NP: [Wired] Tribute to Hippie Hacker Holland

[Nika Bertram]

...sorry for seeming to be offtopic, but somehow i think this isn't,
because, the way i got to know Wau Holland, he very much seemed to be
sharing and even personifying (both in mind and body) many of Pynchon's
themes and interests: a certain "holistic and encyclopedic" view
on the world, without getting overly paranoid or losing his humour or
playfulness, aswell as his interests in "systems" (and how to irritate,
mock or subvert them) and alternative/hippie culture etc..

I'm sure he will be missed by many. Not only hackers.
He really was one of a rare kind.

"Keep cool, but care." (TP)
nika



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Tribute to Hippie Hacker Holland 
By Steve Kettmann 

8:25 a.m. July 31, 2001 PDT 

BERLIN -- Friends of German hacking legend Wau Holland are planning a 
memorial tribute next Friday at the Hackers at Large 2001 gathering in the 
Netherlands. 

Holland, 49, died Sunday from complications of a stroke he suffered in May. A 
funeral service is planned for Holland's hometown of Marburg in two weeks. 

More than 1,000 people have posted remembrances of the Chaos Computer Club 
co-founder at his website, expressing their regard for the person who never 
stopped challenging others to think creatively. 

"Wau, you were always at least one step ahead of us," reads the text of a 
memorial. "We lament a philosopher, a freethinker, a visionary who conceived 
technology not as an end in itself but as a service for
communication between people. 

"Full of energy and always alert to the authorities, laws and data 
collectors, you have demonstrated the chances and dangers of the information 
age to many people with through your sometimes radical opinions
and activities." 

Holland -- born Herwart Holland-Moritz -- came up with the idea of the Chaos 
Computer Club 20 years ago in an article he wrote for Berlin's famous 
left-wing newspaper Die Tageszeitung. The idea was to
make it easier for large numbers of people to get access to the new medium. 

Steffen Wernery, another CCC co-founder, met him two years later when the 
idea started taking shape. Only a few people showed up for the meeting at a 
Hamburg bookstore. But afterward, Wernery and
Holland had dinner. 

"He gave me great inspiration," Wernery said. "His way of thinking about 
computers, using them in a public way, was something very unusual at that 
time. Only big companies were choosing computers then. No
individuals had them. 

"His idea was that we could use computers for human rights. He had the 
opinion we could use computers to make things transparent and to give power 
to the people. This philosophy interested me." 

Holland, bearded and balding, never turned his back on the style or the 
principles that shaped the protest movement of his generation. 

"He always remembered the hippie times," said veteran journalist Detlef 
Borchers, a contributor to the weekly Die Zeit and other publications. "He 
always wore overalls. In the early times of student revolution, it
was to denote that students were on the workers' side of the movement. And he 
went through all these years, wearing these old-fashioned clothes." 

Holland had strong ideas about how computers could be used -- and how not to 
use them. He thought a hack should have an idea behind it, even a moral 
purpose. 

"He had political and philosophical ideas, and I offered my ability to 
organize," Wernery said. 

Even the first famous CCC hack never would have happened had the German 
postal and telecommunications authority heeded Holland's and Wernery's 
warning that they had found a security hole in the Btx
network. To make their point, the pair hacked into the system using the 
password of the Hamburg savings bank and ran up the equivalent of roughly 
US$50,000 in credit to the CCC account. Then they went to
the media with the story, which caused a major stir in West Germany. 

"Way back in the 1980s, we had a monopoly here with the German Post being a 
very state-governed organization and a very strict one," Borchers said. 

"In those times, I had my first acoustic coupler, and you had to have a 
permit for it. To get that, you had to send in your passport, and a letter 
from another person guaranteeing you are a nice guy and so forth.
In those early times, communication was not free at all." 

Holland worked to change that, Borchers said. 

"In his view, every kind of communication was a liberator of the people to 
get their voice heard," he said. "So he was a technophile with a sense of 
politics. That was missing at those times in Germany. Die
Tageszeitung and the German political scene were very suspicious of 
computers. 

"The Chaos Computer Club had an understanding of being a political 
organization in the fight against the mighty German Bundespost, the yellow 
monster. In these times, thinking about breaking into other
computers was also breaking the monopoly of the Bundespost, so it had a 
political voice." 

But Holland also tried not to take himself too seriously. Borchers recalled 
Holland's television appearances from the early days of the CCC as presenting 
"a very funny image of a hacker" that was dramatically
different than how people in the United States saw hackers at the time. 

"He was always sort of playful," said Christiane Schulzki-Haddouti, a writer 
for the German webzine Telepolis who once had Holland pose on a police boat 
in Hamburg. 

"He was not very much concerned about traditional behavior. He liked to 
provoke and he always tried to look at things from a different angle," 
Schulzki-Haddouti said. "He didn't care whether people followed
him or not. He just said it, and you either followed him or you didn't; and 
if you didn't, it was your fault." 

Whereas other early leaders of the CCC went on to build personal fortunes, 
Holland lived simply. In recent years he was working with young people in the 
former East German city of Jena. 

"He played a very important role in the German Internet scene," 
Schulzki-Haddouti said. "But in my opinion, it's sad that he couldn't 
establish his role in a bit more of an institutional way. But maybe he didn't
want it. In America you find many people who founded things like the Chaos 
Computer Club, and go to conferences, and have a nice office and so forth. He 
didn't have this at all. He had to struggle hard for a
living." 

Added Borchers: "Wau Holland always lived on the alternative side. He 
remained uncompromised. They don't even have money to make a good funeral. 
They are collecting money." 

But Holland always attracted a wide circle of friends and admirers. Doctors 
at the hospital in Bielefeld where he spent his last two months in a coma 
told visitors they had never seen so many people maintaining a
vigil for a patient in a coma. 

"I would say he was more a poet," Schulzki-Haddouti said. "He was a sort of 
living archive of the German Internet scene. He could remember every event, 
and how every idea came from every idea before. It's a
very serious loss. I doubt whether there's anybody else who knows the soul of 
the German Internet scene so well as he did." 

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-- 
Best regards,
 Nika                            www.kahunamodus.de