Patrick K. Kroupa
| Patrick Karel Kroupa | |
|---|---|
| Born |
January 20, 1969 Los Angeles, California, USA |
| Residence | United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Other names | Lord Digital |
| Citizenship | American |
| Years active | 1983–present |
| Known for | MindVox, ibogaine, hacking |
| Home town | Los Angeles, California |
Patrick Karel Kroupa (also known as Lord Digital, born January 20, 1969) is an American writer, hacker and activist. Kroupa was a member of the legendary Legion of Doom and Cult of the Dead Cow hacker groups and co-founded MindVox in 1991, with Bruce Fancher. He was a heroin addict from age 14 to 30 and got clean through the use of the hallucinogenic drug ibogaine.
Kroupa was born in Los Angeles, California, of Czech parents who left Prague, Czechoslovakia, after the Soviet invasion in 1968. His parents were divorced when Kroupa was six, and he relocated to New York City, where he was raised by his mother. He is the nephew of Czech opera singer Zdeněk Kroupa.
Patrick Kroupa was part of the first generation to grow up with home computers and network access. In numerous interviews he has repeatedly listed two events which were important in shaping the course of his later years.
The first was being exposed to one of the first two Cray supercomputers that were ever built, which was located at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) where his father was a physicist, who took him through the labs and taught him to program in Fortran and feed the Cray using punched cards. This happened during the same year that Woody Allen was filming Sleeper, using NCAR in many of the futuristic background scenes that appeared in the movie. Kroupa got an Apple II computer for his own use around the time he was seven or eight years old.
The second event was being part of the last days of Abbie Hoffman's YIPL/TAP (Youth International Party Lines/Technological Assistance Program) counter-culture/Yippie meetings that were taking place in New York City's Lower East Side, during the early 1980s. Kroupa again lists this event, repeatedly in interviews, as opening many new doors for him and changing his perceptions about technology.
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