Read Online Concrete Underground (2010) by Moxie Mezcal - Free Book Online
Authors: Moxie Mezcal
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and marketing campaigns. Employees evoked his name in debates like parish priests citing chapter and verse. The question wasn't good-or-bad , right-or-wrong - itwas what will Max think?
As we got to know each other, he explained the situation to me like this: "It's not that dissent isn't tolerated. It just simply doesn't exist."
He gave me an example. "Say I pull some new concept out of my ass at the weekly executive meeting, some gem like 'user behavioral metrics' or 'achieving psychosocial harmonization' or whatever nonsense springs to mind. By the end of the day, you'll hear that same phrase echoing the halls throughout the entire campus. Everyone will be parroting it from the lowest mail room intern to the CFO's mistress."
But Max's professional life was only one part of the intricate personal mythology that had built up around him. The tales of excess and debauchery in his personal life were legendary. Max fucked the most beautiful people, ate at the most expensive restaurants, thoroughly trashed the most exclusive hotel rooms, and puked up the most exquisite liquors - all within conspicuous range of the camera's lens. He was like Keith Moon reincarnated with Bill Gates' bankroll in the age of TMZ . Tabloids and local bloggers ate his shtick up, further propagating and embellishing the myth.
Even his back story morphed and evolved to service the myth. The canonical version went like this:
Dylan Maxwell was a native of the city born into a solidly upper middle class family. His mother was an orthodontist, his father an accomplished composer who experimented with electronic music and had scored a few moderately successful films. He showed an interest in computers from an early age, encouraged by his father who was himself quite the technophile and always had the latest equipment for his son to tinker with. By the time Max entered high school he already had a lucrative part-time business designing web sites and software applications for local companies. He quickly expanded this gig to include security consulting by hacking into the sites of several major banks and government agencies, then telling them about it and offering to help them fix the vulnerabilities.
At the age of 16, Max passed the equivalency exam and dropped out of high school. This allowed him to devote himself to his computer work full time. He tried taking a few college courses but lost interest in them quickly. By the time he turned 18, he had turned down multiple offers for jobs and scholarships and instead decided to travel abroad. This was where the official record got hazy.
There were a number of outlandish stories of his two years overseas; talk to a dozen different people who profess to know , truly know Dylan Maxwell, and you'll get a dozen different accounts, each more preposterous than the last. From what I could deduce reading between the lines, he first spent half a year backpacking through Europe, then spent the rest of the time in southeast Asia where he studied for some indeterminate period in a Tibetan monastery.
Aside from that, the story was a Choose Your Own Adventure . Turn to page 23, Max loses his virginity to a window hooker in Amsterdam while tripping on LSD and mushrooms, and the experience is terrifying to both parties involved. Turn to page 32, Max falls madly in love with a teenage ladyboy in Bangkok. Turn to page 42, Max gets in a bar fight in the eastern side of Berlin with a group of skinheads and ends up slicing open one's throat with a broken whiskey bottle. Turn to page 66, Max joins up with an underground sect of Kali worshipers and participates in at least one ritual killing. At a certain point, I began to suspect that Max was deliberately leaking misinformation, but he vehemently denied this, instead preferring to compare the retelling of his life story to a game of Japanese Whispers.
In the end, all that really mattered was that the Max who returned to his home town two years later was no longer the shy,
As we got to know each other, he explained the situation to me like this: "It's not that dissent isn't tolerated. It just simply doesn't exist."
He gave me an example. "Say I pull some new concept out of my ass at the weekly executive meeting, some gem like 'user behavioral metrics' or 'achieving psychosocial harmonization' or whatever nonsense springs to mind. By the end of the day, you'll hear that same phrase echoing the halls throughout the entire campus. Everyone will be parroting it from the lowest mail room intern to the CFO's mistress."
But Max's professional life was only one part of the intricate personal mythology that had built up around him. The tales of excess and debauchery in his personal life were legendary. Max fucked the most beautiful people, ate at the most expensive restaurants, thoroughly trashed the most exclusive hotel rooms, and puked up the most exquisite liquors - all within conspicuous range of the camera's lens. He was like Keith Moon reincarnated with Bill Gates' bankroll in the age of TMZ . Tabloids and local bloggers ate his shtick up, further propagating and embellishing the myth.
Even his back story morphed and evolved to service the myth. The canonical version went like this:
Dylan Maxwell was a native of the city born into a solidly upper middle class family. His mother was an orthodontist, his father an accomplished composer who experimented with electronic music and had scored a few moderately successful films. He showed an interest in computers from an early age, encouraged by his father who was himself quite the technophile and always had the latest equipment for his son to tinker with. By the time Max entered high school he already had a lucrative part-time business designing web sites and software applications for local companies. He quickly expanded this gig to include security consulting by hacking into the sites of several major banks and government agencies, then telling them about it and offering to help them fix the vulnerabilities.
At the age of 16, Max passed the equivalency exam and dropped out of high school. This allowed him to devote himself to his computer work full time. He tried taking a few college courses but lost interest in them quickly. By the time he turned 18, he had turned down multiple offers for jobs and scholarships and instead decided to travel abroad. This was where the official record got hazy.
There were a number of outlandish stories of his two years overseas; talk to a dozen different people who profess to know , truly know Dylan Maxwell, and you'll get a dozen different accounts, each more preposterous than the last. From what I could deduce reading between the lines, he first spent half a year backpacking through Europe, then spent the rest of the time in southeast Asia where he studied for some indeterminate period in a Tibetan monastery.
Aside from that, the story was a Choose Your Own Adventure . Turn to page 23, Max loses his virginity to a window hooker in Amsterdam while tripping on LSD and mushrooms, and the experience is terrifying to both parties involved. Turn to page 32, Max falls madly in love with a teenage ladyboy in Bangkok. Turn to page 42, Max gets in a bar fight in the eastern side of Berlin with a group of skinheads and ends up slicing open one's throat with a broken whiskey bottle. Turn to page 66, Max joins up with an underground sect of Kali worshipers and participates in at least one ritual killing. At a certain point, I began to suspect that Max was deliberately leaking misinformation, but he vehemently denied this, instead preferring to compare the retelling of his life story to a game of Japanese Whispers.
In the end, all that really mattered was that the Max who returned to his home town two years later was no longer the shy,
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