The L0pht: What I Saw

	A sea of trash wafts across a battered wooden floor.  In an 
antiseptic room that smells of vanished industry, the castoffs of 
corporate elecronics flourish beneath a sea of yesterdays high tech.  
The Vaxen, the behemoths of an age when technocracy was 
centralism, lurk like benevolent lords over an amassed army of dead 
displays and battered boards, all verged on the parralell brinks of 
operation and the trash.  Peering out from the technorubble is the 
occasional active CRT; the occasional signal bursting forth from noise.  
A moto has been developed, half in jest (but then what isn't):  
"Entropy Rules".  It's a double entendre or the technomedia set, 
displaying a brand of love for battered and discarded technology that 
verges on the sexual.  All around are piles and piles and piles; stacks 
of fluff and garbage.
	But not really.  Fluff and garbage canŐt begin to desribe this 
neo-industrial playground.  This fluff and garbage, this TRASH, this is 
the playground of some of the most literate and wel connected 
people that have ever een the light of day.  The discarded garbage of 
old tehnology provides the links, the connections to everything thatŐs 
going on, all that's out there, all that can be done.  It's almost as if 
these broken boards and obsolete machines breed information, breed 
power.  From all the garbage in the world, well, there's all the spare 
prts in the world.  Or that's the way they look at it.  If somebody else 
threw it out, thatŐs their good luck.  This place, vestige as it is from 
another hypertechnical age, is a vacuum for technology.  Every 
broken monitor and melted card seems to breed one that works.  As 
the density of neophyte los grows greater, so does it attract even 
more.
	This place, this non-home home is more than that though.  It's 
a place to chill, a place to party, a place to work: a place to owrship 
the technology that makes up itŐs members hearts and dreams.  The 
members, the initiates, the visitors, these are people who live and 
breathe computers:  who want and need them for all they do, who 
draw from digital devices the strength to do whatever they damned 
well want.  In that sense, then, this is a place of worship.  A 
mannequin sits armless atop a cabinet, wearing a veil and a mock IV: 
"Our Lady of the Vax".  A joke, for sure, but a joke that everybody can 
get into, a joke that breeds other jokes: another of the mock-serious 
half truths that make up the fiber of those who made this place.
	All those things and more.  Worship for the 'technomedia 
prietshood'.  Part workshop, part playhouse. Rave center for the 
socially disinclined.  Last vestige of the smart sleepless.  A place for 
extra storage.  The L0pht, man.  It's got it all.

					     -tfish GO-FORCE! -=RDT Synd.
