HOT GOSSIP magazine, Dec '97


                  
                           
                           
Exclusive - Interview With An American Intelligence Agent

I'd heard a few stories about Dangerous McCarty and the
tricks she gets up to on the Internet, and I was interested
to know more about her. So how do you interview a Net Spy,
and what kind of people are they, and who do they spy on? 
Well I was soon to find out!

Dangerous McCarty,  better known as Diana McCarty,
is into conference co-ordination and snappy dressing, and apart
from being an expert in dealing with troublesome net.artists, she's also a notable socialite,
and is currently booked to appear at exhibitions and conferences in
Switzerland, Berlin and Budapest.

She's very outspoken, neurotic, friendly, intelligent, and American. She has a
sense of humour, is a little paranoid and 
extrovert. She drinks a lot, smokes like a chimney and she
cares about the environment. So what's a nice girl like this
doing hacking her way through cyber - conferences?

"Oh you know, spying for the American Government mostly"
she replies.

Her interests are varied - she likes art, but would rather wear it,
eat it or smoke it. Some of her work is very abstract, and she's a
dab hand at social networking.  I ask her if she's one of
those girls who sprays conference delegates with paint.

"Not at all" she says, producing her ubiquitous laptop,  
"I might ask them to take me out for lunch to discuss funding strategies
 I quite like people. Some of them anyway. At least 3."

So what does she like about People?

She thinks People are extremely interesting subjects and she
likes to organise them. At the moment she's working on an EU funding
 project  and it certainly involves People. 
 In the not too distant future Diana McCarty plans to become an Eastern European  male. 
 Does this mean she's going for a sex change?

"No" she giggles "it s an on-line identity. On the Net
people tend to think that Eastern European men are very mysterious
and women find them very attractive, it is an experiment and I hope to 
learn something from it."

She's also instrumental in creating Mailing Lists. With a glint in her eye, 
she tells me about the Faces and  Nettime mailing lists.
 She says she likes the theory and the gossip but I wonder,
is it the networking challenge which is so attractive to her?

I get the impression that Dangerous McCarty likes a
challenge, but she admits that some of her challenges which
were meant to be funny, didn't always turn out to be that
way. Like the time when she provoked a mini- revolution in a German Supermarket in Kassel
She was looking for a reaction, she got one,
They called the police, and the anti-terrorist squad arrived.

"Well I am an agent provocateur," she said "it was a performance, it
wasn't supposed to be a threatening hoax. I didn't think it
would be such a problem. Jesus,  they're so uptight those supermarket-managers"

So what about the social hacking?

Diana McCarty is infamous for hacking into  electronic art and culture conferences and
uploading editorial on various websites about them.
 
Thats when the rumours began that she was indeed a CIA spy since she was very active
in the Eastern European Underground media scene.

So what else is she up to? She tells me she is now working on a
virus, albeit a friendly one. I wonder how there can be such
a thing as a friendly virus? Well, she insists there is such
a thing, and she claims that it may well be a female virus.

"It won't do any harm, it won't destroy a hard disc, or have
anything to do with messing up data, it will just play a tune
and re-organise messy desktops" she said.

I wanted to know what she really thought about the Internet,
and where she thought it would all end up.

"In the future I believe it will  be taken over by women. It will eventually be
controlled by a small number of robots programmed by powerful women with big hair"

Diana McCarty has been playing around with electronic culture since
she was 14 years of age. One wonders how many more little
McCarty's are out there playing around with their laptops and co-ordinating conferences,
and one can only hope that if anything, they grow up with a
sense of humour and big hair.

Thankyou Diana McCarty for this interview.  

Georgina Bruni 
Hot Gossip UK 
E-Zine http://www.itl.net/goto/hotgossip