Patrick K. Kroupa

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Patrick K. Kroupa, 2005.

Patrick Karel Kroupa (also known as Lord Digital, born January 20, 1969 in Los Angeles, California) is an American writer, hacker, and cyberculture icon. Kroupa was a member of the legendary Legion of Doom hacker group and co-founded MindVox in 1991, with Bruce Fancher. He was a heroin addict from age 14 to 30, and got clean through the use of the hallucinogenic drug, ibogaine.

Early Years

Patrick Kroupa was part of the first generation to grow up with home computers and network access. In numerous interviews he has repeatedly cited two events which were pivotal 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 NCAR (the National Center for Atmospheric Research) 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 own use around the time he was 7 or 8 years old.

The second event was walking into the ending of the final generation 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 80's. Kroupa again lists this event, repeatedly in interviews, as opening many new doors for him and changing his perceptions about technology.

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Patrick K. Kroupa, late 1980's.

TAP predated 2600 by decades and 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 life-long friend, Bruce Fancher; Yippie/Medical Marijuana activist Dana Beal (The Theoretician), who was part of the John Draper (Captain Crunch)/Abbie Hoffman, technologically-inclined branch of the counter-culture and perhaps most important: Herbert Hunke, who along with John Draper was a frequent house-guest, spending months (in Hunke's case, years) living in Dana Beal's basement at the infamous #9 Bleecker Street.

Herbert Hunke's best-known claim to fame, is being the man who turned William Burroughs on to heroin. While Burroughs was an exception to nearly everything most people may consider human, Hunke's actions were not. Although Hunke was known as a beat poet and writer, he was also living in squalor, homeless part of the time, surviving through petty crimes and dealing heroin and turning anybody he came into contact with, onto the drug.

Hunke was also the person who first introduced Kroupa to heroin at age 14; the drug that nearly killed him, helped destroy the company behind MindVox while creating the legend and myth that MindVox became, and laid the foundations for what Kroupa himself was to become in the 21st. century.

With the exception of the counter-cultural and hard-drug elements, the preceding history made Kroupa part of a small group, made up of a few hundred kids who were either wealthy enough to afford home computers in the late 70's, or had technologically-savvy families who understood the potentials of what the machines could do. 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.

During his time in the computer underground Kroupa was a member of the first Pirate/Cracking crew to ever exist for the Apple ][ computer: The Apple Mafia; as well as various phreaking/hacking groups, the most high-profile being: the Knights of Shadow and his last group association: the Legion of Doom.

The MindVox Years (1991-1996)

MindVox is Formed

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In the early 90's there was a huge upheaval in online existence. Cyberspace was in the process of no longer being a cutting-edge private playground for the rich, smart and computer-literate. The dream of universal access was in the process of becoming reality.

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, charged and in some cases successfully prosecuted. 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).

At the same time the non-computer, counter-cultural underground, was experiencing a similar crisis and imploding all over itself. Abbie Hoffman returned, only to kill himself. The Yippies broke off into different factions that were at war with each other, mirroring the online activities of LOD and MOD. For all their peace, love and understanding, the Hippies, Yippies and Zippies, couldn't even get along with each other.

While the computer underground and the counter-culture was busy with infighting, the US Government was even more busy with trying to bring law and order online. They went about it by arresting anybody and everybody and stomping all over civil rights and due process. This led to the formation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) by Mitch Kapor, John Perry Barlow and John Gilmore.

This is the environment in which MindVox was born. 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.

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

Voices in my Head

This is the time during which Patrick Kroupa wrote the now classic, Voices in my Head, MindVox: The Overture. Kroupa provided a compelling and sweeping, first-person overview of the cultural forces that were at play in the hacker underground during the decade that pre-dated the launch of MindVox.

In the process of writing and releasing Voices, Kroupa crossed the line into shaping an entire culture's mythology and re-invented himself as a formidable writer. 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 and receiving accolades from the mainstream press.

Voices defined 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 gushing 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, and Kroupa and Fancher displaced the "Cute boy band alert!" with the "Cute cyberpunk alert!"

MindVox had arrived. The internet was booming, dot.com was happening, Kroupa and Fancher were media fixtures who still maintained their counter-cultural reputation and history and it looked like their dream had come true.

MIA / DOA (1996 - 2000)

Prior to the 1990's Kroupa's reputation was based upon his hacking talents. After 1991, the spotlight had shifted over to his writing, but what always made Patrick Kroupa greater than the sum of his parts, was their synergy with his personality. He was articulate, charismatic and charming, Kroupa was a living Cult of Personality.

The common joke of the time was that Kroupa had his own version of Steve Jobs' famous Reality Distortion Field. He was also a very vocal proponent of self-selecting your own state of consciousness and freely wrote and talked about his own drug use.

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 fact that he regularly lost weeks of time injecting speedballs (a mixture of heroin and cocaine), was in and out of detoxes and rehabs in a revolving door manner, and so heavily bipolar, that when he wasn't on heroin, he didn't function at all; were all facts that 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. With the exception of his close friends, nobody knew that he was injecting over $1,000 a day of heroin just to function.

By 1996 something was very obviously wrong. MindVox was at the absolute height of its powers, yet it was starting to fall apart. Bruce Fancher was suddenly part of 2 or 3 other start-ups, 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 upteenth time.

Sometime in early to mid 1996, Patrick Kroupa simply vanished.

In 1997 Bruce Fancher officially had Kroupa declared as a missing person for legal reasons and posted public messages all over MindVox asking anyone who had seen Patrick or had contact with him, to please notify Fancher.

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.

Bibliography

Essays

Voices In My Head MindVox: The Overture (1992), Patrick K. Kroupa. [1], [2], [3]

Magazines

The Akashic Records of Cyberspace (1993), Patrick K. Kroupa. Mondo 2000.

Memoirs of a Cybernaut (1993), Patrick K. Kroupa. Wired.

Agr1pPa - A Book of The Mentally Disturbed (1993), Patrick K. Kroupa. Mondo 2000. [4], [5]

The Secret Service is Neither (1994), Patrick K. Kroupa. Mondo 2000.

Heroin Times: Ibogaine Series (2000-2003), Patrick K. Kroupa. Heroin Times.

Medical Journals

Ibogaine: Treatment Outcomes and Observations (2003), Patrick K. Kroupa (Junk the Magic Dragon) & Hattie Wells (Epoptica). MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, Volume XIII, Number 2).

Ibogaine in the 21st Century: Boosters, Tune-ups and Maintenance (2005), Patrick K. Kroupa & Hattie Wells. MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, Volume XV, Number 1).