Patrick K. Kroupa

Last updated
Patrick Karel Kroupa
Born (1969-01-20) January 20, 1969 (age 55)
Los Angeles, California, USA
NationalityAmerican
Other namesLord Digital
CitizenshipAmerican
Years active1983–present
Known for MindVox, ibogaine, hacking

Patrick Karel Kroupa (born January 20, 1969) known colloquially as Lord Digital is an American writer, hacker and activist. Kroupa was a member of the Legion of Doom and Cult of the Dead Cow hacker groups and co-founded MindVox in 1991, with Bruce Fancher.

Contents

Early years

Kroupa was born in Los Angeles, California on January 20, 1969. His Czech parents left Prague, Czechoslovakia, after the Soviet invasion in 1968 and divorced when Kroupa was six. He then moved to New York City, where he was raised by his mother. He is the nephew of Czech opera singer Zdeněk Kroupa. [1]

Kroupa was part of the first generation to grow up with home computers and network access. In numerous interviews he has repeatedly listed two events which were important in shaping the course of his later years.

The first was being exposed to one of the first two Cray supercomputers that were ever built, which was located at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) where his father was a physicist, who took him through the labs and taught him to program in Fortran and feed the Cray using punched cards. This happened during the same year that Woody Allen was filming Sleeper , using NCAR in many of the futuristic background scenes that appeared in the movie. Kroupa got an Apple II computer for his personal use around the time he was seven or eight years old. [2]

The second event that shaped his life was being part of the last days of Abbie Hoffman's YIPL/TAP (Youth International Party Lines/Technological Assistance Program) counter-culture/Yippie meetings that were taking place in New York City's Lower East Side, during the early 1980s. Kroupa again lists this event, repeatedly in interviews, as opening many new doors for him and changing his perceptions about technology.

TAP was the original hacker and phone phreak publication which predated 2600 by decades (at the time of the last TAP meetings, 2600 magazine was just starting to publish its first issues). Kroupa met many people there who would become part of his life in the years to come. Three of the main characters would be his future partner and lifelong friend, Bruce Fancher; Yippie/Medical Marijuana activist Dana Beal (The Theoretician), who was part of the John Draper (Cap'n Crunch) /Abbie Hoffman, technologically inclined branch of the counter-culture and perhaps most important: Herbert Huncke, who introduced Kroupa to heroin at age 14. [3]

With the exception of the counter-cultural and hard-drug elements, the preceding history made Kroupa part of a small group, composed of a few hundred kids who were either wealthy enough to afford home computers in the late 1970s, or had technologically savvy families who understood the potentials of what the machines could do. [4] The Internet as it is today did not exist; only a small percentage of the population had home computers and out of those who did, even fewer had online access through the use of modems. [5]

During his time in the computer underground Kroupa was a member of the first Pirate/Cracking crew to ever exist for the Apple II computer: The Apple Mafia [6] [7] [8] as well as various phreaking/hacking groups, the most high-profile being the Knights of Shadow. When KOS fell apart after a series of arrests, many of the surviving members were absorbed into Kroupa's final group affiliation: the Legion of Doom (LoD/H). [9]

Kroupa started publishing some of his hacking techniques when he would have been around 12 or 13. [10] There is a significant progression through years of text, which captures Kroupa's early evolution and skills, [11] culminating in an extensive, programmable phone phreaking and hacking toolk it for the Apple II computer, called Phantom Access (which is where the name Phantom Access Technologies, the parent corporation behind MindVox, would later come from).

The MindVox Years

Voices in my Head (1991–1996)

         /\_-\         <((_))>          \- \/  /\_-\(:::::::::)/\_-\ <((_))  MindVox  ((_))>  \- \/(:::::::::)\- \/          /\_-\         <((_))>          \- \/

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the computer underground had suffered through a series of protracted raids by the Secret Service and FBI, called Operation Sundevil and Operation Redux. Many Legion of Doom members were raided and charged. [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] This happened against the backdrop of the first and largest gang war that ever took place in cyberspace, the Great Hacker War between LOD and their rival gang MOD (Masters of Deception).

Considering Kroupa and Fancher's backgrounds and the fact that MindVox employed a motley collection of convicted felons like security expert Len Rose [17] and the infamous Phiber Optik (Mark Abene) who was awaiting a Manhattan grand jury indictment, these were very real issues at the time.

This is the environment in which Patrick Kroupa and Bruce Fancher launched MindVox. In the words of Bruce Fancher:

Our greatest fear wasn't whether or not we'd be successful as a company, that was secondary. What concerned us was that one day the Secret Service would kick in the door and just confiscate everything.

This is also the time during which Patrick Kroupa wrote, Voices in my Head, MindVox: The Overture. Kroupa wrote about the cultural forces that were at play in the hacker underground during the decade that pre-dated the launch of MindVox, considered by some the "Golden Age" of cyberspace[ who? ].

In the process of writing and releasing Voices, Patrick Kroupa stepped out from behind Lord Digital. Instead of status in the hacker underground and notoriety in a sub-culture, Kroupa was being written about as the Jim Morrison of cyberspace [18] and receiving accolades from the mainstream press. [19] [20] [21] [22]

Voices helped define what MindVox became, a counter-cultural media darling meriting full-length features in magazines and newspapers such as Rolling Stone, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The New Yorker. Voices in my Head was the spark that propelled Kroupa out of obscurity and into the mainstream.

There is no single article that captures this as well as Sassy magazine's effusive coverage of MindVox. The long, strange trip that began in the hardcore hacker underground, had landed in the middle of a glossy mainstream magazine targeted at an audience of teenage girls, with Kroupa and Fancher displacing that issue's "Cute boy band alert!" with the "Cute cyberpunk alert!". [23]

MIA / DOA (1996–2000)

A running theme through nearly all of Kroupa's writing is his drug use. He was a very vocal proponent of self-selecting one's own state of consciousness and freely wrote and talked about his own drug history. The caveat being, some of his drug use was open and public. The fact that he was an advocate of LSD and other psychedelic drugs was no big secret. The darker side of his life — that he regularly lost weeks of time injecting speedballs, was in and out of detoxes and rehabs, and suffered from bipolar disorder — were not publicized or mentioned until nearly a decade later.

Kroupa wrote with great honesty and passion about a variety of topics, but he very carefully danced around his own increasing dependence on heroin. Everybody knew that Kroupa occasionally used heroin, cocaine and dozens of other drugs, but not the extent.

By 1996, MindVox was at the absolute height of its powers, yet it was disintegrating. Bruce Fancher was suddenly part of two or three other start-ups, and system repairs that should have taken hours dragged on for weeks. While the user-base kept growing, the previously high level of intelligent discourse within the internal conferences had suffered, and while MindVox was getting more press than ever, all of it read like the same story being retold for the umpteenth time.

Sometime in early-to-mid 1996, Kroupa simply vanished. Freedom of choice gave way to the downward spiral of hardcore heroin addiction and dysfunction. In his 2005 book, Hip: The History, New York Times reporter and former Details editor John Leland would write:

In truth far too many of the celebrated figures in these pages led melancholy and difficult lives of isolation, mental illness and drug addiction. Interesting and romantic to read about, but very tough on those who live them.

Kroupa's exact whereabouts and activities from early 1996 until December 1999 remain unknown. He has acknowledged that he travelled throughout North America and spent time living in Mexico, Belize, Puerto Rico, the Czech Republic and eventually Bangkok, Thailand.

The dot.com success story that began with MindVox eventually hit rock bottom when Patrick Kroupa turned thirty incarcerated, "doin' Cold turkey on cement, in The Tombs". [24] Several months after this arrest, Kroupa finally kicked heroin through the use of the hallucinogenic drug, ibogaine. He was detoxed for the last time in the West Indies, on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts by Dr. Deborah Mash in late 1999.

He subsequently spent four months living at the Buddhist temple, Wat Tham Krabok, well known for its heroin and opium drug rehabilitation program.

21st century

A heroin-free Kroupa returned to the United States from Thailand in 2000, and became CTO of Dr. Deborah Mash's Ibogaine Research Project [25] at the University of Miami's Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine.

During the next several years Kroupa appeared in a series of ibogaine-related news reports which aired on television, radio and print media. [26] The most famous example probably being San Francisco's KRON news-report, which aired in 2004 and features Kroupa and Mash in a ten-minute long pro-ibogaine story. [27]

Kroupa is regularly a featured speaker at psychedelics and harm reduction conferences. [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] He seems to have a penchant for appearing at speaking engagements with multiple cups of coffee lined up in front of him, sometimes chain-smoking cigarettes through hour-long presentations. [34] [35] [36]

Yippies and the counterculture

While Kroupa's past history with the Yippies began at around age 13 or 14, [2] when the Yippies formalized a Yippie Speakers Bureau in 2003, consisting of: Paul Krassner, Dana Beal, Robert Altman, Grace Slick, Stew Albert, Dennis Peron, Ed Rosenthal, Jack Hoffman, Steve Conliff and Hunter S. Thompson, and went on tour during 2003-2004, the line-up featured the surprising inclusion of former Black Panther Party leader Dhoruba bin Wahad, and Patrick Kroupa, who wasn't born when the Yippies first became a cultural force in the United States, and was 2–3 generations younger than his closest compatriot. [37] It is unknown whether the YSB remains active; it went on hiatus after the deaths of Stew Albert, Hunter S. Thompson (both in 2005), and Steve Conliff (2006).

On November 15, 2007, he spoke at the University Philosophical Society (Trinity College, Dublin), discussing ibogaine, the worldwide War on Drugs, and advocating the legalisation of all narcotics. [38] The following Monday (November 19, 2007) Kroupa appeared on Ireland's national television station TV3's Ireland AM talk show, calling the War on Drugs:

... an unequivocal, catastrophic, world-wide failure, that has destroyed countless lives, set fire to hundreds of billions of dollars and produced no discernible results. There is no lack of drugs, basically, anywhere on planet Earth. The number of people using drugs has not decreased. While the street price of drugs hasn't gone up, the purity levels have steadily risen. But hey, we sure do have a lot of people in prison!

Kroupa is High Priest in the Eastern European based Sacrament of Transition [39] (a religious organization whose initiation rituals involve the sacramental use of ibogaine), and a member of Cult of the Dead Cow. [40]

Bibliography

Essays

Magazines

Medical journals

Related Research Articles

<i>Neuromancer</i> 1984 science fiction novel by William Gibson

Neuromancer is a 1984 science fiction novel by American-Canadian writer William Gibson. Considered one of the earliest and best-known works in the cyberpunk genre, it is the only novel to win the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award. It was Gibson's debut novel and the beginning of the Sprawl trilogy. Set in the future, the novel follows Henry Case, a washed-up hacker hired for one last job, which brings him in contact with a powerful artificial intelligence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Youth International Party</span> 1960s American youth-oriented counter-cultural political party

The Youth International Party (YIP), whose members were commonly called Yippies, was an American youth-oriented radical and countercultural revolutionary offshoot of the free speech and anti-war movements of the late 1960s. It was founded on December 31, 1967. They employed theatrical gestures to mock the social status quo, such as advancing a pig as a candidate for President of the United States in 1968. They have been described as a highly theatrical, anti-authoritarian, and anarchist youth movement of "symbolic politics".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Krassner</span> American writer and satirist (1932–2019)

Paul Krassner was an American writer and satirist. He was the founder, editor, and a frequent contributor to the freethought magazine The Realist, first published in 1958. Krassner became a key figure in the counterculture of the 1960s as a member of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and a founding member of the Yippies, a term he is credited with coining.

<i>Tabernanthe iboga</i> Species of plant

Tabernanthe iboga (iboga) is an evergreen rainforest shrub native to Central Africa. A member of the Apocynaceae family indigenous to Gabon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Republic of Congo, it is cultivated across Central Africa for its medicinal and other effects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MindVox</span> Early Internet Service Provider, based in NYC

MindVox was an early Internet service provider in New York City. The service was referred to as "the Hells Angels of Cyberspace".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jeremy Weate</span> British philosopher

Jeremy Weate studied philosophy at the University of Hull, the University of Liège and the University of Warwick, graduating with a PhD in European philosophy from Warwick in 1998. His PhD thesis was Phenomenology and Difference: the Body, Architecture and Race.

Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics (ICE) is a term used in cyberpunk literature to refer to security programs which protect computerized data from being accessed by hackers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dana Beal</span> American social and political activist

Irvin Dana Beal is an American social and political activist, best known for his efforts to legalize marijuana and to promote the benefits of Ibogaine as an addiction treatment. He is a founder and long-term activist in the Youth International Party (Yippies), and founded the Yipster Times newspaper in 1972. The Yipster Times was renamed Overthrow in 1978, and ended publication in 1989.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ibogaine</span> Psychoactive substance found in plants in the family Apocynaceae

Ibogaine is a naturally occurring psychoactive substance found in plants in the family Apocynaceae such as Tabernanthe iboga, Voacanga africana, and Tabernaemontana undulata. It is a psychedelic with dissociative properties.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bruce Fancher</span> American hacker

Bruce Fancher is a former computer hacker and member of the Legion of Doom hacker group. He co-founded MindVox in 1991 with Patrick K. Kroupa.

Deborah Carmen Mash is an American professor of neurology and of molecular and cellular pharmacology at the Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine, and director of the Brain Endowment Bank at the University of Miami. She is also the Chief Executive Officer and founder of DemeRx.

Sacrament of Transition is a new religious movement based in Slovenia, based on and promoting the sacramental use of the psychoactive plant Tabernanthe iboga and its psychoactive chemical constituent ibogaine. The founder of Sacrament of Transition is Marko Resinovic. The organization routinely sponsors psychedelic-related conferences and meetings.

Zippie was briefly the name of the breakaway Yippie faction that demonstrated at the 1972 Republican and Democratic Conventions in Miami Beach, Florida. The origin of the word is an evolution of the term Yippie, which was coined by the Youth International Party in the 1960s.

Addiction medicine is a medical subspecialty that deals with the diagnosis, prevention, evaluation, treatment, and recovery of persons with addiction, of those with substance-related and addictive disorders, and of people who show unhealthy use of substances including alcohol, nicotine, prescription medicine and other illicit and licit drugs. The medical subspecialty often crosses over into other areas, since various aspects of addiction fall within the fields of public health, psychology, social work, mental health counseling, psychiatry, and internal medicine, among others. Incorporated within the specialty are the processes of detoxification, rehabilitation, harm reduction, abstinence-based treatment, individual and group therapies, oversight of halfway houses, treatment of withdrawal-related symptoms, acute intervention, and long term therapies designed to reduce likelihood of relapse. Some specialists, primarily those who also have expertise in family medicine or internal medicine, also provide treatment for disease states commonly associated with substance use, such as hepatitis and HIV infection.

Festering Hate and CyberAIDS are the names of the first two Apple ProDOS viruses. CyberAIDS appears to have been a series of viruses with minor changes in the code, culminating in the final version called Festering Hate, which appeared in 1988. When the virus went off, the title page credited "Rancid Grapefruit" and "Cereal Killer" of the "Kool/Rad Alliance!"

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Phantom Access</span>

Phantom Access was the name given to a series of hacking programs written by Patrick Kroupa of LOD. The programs were worked on during the early to mid-1980s (1982–1986), and designed to run on the Apple II computer and Apple-Cat modem.

Dimitri Mugianis is a harm reductionist, activist, musician, poet, writer, anarchist, and psychedelic practitioner.

<i>How to Change Your Mind</i> 2018 book by Michael Pollan

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence is a 2018 book by Michael Pollan. It became a No. 1 New York Times best-seller.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MindMed</span> Psychedelic medicine biotech company

Mind Medicine Inc., also known as MindMed, is a New York-based psychedelic medicine biotech company that develops psychedelic-inspired medicines known as psychoplastogens and therapies to address addiction and mental illness.

References

Books

Magazines and newspapers

Medical journals

Public Access U.S. government documents

Available from U.S. G.P.O., Supt. of Docs., Congressional Sales Office. ( ISBN   0-16-053913-7)

Film

Television

Radio

Music

References

  1. ↑ Zdeněk Kroupa 1921-1999
  2. 1 2 Internet Gurus Archived 2013-01-31 at archive.today Tod Foley
  3. ↑ Blacklisted News: A Secret History of the 80's Archived 2007-09-27 at the Wayback Machine Yippie Book Collective. Bleecker Publishing (1984)
  4. ↑ The First Trinity: the Commodore PET, the Radio-Shack TRS-80, and the Apple (1977-1980)
  5. ↑ The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th edition
  6. ↑ Response, Fredric L. Rice, Organized Crime Civilian. "No such file (.View. THE APPLE MAFIA STORY.F.THE SA". www.skepticfiles.org. Archived from the original on 3 March 2016. Retrieved 14 August 2018.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  7. ↑ Apple Mafia Krack title page 1
  8. ↑ Apple Mafia Krack title page 2
  9. ↑ THE HACKER CRACKDOWN: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier War on The Legion Archived 2005-12-27 at the Wayback Machine , Bruce Sterling
  10. ↑ A Guide To ADS Systems Archived 2007-10-31 at the Wayback Machine , Lord Digital (1982)
  11. ↑ RSX11M Version 3.X Real Time Operating System Terminus and Lord Digital (1984)
  12. ↑ THE HACKER CRACKDOWN: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier Sting Boards Archived 2005-12-06 at the Wayback Machine , Bruce Sterling
  13. ↑ CS/EP142 Computers and Society, 1996
  14. ↑ Computer Underground Digest Volume 2, Issue #2.16 Archived 2005-02-23 at the Wayback Machine (December 10, 1990)
  15. ↑ Operation Sun-Devil Phrack Magazine, Issue: 32, Article: 10
  16. ↑ International Intrusions: Motives and Patterns Kent E. Anderson
  17. ↑ Boardwatch Magazine: MindVox Archived 2013-01-31 at archive.today 1992
  18. ↑ Surfing on the Internet Archived 2013-01-31 at archive.today J. C. Herz ( ISBN   0-316-36009-0)
  19. ↑ MindVox: Urban Attitude Online. Archived 2013-01-31 at archive.today Wired Magazine, 1993, Charles Platt
  20. ↑ Wiring the Planet-MindVox! Archived 2013-01-31 at archive.today Frank Bajak, Associated Press, 1993
  21. ↑ Boot Up and See Me Sometime Archived 2013-02-01 at archive.today New York Magazine, 1994
  22. ↑ There's A Party in my Mind... MindVox! Archived 2013-01-31 at archive.today Andrew Hawkins, Mondo 2000, 1993
  23. ↑ Hi Girlz! See you in Cyberspace Archived 2013-01-31 at archive.today Sassy Magazine, 1994.
  24. ↑ Sound Bites of Patrick Kroupa, at the Drug Policy Alliance conference DPA, New Orleans, 30 December 2007
  25. ↑ "Ibogaine Research Project". 15 December 2001. Archived from the original on 15 December 2001. Retrieved 14 August 2018.
  26. ↑ "media" . Retrieved 14 August 2018.
  27. ↑ Hallucinogen May Cure Drug Addiction KRON, 2004
  28. ↑ Psychedelic Television, 2006 Ibogaine Conference [ permanent dead link ]
  29. ↑ "News & Events" . Retrieved 14 August 2018.
  30. ↑ "American Association for the Treatment of Opioid Dependence - 5th National Harm Reduction Conference". Archived from the original on 5 February 2005. Retrieved 14 August 2018.
  31. ↑ "Drug Policy Alliance, 2003. Life in the Psychedelic Ghetto, Patrick Kroupa". Archived from the original on 3 March 2016. Retrieved 14 August 2018.
  32. ↑ "New York City Ibogaine Forum 2005 - Ibogaine Low Dose and Maintenance Therapy". Archived from the original on 23 December 2012. Retrieved 14 August 2018.
  33. ↑ "NYC Ibogaine and Iboga Forum, 2003". Archived from the original on 10 March 2012. Retrieved 14 August 2018.
  34. ↑ Daniel Pinchbeck, Sandra Karpetas, Patrick Kroupa with coffee-cups, Ibogaine conference, 2003 Archived 2008-05-29 at the Wayback Machine
  35. ↑ Sandra Karpetas, Patrick Kroupa with coffee-cups, Ibogaine conference, 2003 Archived 2008-05-29 at the Wayback Machine
  36. ↑ "mobisux.com". www.mobisux.com. Retrieved 14 August 2018.
  37. ↑ Yippie Speaker's Bureau Archived 2008-05-14 at the Wayback Machine
  38. ↑ The Irish Examiner, Legalisation of narcotics up for debate November 15, 2007
  39. ↑ "Sacrament of Transition ". sacrament.kibla.si. Retrieved 14 August 2018.
  40. ↑ Cult of the Dead Cow, Introducing two new members! Archived 2006-03-16 at the Wayback Machine Feb 19, 2006
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.