At his best, he rep­re­sent­ed a new way of exist­ing in rela­tion to author­i­ty. He wasn’t very straight­for­ward­ly of the left and couldn’t have dis­tin­guished dialec­ti­cal mate­ri­al­ism from a bag of nuts. He hates sys­tems of belief, hates all sys­tems, wants indeed to be a ghost in the machine, walk­ing through the cor­ri­dors of pow­er and switch­ing off the lights. I found myself writ­ing notes culled from what he said to me about him­self. ‘When you’re a hack­er you’re inter­est­ed in masks with­in masks,’ and ‘We could under­mine cor­rup­tion from its dead cen­tre. Jus­tice will always in the end be about human beings, but there is a new van­guard of experts, crim­i­nalised as we are, who have fas­tened onto the can­cer of mod­ern pow­er, and seen how it spreads in ways that are still hid­den from ordi­nary human experience.’