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The Anarchist Cookbook is what sets you on your path.

You find it at the bottom of the dollar bin at the used bookstore in Bozeman, where you often go to find reading material for Jane, now a teenager. The University of Montana students sell their old books here, and you have located a surprising number of useful texts on the shelves. But today, you find something else entirely, something that turns out to be far more important to you than a dog-eared copy of Organic Chemistry1.

The book has a torn cover and is so flimsy that you almost disregard it, until your eye catches on a word that you find intriguing. Anarchist . You hesitate: You have heard of this book, a glorified pamphlet that was deemed “subversive” by the FBI and CIA when it was first published in the early seventies. “One of the crudest, low-brow, paranoiac writing efforts ever attempted,” the FBI called it. Written as a kind of political stunt, The Anarchist Cookbook had the whole computer community buzzing about it back when you worked at PRI because it contained instructions for rudimentary early telephone hacking, the “phreaking” that Woz and Steve used to employ to make long-distance calls for free.

Of course, you buyit.

Inside, you discover instructions for all kinds of illegal activities. How to engage in hand-to-hand combat, make your own LSD, conduct surveillance, sabotage a car. It’s all written in the most colloquial language, with guidelines easy enough for a teenager to follow. Making tear gas is so simple that anyone can do it, it reads, and then proves itself correct.

But the part that intrigues you the most is Chapter 4: Explosives and Booby Traps. The chapter is illustrated with a drawing of a grizzled anarchist, setting off a cartoon bomb. At first you are fascinated simply by the engineering aspect of bomb-making, the logical mechanics of it appealing to you in the same way that the innards of a computer once did. You assemble a few explosives of your own, because you can; but you aren’t quite sure what to do with them, other than to booby-trap your own escape hatch.

It takes some time for you to return to the introduction of this chapter and realize that there’s a bigger message to be gleaned from this little book . The most heroic word in all languages is Revolution, the section begins. Explosives are one of the greatest tools any liberation movement can have…An explosion can take the shape of hope for a nation of oppressed people.

You know exactly what the people need to be liberated from.

—

Just because you’ve been away from Silicon Valley for more than a decade doesn’t mean you haven’t been paying attention to what’s happening in the world. You’ve watched from the sidelines as computers and their miraculous wonders take up more and more of the real estate in the newspapers and magazines that you read (and later, once you realize it’s a necessary evil, the television news you consume). The same hackers and programmers and engineering Ph.D.s that you once considered your peers are now on the front page of every periodical, lauded as prophets, rich beyond belief. Time magazine declares the computer “Machine of the Year”!

In 1994, you read that nearly a quarter of all households now have personal computers.

Life in the outside world is moving too fast. You feel the upward curve of technology’s progression ascending off the chart—Moore’s Law, that terrifying accelerating equation—and all your alarm bells are going off. You have so much knowledge about where this is all going—you have the counterpoint to the hype that the world seems to currently lack—and it no longer feels right to hide away and let it all happen without you. You need to speak up. To be the Cassandra to everyone else’s Pollyanna.

You try to ignite your revolution with a magazine, Libertaire, only to discover that it’s hard to get people to listen to you if no one is aware that you exist. A pseudonym and a typewriter will only take you so far. Two years in, you have to admit to yourself that you’ve failed.

Meanwhile, the internet has arrived with a bang. The latest iteration of what you were working on so many years ago at Harvard with ARPAnet, but shinier and slicker and more user-friendly. So much more compelling, so much more addictive. It is an immediate sensation. You can feel the doomsday clock ticking off the minutes of humanity’s demise. How is it possible that you are the only person who sees this? Why is everyone so willing to step smilingly off a cliff, never bothering to look down to see what’s below?

And then there’s this:

Jane is nearly a woman now, growing curious about the world beyond your cabin. You had na?vely hoped that she would choose to stay with you here in the woods, protected, safe forever; but the older she gets, the more you come to understand that this was always just a fantasy. One day, you find a cheap pink lipstick hidden inside her sock drawer and you realize that it’s not long before she will try to leave you. And what will happen to her then? The world out there will eat her alive. It will take everything that is pure and beautiful and mindful about her and strip it away, replace it with pop culture and disposable ephemera, infotainment and beauty tips and laugh tracks that telegraph ersatz emotion.

You think of Jane’s eyes, staring blankly at screens, reflecting back only pixels, and you shudder.

And how will she look at you then, after her mind has been poisoned? Once she leaves the cabin, it’s just a matter of time before she finds out everything you’ve hidden from her. And when she does, she will not think that you saved her; she will think that you denied her. You must find a way to make her see, once and for all, why you took her away from all that.

There is only one logical path forward. You have to change the world that she is about to enter, and force it to become the world you know it should be. If no one is paying attention to you now, you have to do something so big that it can’t be ignored.

And that’s when you remember The Anarchist Cookbook. An explosion can take the shape of hope.

You begin to plan to kill people. If the world refuses to wake up to the horrors coming its way, then horror is going to be the only way to jolt it alert. You know that if you succeed with your plan, people will wonder why you did what you did. You’ll need to make it abundantly clear that this was not a sick whim, the act of a psychopath, but a moral necessity for the betterment of mankind. A sacrifice you are making for the greater good. For Jane, yes. But also the children of the future—the Janes yet to come.

And so you begin to imagine a manifesto that will make this all clear.

—

There is one more quote in The Anarchist Cookbook that you think about a lot: Madness creates its own fatal hubris, and will destroy itself; but sometimes it does need a push in the right direction.

The world is mad, you tell yourself.

It’s the world that’s mad, not you.