Cult of the Dead Cow

How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World

By: Joseph Menn

Narrated by: Jonathan Davis, Joseph Menn

The shocking untold story of the elite secret society of hackers fighting to protect our freedom, “a hugely important piece of the puzzle for anyone who wants to understand the forces shaping the internet age” (The New York Times Book Review)

Cult of the Dead Cow is the tale of the oldest active, most respected, and most famous American hacking group of all time. With its origins in the earliest days of the internet, the cDc is full of oddball characters – activists, artists, and musicians – some of whom went on to advise presidents, cabinet members, and CEOs, and who now walk the corridors of power in Washington and Silicon Valley.

Today, the group and its followers are battling electoral misinformation, making personal data safer, and organizing to keep technology a force for good instead of for surveillance and oppression. Cult of the Dead Cow describes how, at a time when governments, corporations, and criminals hold immense power, a small band of tech iconoclasts is on our side fighting back.

Critic reviews

"An invaluable resource. The tale of this small but influential group is a hugely important piece of the puzzle for anyone who wants to understand the forces shaping the internet age."—New York Times Book Review

"The author narrates a fast-paced story about how a little-known movement that could trace its roots to the psychedelic rock of the 1960s-one visionary was the son of the Jefferson Airplane's drummer, while another was a lyricist for the Grateful Dead-would eventually serve as security advisory for the Pentagon, the cybernetics industry, and geopolitical forces around the globe... A quick tale of black hats and white hats, with a lot of gray area in between."—Kirkus Reviews

"Long before there was a multi-billion dollar cyber industry, there were some ethical hackers who showed us that the Silicon Valley emperors had no clothes. They looked like misfits, but they showed us how insecure the Internet was and how to make it better. Joe Menn makes this previously untold story entertaining and relevant to today's cyber threats."—Richard A. Clarke, first White House "Cyber Czar"

"Cult of the Dead Cow is an exhilarating and essential look into a part of the hacker underground that has shaped the modern world in profound ways. Readers will be amazed by this crew of eccentric, impassioned geniuses who have so often served as the Internet's conscience while lurking unknown in the shadows. The depth of Joe Menn's reporting is as astonishing as his storytelling - no one could have captured this tale better."—Ashlee Vance, author of Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

"Cult of the Dead Cow reveals a story few know about the origins of white hat hacking and the heroes it celebrates. Despite the title, hacking isn't dead yet!"—Vint Cerf, co-inventor of the Internet

"This dramatic story of how the Internet's first hackers learned to handle their outsized abilities can help us grapple to control the power of today's technology titans."—Bruce Schneier, Harvard fellow and lecturer and author of Click Here to Kill Somebody

"A beautifully researched, engrossingly told story about how CDC and its members and offshoot groups invented much of what has become normal in the modern practice of tech and security...Menn zeroes in on a perfect spot between the personalities and the tools, and in so doing, answers some important questions about how we arrived at the place we're at today, where information security is at the heart of questions of national security, human rights, free speech, and the survival of our democracies and our species itself."—Cory Doctorow, author of LittleBrother and Homeland

"A must-read for anyone who cares about how we broke the internet...and how we just might save it."—Dustin Volz, Wall StreetJournal security reporter

As a fellow hacker, loved it

I learned to program when I was 12 in about this same era, but absolutely no one was around in my small town who understood what I was doing, including my parents. I wasn’t allowed to use the modem because phone calls were too expensive and had a pretty strict upbringing so probably would not have gotten into phreaking, but I wish I had discovered others with related interests earlier. Somehow I meandered into tech almost by accident despite not realizing people did programming for a living, and now am the CEO of a security company doing penetration testing and cloud security training. I have heard a lot about different aspects of this book from other sources but this really tied some things together. I even know more about some of the people I’ve been following on Twitter for years. Great read.

Modern history that is not in the history books

It is really important to understand what happened before and how that shaped our technology and the way we use it today, some of these stories I knew them, some others were new to me. It is well written and I enjoyed every single moment of it. If you are in the security or cybersecurity, you need to read this.

Good story telling

i enjoyed this publication. It was good for historical coverage and had a nice overview of hacker society.

better than i knew

what a special exposition. i was heavy in tech development and knew the fringes. the details are spectacular.

Somewhat scattered, marred by a poor reading

Jonathan Davis doesn't seem to read more than a few words ahead, so that each of his sentences is merely an assemblage of unrelated phrases. Indeed, listening with headphones, it's easy to hear how he has re-recorded individual phrases and edited them into a sentence. This robotic reading style means that the listener has to capture all the words, re-parse them into a more sensible prosody, and then replay the whole thing in one's head in order to figure out what was just said. It's like having Siri read the New York Times: The phonemes are all there but it takes significant effort to understand what one is hearing. Neither Siri nor Jonathan Davis understand a word of what they're reading.

Menn's writing style is to jump around all over the map. That's OK, but it takes an actor with some talent to bring out Menn's voice. Davis fails.

The first few chapters were an absolute blast for me, because I know or have met almost every one of the people mentioned (except Beto O'Rourke). I loved the world of BBSes back in the day, though I was never a hacker or a phreak.

As the book's timeline progressed, names came up that I wasn't that familiar with. (In a few cases, that's a good thing — plausible deniability ;-)) But as the book wore on, the dry chronicling of the antics of the CDC's members became quite boring. These are just geeks, no more or less interesting than the hundreds of other geeks I know.

Does it get better towards the end? I'm about an hour and a half from the end, and I am not sure if I really want to work that hard. And now that I no longer commute (covid isolation) the thought of listening to Davis butcher sentence structure is not appealing.