
I was furious about the whole debacle, but it pretty much changed history. They were selling Blue Boxes for about $150 each, and not only did the profits help put them through college, some of the money was used to make twenty-five PC boards for the first personal computer ever made, the Apple I.
Draper, far older and wiser at the time, claims he was far more serious about not selling illegal devices. The book documents, at some great length, how he had been hounded by state, municipal and federal cops for his tech aptitude and unconventional lifestyle, especially after the international attention that Esquire called down upon his quasi-legal pursuits. He'd already been to jail twice at that point, and his stays had not been good for him. Draper states that:
It all started when this guy, "Al Gilbertson" (let's stick with his Esquire article pseudonym), got popped using a homemade Blue Box. He was making them and selling them to organized criminals. Bookmakers mostly. There were basically two ways of using the box to access an internal trunk call. One was safe and one wasn't. You can probably guess what happened.
My phreaker friends knew how Gilbertson had messed up and one of them somehow got his phone number. Wanting to be helpful, one friend called him to explain how he'd made a stupid error and what he should have done. Gilbertson didn't take it too well, and was somewhat bitter about being busted. He happened to know a certain Esquire journalist named Ron Rosenbaum, and with the intention of getting back at the phone company for busting him, he wanted to get blue-boxing information out to the public.
Obviously, Rosenbaum wouldn't be able to give the exact frequencies without having the phone company sue Esquire, but everything else would be laid out on a silver platter for any would-be phreakers to take advantage.
The news came to me that Rosenbaum was in the process of writing an article about phone phreaking. I had his number, so I called him and asked about this article, and who he had talked to so far. It turns out the blind kids had met him on a conference party line and gave him the whole spiel. They juiced me up as this superhero because I had built my own Blue Box.
A lot of what Ron Rosenbaum wrote depicted me as an underground hero, driving around in my VW bus, sneaking a cable out of my car and zapping calls all over the world. I actually didn't do that very often. Other lore told by the blind kids included me tapping my girlfriend's line to find out if she was true to me. This wasn't entirely true, as my philosophy was to never violate personal privacy-unless I heard the authorities were onto me.
This incongruent fame would haunt Draper from 1971 until this very day, as the same article introduced each new generation of phreaks and hackers to the mythos of Captain Crunch, and as successive rounds of incarceration for petty IP and telephony crimes would extract their vengeance on his ever-more-frail body. By the time he landed in the privileged confines of the Steves' dorm room, he had already had the shit kicked out of him by the system. To whit:
I was transferred from Stroudsburg to Northampton County Prison in Easton, Pennsylvania. There were some pretty nasty people in there and I had to survive, so when asked for some information on how to manipulate the phone company, I gave them a few of the WATS extenders [free phone-call numbers] just to get them off my back. That didn't work out too well, however, after they discovered all the codes had been changed, and a few of their buddies got busted using Blue Boxes. They took it out on me with a baseball bat in the yard, and did some long-lasting damage to my knees and lower back.
After I got out of the infirmary, they put me in isolation, which was fine with me. It kept the thugs off my back while I was preparing my case and corresponding with my yippie friends through an attorney.
The injuries to my back and knees never really healed properly. I still suffer from them today. There was little to no medical services in Northampton, and if you had a toothache, they would just pull the teeth. I asked for an x-ray for my knee and lower back and never got it. I complained to my attorney, but with the money he was being paid, he had little incentive to mention my physical mistreatment in court.
Since I was in isolation for so long, I never had the opportunity to go out in the yard, but there were no exercise opportunities like in Lompoc [another prison] anyway. The prison guards figured they had better control over the prisoners if they didn't get the chance to pump iron. Instead, they got out their aggression fighting each other. It was a zoo, and I never saw the light of day.
I guess I was still one of the lucky ones, since due to my disability, they didn't assign me any jobs, and since I was in there awaiting trial, and wasn't considered a permanent inmate, I was allowed to have a black and white TV in my cell, which Andy had brought in. My attorney worked out a deal where I could walk around the tiers when the others were in the yard, but the weather was cold and damp, and my back hurt constantly.
It really didn't get better at all until I was allowed back in the general population and met a guy who had been a personal trainer. He helped me get the strength back in my legs at least.
Now, this is significant, because it's the only place in the book (narrated by Draper's friend Craig Wilson Fraser) where Draper speaks personally about the genesis of the "energy blockage removal exercises" that are the core of the Buzzfeed story. Fraser, however, goes into them a little more:
As my weekly visits to Mill Valley [Draper's Home] continued, I started noticing things about being with John. Several times, I noticed a policeman looking toward us from a distance, and I always had this feeling that John's well-meaning but intense energy was attracting more attention than I had ever felt.
His intense energy was also misconstrued by many people over the years, when it came to certain exercise techniques he liked to share. Back in the 1990s, and apparently long before that, almost everyone who talked to John for more than five minutes would be told that he could "increase their physical strength by ten to twenty per cent." The demographic of people who talk to John for longer than five minutes being mostly nerdy males who have scarcely seen a locker room.
The exercise techniques, which he loosely called "energy blockage removal," were shown to him by a sports physiotherapist with an affiliation to the San Francisco 49ers, and consisted of muscle stimulation using applied kinesiology, interspersed with traditional exercises such as squats and push-ups. These were done while carrying John, literally, and him militarily barking out orders to focus on other body movements rather than on the strain of the working muscle. It was a very odd experience, but helped me gain some strength. I repeated it multiple times in the first year of knowing John, and still use similar techniques on myself when exercising.
John may have had some selfish reasons for so avidly pursuing it with folks, as the relief he got from being lifted that way would ease his chronic back pain for at least a day, and also, as with most people, he needs to feel valued. So, yeah, he pretty much suggested it to everyone he met.
Scores of individuals I've talked to gained enough from his routine to make it palatable and continued. Dozens of others tried it once and thought nothing of it, but a handful felt physically wrecked by the experience. He wasn't light.
A few even said they felt infringed upon, but I can't help thinking those people were more embarrassed by the surfacing of their own fears of intimacy, or that they felt conned somehow by John's alluring claims. I get it. He can come off as creepy or at least weirdly intense, he's not the cleanest-smelling guy on the block, and the noises of relief he makes during the exercise sound pretty primal. He also has a limited, childlike perspective when it comes to reading the discomfort or signals of others. The first time I tried it, my drug-fueled paranoia went through the roof that it was about to turn sexual in some way, but of course nothing of that nature ever occurred. Over the years I've shared humorous anecdotes with many others who had the same initially paranoid experience, but there are also a few who said they were so "creeped out" by him (or their own paranoia), that they "fled for their lives."
I would suggest those few individuals might have been unable or unwilling to work through their own personal issues of physical contact with another male, and chose to interpret and relay the experience in a nefarious way to save themselves tackling their own inner demons. It's a pity. Those unfavorable stories and misunderstandings have created much rumormongering and negative cognitive bias in certain circles, and unfortunately John's reputation suffers to this day.
Fraser repeatedly mentions Draper's back pain throughout the book, as it appears to be a source of much anecdote:
After having a valet begrudgingly park the dirty Toyota, we made our way to the buffet, only to find huge lines of tourists with the same idea. What happened next was the first time I saw John at his fantastically shameless best. On seeing the lines of people, he immediately marched up to a courtesy phone, picked it up and bellowed, "I can't wait in this line! I have a bad back! How can I be expected to wait here?" The rest of us stood there in astonishment. It was beyond embarrassing. Actually, it was so far beyond that I didn't feel anything. We all just silently followed John and the manager, who had instantly appeared. He took us to the front of the line apologetically and bowed off. I thought he was going to give us free passes too, but no such luck. John started piling soft food on his plate with a sly smile. He had hacked the casino buffet.
Draper peppers the text with anecdotes about his own back pain as well, such as "I wanted to get down to Cuidad Juarez in Mexico to visit a pharmacy for some back-pain medications," and "After a few days into the work, my old lower-back injury flared up worse than ever, and I had to use a wheelchair for the last few days of our week in Bangkok."
Fraser also includes two narrative sections from one other source familiar with the exercises. The following lengthy quotation is from Noble Ape author Tom Barbalet, and relates his own experience of Draper's first visit to Australia. I have decided to post it in full (instead of truncating it with ellipses at the behest of my editor) because it captures the outsider awe surrounding Draper so completely, and mentions him often enough that cutting out the few sentences not about him seems more likely to increase confusion than decrease it. It is a fine distillate of the book's entire 150-page narrative:
I had just started university and for a curious set of reasons, I was living on campus at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, in a dorm house run by nuns. You have to understand that in 1995, the Internet was really new and there were no photos of Crunch online. In fact, for the longest time, my photos and interview were the only internet-age documentation of him. I became a source and was periodically contacted by journalists to use my photographs and talk to me about Crunch. There were at least three book projects that were pitched to me about him.
For me, Crunch was the person in technology I had to meet. The Esquire article on his work redefined my life. I found it on a friend's Amiga in the Jolly Roger set of text files. I remember printing it out on an old dot-matrix printer at age thirteen and binding it with string. I carried it around with me for months until the paper became detached from the string. The Crunch of the Esquire article represented the Robin Hood or Peter Pan of technology. He embodied the kinds of technical improvements of large engineering systems that required mischief to explore and understand. That was a boyhood me in Australia. Crunch was my tech hero.
In 1995, even though I was only eighteen at the time, I had written a novel about the Australian technology underground, Field of Chaos, and I was fascinated to see how Crunch fitted in with the local tech community. There was some discussion with him and others about holding a rave in his honor in Canberra. Although I had never put on a rave, I knew a number of DJs and promoters and had floated the idea with them for a pretty flat response. Crunch had linked up with a group called Clan Analogue in Sydney, who I knew and who had created some curious wah-wah dance music. While I was still planning the rave in honor of Crunch, I asked him to leave a voicemail, which years later, I can still recite verbatim:
"The Crunchman here. The man on a mission. And the mission is to spread as much love and energy as I possibly can: that's my mission.
So come check me out at the next rave. And I'm looking forward to raving my ass off!"
Crunch arrived at my dorms with a lanky fellow and a guy who claimed to be a hash smuggler from the Emerald Triangle (Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia). Crunch immediately wanted a hot breakfast. Thankfully, the dorms served pancakes on the weekend and John went back for seconds, thirds, and fourths. I had a small crew as well.
Crunch being in town had drawn a few of my friends together. After the pancakes, he had one driving purpose: to perform his energy-blockage removal on me and many of my friends. The energy blockage removals turned out to be an introduction to Crunch that appears to have occurred with many. For me it was about an hour of doing pushups, squats, and stretches with Crunch hanging on my back the entire time. Not figuratively hanging on my back, but literally hanging on my back like some kind of counter-culture Yoda barking commands and making comments about various physical attributes I had.
The whole process left me a little stunned and I infamously noted to a friend following my experience that it was "invigorating' before Crunch performed the same technique on my friend.
Crunch at the time said he didn't sleep. This was a big part of his general rap. He had apparently elevated himself to a higher level of consciousness while the rest of us schmucks were locked into six to eight hours per night. Not the Crunchman.
He spent two days with me that visit and while there were a number of unique experiences through that time, one that I found completely unexplainable was somewhere through the first day when he and his posse went into the center of Canberra with one instruction: do not bring back a particular hacker. Do anything with your adventures but please don't return with one hacker who had been particularly troublesome and had called in death threats on my mother and young brothers. My mother was a formal woman but had splendidly once picked up the phone after only a couple of rings and told this individual in no uncertain terms to fuck off.
Canberra at the time had a population of 250,000. This troublesome hacker had an unlisted number. Within two hours, Crunch and his posse had returned with this one hacker. He was gushing greatly that I had sent out Crunch looking for him and thanked me for making sure that Crunch found him. I had no problems recommending the energy-blockage removal technique.
By the second day, the effects of the energy blockage removal was leaving me the little worse for wear and I left Crunch with a friend of mine to go and find some world-renowned Canberra cannabis. The difficulty in finding cannabis on a university campus is a constant of nature in the order of seconds. I guess I was happy for any kind of break. After lying down for about ten minutes, I was drawn to loud screams coming from a public open-air space in the dorms. Crunch was curled in a fetal position screaming at the top of his lungs that he had been poisoned, as someone had spiked his cannabis with the dreaded tobacco. As I was walking down some stairs to see the commotion, one of the nuns coming up the stairs told me in no uncertain terms that Crunch needed to go. After the fact, I heard accounts of Crunch offering blotter paper to anyone interested including, it would seem, the nuns.
Crunch was sent on his way with his posse to find another place to stay. This seemed to be relatively common for Crunch's first visits. Two things of note occurred afterwards. First, the energy-blockage removal technique provided a lactic acid build up that rendered both me and my friend paralyzed after three days, which was interesting. Second, as he no longer slept, I received a couple of calls from Crunch asking after a pair of shorts he left behind at roughly three a.m. and four a.m., respectively, over the following week. I had washed the shorts and was wondering what I should do with the artifacts. Even after a wash, they still had a smell that reminded me of the energy-blockage removal work only a few days earlier. It turns out that Crunch had sewn the blotter paper into the shorts. After the wash, the shorts were less important.
Aside from Clan Analogue, Crunch also travelled to Adelaide for some time. I was born in Adelaide and travelled there at least once a year to visit my family. Through these visits, I also befriended people in the tech community in Adelaide as there was substantial overlap with the rave community. I remember getting an Adelaide rave video a few months after Crunch returned to the U.S. to see some historical filming of him. The video featured three or so raves. Moving through the dancers, Crunch appeared within the crowds of a couple of raves. He was always dancing in his own space. When the camera came near, a large toothless grin crept across his face. He seemed a little out of place within the mass of teenagers and twenty-somethings, but he had his own style. Crunch's intense energy was pretty far removed from the relaxed technology scene in Australia. He surfed a number of couches through his time in Australia and spent a bit of time staying in the notorious Kings Cross section of Sydney. Many found his intensity exhausting.
A community formed of people with whom Crunch had stayed. They exchanged information about their pet cats that were never quite right again and countless accounts of energy-blockage work. Although I was unable to attend, I was invited to a large party that was held in Sydney shortly after Crunch left Australia. People came together to tell their stories of the Crunchman and the message he bought from the San Francisco Bay Area.
Drugs, as you might imagine, play a large role in this book. So if you like biography with open drug references, this might just be the book for you. According to Fraser, "John has a nickname for getting high, which nobody ever understands: 'Executing a 9N instruction.' 9N is machine code on the 8800 microprocessor for 'get high resistance pair.'"
Babalet('s blog) is also quoted later in the book, describing another interaction with Draper, this time in Las Vegas, and years later:
We went out for a meal at Denny's with Crunch's new friend, Trevor. A really nice fellow who at twenty-two was already an Iraq vet. When Crunch went to the restroom, Trevor noted Crunch had done one of his back stretches within about five minutes of meeting him. Ah, deja vu. I had injured my back, so when Crunch requested a back stretch, I wasn't aable to accommodate.
And that's it. There's no other mention of the energy blockage technique in the book, no mention of any of the accusers, or further explication of the exercise technique. Clearly the position of the author(s) is that this is not a big deal, just a palliative health procedure that Draper adopted in order to regain use of his legs after a severe prison beating, and one that's been widely misconstrued as sexual by people who are a lot less old and wise than he.
Clearly he is a celebrity, and, as such, one could argue that he has a certain power (glamour?) that attracts young hackers who are thirsty for illicit knowledge and elite associations. He admittedly uses that power to attempt to convince them to spend an hour doing hard exercises with him hanging half-naked and half-erect from their backs. This is, without question, odd.
Should you read his book? Hopefully I've presented enough information for you to know by now. If you are just interested in any salacious details pertaining to the sexual assault allegations against him, well, you needn't bother. They're all right here. If, however, you are interested in understanding the mind of the only Atomic-age internet (anti)hero, you could do worse than to imbibe the tall tale of Captain Crunch.
With extensive edits by Matt Skala of ansuz.sooke.bc.ca.