ESQUIRE

Heath Bunting gets subversive on the Net

CYBERCAFE Is it art? Or is it anarchy? Heath Bunting, 29, is
best described as a techno renaissance man. One of those
left behind by the Eighties but picked up by the Nineties as
the world got wired. It's not like he's made a million, or
that he is likely to. He isn't one of those geeks-done-good,
now raking it in by advising multinationals on how to use
the Internet to peddle their products. But, he travels the
world, he lives in a roomy flat on Shaftesbury Avenue in the
heart of the West End where you find the beds on stilts,
where there's no coffee but plenty of herbal tea and, of
course, a desk lined with computers.

It was Bunting who came up with the term "cyber cafe" and
the idea of a place where people could get on the Net while
they guzzled cappuccino. He ultimately failed to find
funding, although the idea has since taken off in a huge way
after the Cyberia cafe opened its doors in the West End.
But, even when his venture was scuppered, he still had his
Cybercafe bulletin board, which offers a wicked brew of arty
manifestos and anarchic information for around 400 users. He
built his first computer at the age of thirteen, based on a
model he saw in an electronics magazine and using bits found
in skips. As soon as it was finished, he was writing games
programs and attending the computer classes the council had
laid on for schoolteachers. He went to college in Bristol to
become a systems analyst, but found it less stimulating than
sitting at home designing 3D graphics on his BBC computer,
so he packed it in. There was a long stretch on the dole. He
made stained glass windows, got into art and again turned to
skips to build himself computers. Three years ago he started
to work for a multimedia company in the Southwest, where he
encountered the Internet. Since then, he has managed to
carve a unique role for himself in the UK techno scene.

One of Bunting's core activities is raiding corporate skips
to get their computer secrets. "Most companies," he says,
"are obsessed with computer security but don't realize how
much information they give out and leave in their bins." He
talks about "rearranging the personnel files" for an unnamed
major multinational, believes his phone has been tapped and
that the security services are interested in him. His latest
plan, the underground GCHQ, taking everything from pirate
radio to police broadcasts and making them available around
the world on the Net, is, again, likely to win him many
friends in high places. But, he insists, "I'm not really
part of the hacker scene and I'm not aggressive enough to be
an anarchist. A lot of my ideas are based on viral theory,
it's about finding the weak point."

Despite such subversive intent, Bunting claims to avoid
confrontation, and doesn't believe in simply opposing
extreme views with extreme views. He has been involved with
projects such as setting up the Internet connection to
Sarajevo which was launched in December by the International
Humanitarian Aid Concern and funded by the George Soros
Foundation, and has taken sponsorship from the Japanese
telecommunications giant NTT to head out to Tokyo and do
some situationist Web art. This has involved, among other
things, taking messages from people over the Net such as "go
to the first man in a suit you see and ask him 'when will it
end?'", doing it and then taking a photograph of the man and
uploading it onto his web site.

But, perhaps Bunting's real coup was the great King's Cross
caper. He set up modems to automatically dial the pay phones
in King's Cross station, and then send instructions to the
thousand or so people on his mailing list, giving them the
phone numbers and asking them all to call them. People from
all around the world joined in the enterprise. Like most of
what he does, the actual technology involved was pretty
simple, but the idea was enormous. That, ultimately is how
it should be. And what is Heath Bunting's next big idea? It
has nothing to do with computers. He wants to get a beach
built on London's South Bank as a project for the
millennium. Well, just remember that people once thought the
idea of a cybercafe was strange.

simon waldman