When_Sysadmins_Ruled_the_Earth

Summary

When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth Forematter: This story is part of Cory Doctorow’s 2007 short story collection “Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present,” published by Thunder’s Mouth, a division of Avalon Books. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license, about which you’ll find more at the end of this file. This story and the other stories in the volume are available at: http://craphound.com/overclocked You can buy Overclocked at finer bookstores everywhere, including Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1560259817/downandoutint-20 In the words of Woody Guthrie: “This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.” Overclocked is dedicated to Pat York, who made my stories better. — Introduction to When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth I’ve changed careers every two or three years ever since I dropped out of university in 1990, and one of the best gigs I ever had was working as a freelance systems administrator, working in the steam tunnels of the information age, pulling cables, configuring machines, keeping the backups running, kicking the network in its soft and vulnerable places. Sysadmins are the unsung heroes of the century, and if they’re not busting you for sending racy IMs, or engaging in unprofessional email conduct it’s purely out of their own goodwill. There’s a pernicious myth that the Internet was designed to withstand a nuclear war; while that Strangelove wet-dream was undoubtedly present in the hindbrains of the generals who greenlighted the network’s R&D at companies like Rand and BBN, it wasn’t really a big piece of the actual engineering and design. Nevertheless, it does make for a compelling scenario, this vision of the sysadmins in their cages aro...