By Richard Thieme

This article was published simultaneously in the program for Def Con 11 (August 2003), on the hactivismo and Linux World (Australia) web sites, and in the Dutch information security magazine Informatiebeveiliging which is published by Genootschap voor Informatiebeveiligers, an infosec association based in the Netherlands.

First, the meaning of hacker.

The word originally meant an inventive type, someone creative and unconventional, usually involved in a technical feat of legerdemain, a person who saw doors where others saw walls or built bridges that others thought were planks on which to walk into shark-filled seas. Hackers were alive with the spirit of Loki or Coyote or the Trickster, moving with stealth across boundaries, often spurning conventional ways of thinking and behaving. Hackers see deeply into the arbitrariness of structures, how form and content are assembled in subjective and often random ways and therefore how they can be defeated or subverted. They see atoms where others see a seeming solid, and they know that atoms are approximations of energies, abstractions, mathematical constructions. At the top level, they see the skull behind the grin, the unspoken or unacknowledged but shared assumptions of a fallible humanity. That’s why, as in Zen monasteries, where mountains are mountains and then they are not mountains and then they are mountains again, hacker lofts are filled with bursts of loud spontaneous laughter.

Then the playful creative things they did in the protected space of their mainframe heaven, a playfulness fueled by the passion to know, to solve puzzles, outwit adversaries, never be bested or excluded by arbitrary fences, never be rendered powerless, those actions began to be designated acts of criminal intent.. That happened when the space inside the mainframes was extended through distributed networks and ported to the rest of the world where things are assumed to be what they seem. A psychic space designed to be open, more or less, for trusted communities to inhabit, became a general platform of communication and commerce and security became a concern and an add-on. Legal distinctions which seemed to have been obliterated by new technologies and a romantic fanciful view of cyberspace a la Perry Barlow were reformulated for the new not-so-much cyberspace as cyborgspace where everyone was coming to live. Technologies are first astonishing, then grafted onto prior technologies, then integrated so deeply they are constitutive of new ways of seeing and acting, which is when they become invisible.

A small group, a subset of real hackers, mobile crews who merely entered and looked around or pilfered unsecured information, became the definition the media and then everybody else used for the word “hacker.” A hacker became a criminal, usually defined as a burglar or vandal, and the marks of hacking were the same as breaking and entering, spray painting graffiti on web site walls rather than brick, stealing passwords or credit card numbers.

At first real hackers tried to take back the word but once a word is lost, the war is lost. “Hacker” now means for most people a garden variety of online miscreant and words suggested as substitutes like technophile just don’t have the same juice.

So let’s use the word hacker here to mean what we know we mean because no one has invented a better word. We don’t mean script kiddies, vandals, or petty thieves. We mean men and women who do original creative work and play at the tip of the bell curve, not in the hump, we mean the best and brightest who cobble together new images of possibility and announce them to the world. Original thinkers. Meme makers. Artists of pixels and empty spaces.

Second, the meaning of “hacker generations.”

In a speech at the end of his two terms as president, Dwight Eisenhower coined the phrase “military-industrial complex” to warn of the consequences of a growing seamless collusion between the state and the private sector. He warned of a changing approach to scientific research which in effect meant that military and government contracts were let to universities and corporations, redefining not only the direction of research but what was thinkable or respectable in the scientific world. At the same time, a “closed world” as Paul N. Edwards phrased it in his book of the same name, was evolving, an enclosed psychic landscape formed by our increasingly symbiotic interaction with the symbol-manipulating and identity-altering space of distributed computing, a space that emerged after World War II and came to dominate military and then societal thinking.

Eisenhower and Edwards were in a way describing the same event, the emergence of a massive state-centric collaboration that redefined our psychic landscape. After half a century Eisenhower is more obviously speaking of the military-industrial-educational-entertainment-and-media establishment that is the water in which we swim, a tangled inescapable mesh of collusion and self-interest that defines our global economic and political landscape.

The movie calls it The Matrix. The Matrix issues from the fusion of cyborg space and the economic and political engines that drive it, a simulated world in which the management of perception is the cornerstone of war-and-peace (in the Matrix, war is peace and peace is war, as Orwell foretold). The battlespace is as perhaps it always has been the mind of society but the digital world has raised the game to a higher level. The game is multidimensional, multi-valent, played in string space. The manipulation of symbols through electronic means, a process which began with speech and writing and was then engineered through tools of literacy and printing is the currency of the closed world of our CyborgSpace and the military-industrial engines that power it.

This Matrix then was created through the forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies, often invisible to the hackers who lived in and breathed it. The “hackers” noticed by the panoptic eye of the media and elevated to niche celebrity status were and always have been creatures of the Matrix. The generations before them were military, government, corporate and think-tank people who built the machinery and its webbed spaces.

So I mean by the First Generation of Hackers, this much later generation of hackers that emerged in the eighties and nineties when the internet became an event and they were designated the First Hacker Generation, the ones who invented Def Con and all its spin-offs, who identified with garage-level hacking instead of the work of prior generations that made it possible.

Marshall McLuhan saw clearly the nature and consequences of electronic media but it was not television, his favorite example, so much as the internet that provided illustrations for his text. Only when the Internet had evolved in the military-industrial complex and moved through incarnations like Arpanet and Milnet into the public spaces of our society did people began to understand what he was saying.

Young people who became conscious as the Internet became public discovered a Big Toy of extraordinary proportions. The growing availability of cheap ubiquitous home computers became their platform and when they were plugged into one another, the machines and their cyborg riders fused. They co-created the dot com boom and the public net, and made necessary the “security space” perceived as essential today to a functional society. All day and all night like Bedouin they roamed the network where they would, hidden by sand dunes that changed shape and size overnight in the desert winds. That generation of hackers inhabited Def Con in the “good old days,” the early nineties, and the other cons. They shaped the perception as well as the reality of the public Internet as their many antecedents at MIT, NSA, DOD and all the other three-letter agencies co-created the Matrix.

So I mean by the First Generation of Hackers that extended or distributed network of passionate obsessive and daring young coders who gave as much as they got, invented new ways of sending text, images, sounds, and looked for wormholes that let them cross through the non-space of the network and bypass conventional routes. They constituted an online meritocracy in which they bootstrapped themselves into surrogate families and learned together by trial and error, becoming a model of self-directed corporate networked learning. They created a large-scale interactive system, self-regulating and self-organizing, flexible, adaptive, and unpredictable, the very essence of a cybernetic system.

Then the Second Generation came along. They had not co-created the network so much as found it around them as they became conscious. Just a few years younger, they inherited the network created by their “elders.” The network was assumed and socialized them to how they should think and act. Video games were there when they learned how to play. Web sites instead of bulletin boards with everything they needed to know were everywhere. The way a prior generation was surrounded by books or television and became readers and somnambulistic watchers , the Second Generation was immersed in the network and became surfers. But unlike the First Generation which knew their own edges more keenly, the net made them cyborgs without anyone noticing. They were assimilated. They were the first children of the Matrix.

In a reversal of the way children learned from parents, the Second Generation taught their parents to come online which they did but with a different agenda. Their elders came to the net as a platform for business, a means of making profits, creating economies of scale, and expanding into a global market. Both inhabited a simulated world characterized by porous or disappearing boundaries and if they still spoke of a “digital frontier,” evoking the romantic myths of the EFF and the like, that frontier was much more myth than fact, as much a creation of the dream weavers at CFP as “the old west” was a creation of paintings, dime novels and movies.

They were not only fish in the water of the Matrix, however, they were goldfish in a bowl. That environment to which I have alluded, the military-industrial complex in which the internet evolved in the first place, had long since built concentric circles of observation or surveillance that enclosed them around. Anonymizers promising anonymity were created by the ones who wanted to know their names. Hacker handles and multiple nyms hid not only hackers but those who tracked them. The extent of this panoptic world was hidden by denial and design. Most on it and in it didn’t know it. Most believed the symbols they manipulated as if they were the things they represented, as if their tracks really vanished when they erased traces in logs or blurred the means of documentation. They thought they were watchers but in fact were also watched. The Eye that figures so prominently in Blade Runner was always open, a panoptic eye. The system could not be self-regulating if it were not aware of itself, after all. The net is not a dumb machine, it is sentient and aware because it is fused bone-on-steel with its cyborg riders and their sensory and cognitive extensions.

Cognitive dissonance grew as the Second Generation spawned the Third. The ambiguities of living in simulated worlds, the morphing of multiple personas or identities, meant that no one was ever sure who was who. Dissolving boundaries around individuals and organizational structures alike (“The internet? C’est moi!”) meant that identity based on loyalty, glue born of belonging to a larger community and the basis of mutual trust, could not be presumed.

It’s all about knowing where the nexus is, what transpires there at the connections. The inner circles may be impossible to penetrate but in order to recruit people into them, there must be a conversation and that conversation is the nexus, the distorted space into which one is unknowingly invited and often subsequently disappears. Colleges, universities, businesses, associations are discovered to be Potemkin villages behind which the real whispered dialogue takes place. The closed and so-called open worlds interpenetrate one another to such a degree that the nexus is difficult to discern. History ends and numerous histories take their place, each formed of an arbitrary association and integration of data classified or secret at multiple levels and turned into truths, half-truths, and outright lies.

Diffie-Hellman’s public key cryptography, for example, was a triumph of ingenious thinking, putting together bits of data, figuring it out, all outside the system, but Whit Diffie was abashed when he learned that years earlier (1969) James Ellis inside the “closed world” of British intelligence had already been there and done that. The public world of hackers often reinvents what has been discovered years earlier inside the closed world of compartmentalized research behind walls they can not so easily penetrate. (People really can keep secrets and do.) PGP was – well, do you really think that PGP was news to the closed world?

In other words, the Second Generation of Hackers, socialized to a networked world, also began to discover another world or many other worlds that included and transcended what was publicly known. There have always been secrets but there have not always been huge whole secret WORLDS whose citizens live with a different history entirely but that’s what we have built since the Second World War. That’s the metaphor at the heart of the Matrix and that’s why it resonates with the Third Generation. A surprising discovery for the Second Generation as it matured is the basis for high-level hacking for the Third.

The Third Generation of Hackers knows it was socialized to a world co-created by its legendary brethren as well as numerous nameless men and women. They know that we inhabit multiple thought-worlds with different histories, histories dependent on which particular bits of data can be bought on the black market for truth and integrated into Bigger Pictures. The Third Generation knows there is NO one Big Picture, there are only bigger or smaller pictures depending on the pieces one assembles. Assembling those pieces, finding them, connecting them, then standing back to see what they say – that is the essence of Third Generation hacking. That is the task demanded by the Matrix which is otherwise our prison, where inmates and guards are indistinguishable from each other because we are so proud of what we have built that we refuse to let one another escape.

That challenge demands that real Third Generation hackers be expert at every level of the fractal that connects all the levels of the network. It includes the most granular examination of how electrons are turned into bits and bytes, how percepts as well as concepts are framed and transported in network-centric warfare/peacefare, how all the layers link to one another, which distinctions between them matter and which don’t. How the seemingly topmost application layer is not the end but the beginning of the real challenge, where the significance and symbolic meaning of the manufactured images and ideas that constitute the cyborg network create a trans-planetary hive mind. That’s where the game is played today by the masters of the unseen, where those ideas and images become the means of moving the herd, percept turned into concept, people thinking they actually think when what has in fact already been thought for them has moved on all those layers into their unconscious constructions of reality.

Hacking means knowing how to find data in the Black Market for truth, knowing what to do with it once it is found, knowing how to cobble things together to build a Big Picture. The puzzle to be solved is reality itself, the nature of the Matrix, how it all relates. So unless you’re hacking the Mind of God, unless you’re hacking the mind of society itself, you aren’t really hacking at all. Rather than designing arteries through which the oil or blood of a cyborg society flows, you are the dye in those arteries, all unknowing that you function like a marker or a bug or a beeper or a gleam of revealing light. You become a means of control, a symptom rather than a cure.

The Third Generation of Hackers grew up in a simulated world, a designer society of electronic communication, but sees through the fictions and the myths. Real hackers discover in their fear and trembling the courage and the means to move through zones of annihilation in which everything we believe to be true is called into question in order to reconstitute both what is known and our knowing Self on the higher side of self-transformation. Real hackers know that the higher calling is to hack the Truth in a society built on designer lies and then – the most subtle, most difficult part – manage their egos and that bigger picture with stealth and finesse in the endless ambiguity and complexity of their lives.

The brave new world of the past is now everyday life. Everybody knows that identities can be stolen which means if they think that they know they can be invented. What was given to spies by the state as a sanction for breaking laws is now given to real hackers by technologies that make spies of us all.

Psychological operations and information warfare are controls in the management of perception taking place at all levels of society, from the obvious distortions in the world of politics to the obvious distortions of balance sheets and earnings reports in the world of economics. Entertainment, too, the best vehicle for propaganda according to Joseph Goebbels, includes not only obvious propaganda but movies like the Matrix that serve as sophisticated controls, creating a subset of people who think they know and thereby become more docile. Thanks for that one, SN.

The only free speech tolerated is that which does not genuinely threaten the self-interest of the oligarchic powers that be. The only insight acceptable to those powers is insight framed as entertainment or an opposition that can be managed and manipulated.

Hackers know they don’t know what’s real and know they can only build provisional models as they move in stealthy trusted groups of a few. They must assume that if they matter, they are known which takes the game immediately to another level.

So the Matrix like any good cybernetic system is self-regulating, builds controls, has multiple levels of complexity masking partial truth as Truth. Of what else could life consist in a cyborg world? All over the world, in low-earth orbit, soon on the moon and the asteroid belt, this game is played with real money. It is no joke. The surrender of so many former rights – habeas corpus, the right to a trial, the freedom from torture during interrogation, freedom of movement without “papers” in one’s own country – has changed the playing field forever, changed the game.

Third Generation Hacking means accepting nothing at face value, learning to counter counter-threats with counter-counter-counter-moves. It means all means and ends are provisional and likely to transform themselves like alliances on the fly.

Third Generation Hacking is the ability to free the mind, to live vibrantly in a world without walls.

Do not be deceived by uniforms, theirs or ours, or language that serves as uniforms, or behaviors. There is no theirs or ours, no us or them. There are only moments of awareness at the nexus where fiction myth and fact touch, there are only moments of convergence. But if it is all on behalf of the Truth it is Hacking. Then it can not fail because the effort defines what it means to be human in a cyborg world. Hackers are aware of the paradox, the irony and the impossibility of the mission as well as the necessity nevertheless of pursuing it, despite everything. That is, after all, why they’re hackers.

Thanks to Simple Nomad, David Aitel, Sol Tzvi, Fred Cohen, Jaya Baloo, and many others for the conversations that helped me frame this article.

©2001 Richard Thieme. All Rights Reserved.

[Published originally in Porcupine as a "literary" story, subsequently reprinted in Zahir, a lovely science fiction magazine edited by Sheryl Tempchin.  It has been critiqued, too, as an "essay." So there you have it - life in the 21st century.

I received a telephone call from a former intelligence analyst for one of the agencies after it was published. He was laughing, he said, because this story reminded him of Three Days of the Condor, the Robert Redford film about a CIA analyst who read fiction to determine what was true.  "About 5% of this story," he said, "is fiction, but the trick is knowing which 5%."   His estimate was a bit on the low side, but the challenge is the same: among so many words, which ones are the key to the crypto?]

By Richard Thieme

I used to think that death bed revelations were nonsense. I knew lots of guys who kept their vows to the last breath. Some even spread disinformation as they died under torture. Intelligence professionals have discipline that sticks, most of the time.

I was sure that I did too.

Then I got the diagnosis. Cancer, inoperable. All through the gut. Stomach, liver, the intestines.

As if I couldn’t guess.

Luckily we manage pain well these days. I feel as much as I want to feel. The pain reminds me that my life is nearly over. I don’t want to forget that. A morphine haze reduces the urgency I need to make myself tell the truth. If I find myself drifting into a fog, dreaming about something in my non-existent future, I ease up on the meds until I vomit, bent double and clutching my gut, then take pills until I’m coherent again but can still remember that I only have a day or two left.

I am writing to three of you (you each know why and do not need to know the identity of the others) and sending one copy to a writer who will know how to use this information. He is not one of the usual suspects, not a name you would know, certainly not one of the useful idiots we use to spread disinformation. (We have more reporters in our stable than stars in the sky. And they say that two sources validate a story!) I am giving it to a man who understands that fiction is the only way to tell the truth.

I am also giving the story to a blogger, but just one. So real gold will be buried on the Net like the dwarf did in that fairy tale. (That’s an inside joke. You’ll understand in a minute.)

You remember the fairy tale, right? A guy forced a dwarf to tell him where gold was buried in a forest? But he didn’t have a shovel? So he tied a scarf around the tree and went to get one after making the dwarf swear he wouldn’t untie it? But while he was gone, the dwarf tied scarves around all of the trees?

So one blog, at least, will have it right.

My God but this pain is intense. With each wave, more of the contents of my life tumble into the darkness. I feel pieces of myself fall away with every breath. Memory modules disconnect and disappear—so many stories, so much distortion, so many lies. I don’t even know what’s true anymore.

I have been instrumental in building the false history that you live in, that you believe. I created false points of reference to anchor your beliefs. You have been wandering in a mist, thinking the sun was shining brightly. I confused the darkness for the sunlight, too. Is that any consolation? Maybe that’s why I want to tell you the truth about Roswell. I just want to shed a little real light before I die.

The human condition is hard enough, what with death mincing our memories, shredding the fabric of our shared mythical history. Many events leave no record at all. Orders were whispered and once they were carried out, the deed never happened. Most real history disappears. The narratives that remain are often bound together with glue to create illusions, but over time, even those lose the ability to stick. Things fall apart.

Nothing is what it seems.

Working in the intelligence community all my life, I know how most nodes, the keys that unlock the real stories, are hidden or were altered to blend in with an acceptable narrative, the consensus reality in which you live. Without a point of reference, don’t you see, you can’t know what you don’t know. But the points of reference are hidden on other planes in some kind of complex non-Euclidean space. Most of us Masters know some but not all, a few of us know most. Those nodes require keys to a code, but even if you had them, they would lead you into a cul-de-sac. The solutions to the puzzles are always layered, and to see it whole, you would have to go through a portal into hyper-dimensional space and turn around and see how everything looks from there.

Enigma is one example. There are many more.

Before it was known that the Allies cracked the German code, everything written about the war, about Churchill, what he knew when, what FDR might know, was written from a false point of reference. Once historians knew that he knew what he knew and when, everything shifted, the entire context of how you humplings knew your own history shifted. History not only looked different, history was different. What you thought you had lived was seen in a parallax view. It makes you dizzy to realize this, I know, so you recoil into a saner, more comfortable place. It is going to take energy for you to listen to what I am saying.

But please do listen. Please, you who for a moment are free of pain and live in the light and think the darkness will not win. That’s one of the myths you celebrate in story and song. But I am already fluctuating between the fading light and the immense waiting darkness and I can see that the darkness does win. It does. So please, please listen.

I am going to alter your beliefs. However disingenuous I may sometimes seem, I want to bequeath to you humplings the little bit of the bigger truth that I still have.

Oh? You’re not familiar with that term, humplings?

Let’s say that humanity makes up a bell curve and it looks like an animal, OK? It has a snout, a big hump and a tail. Ten per cent live in the nose. Ten per cent live in the tail. Up front are the Masters who manage reality. That’s us. Back in the tail are the dregs. They’re benchmarks that humplings use to tell themselves they’re doing fine. That’s why we keep them. The eighty per cent that live in the hump—that’s the humplings. That’s you. You inch along inside a shared consensus like a huge worm. Your world is defined by things that are real but they’re contextualized by those points of reference I mentioned, the ones we provide. The index by which you arrange memories and thoughts, in other words, creates an illusive matrix in which you live but which you never see.

Fish in water. Humplings in a hump.

Since shortly after World War 2, we have managed that hump. We had to, don’t you see. Humplings don’t know what’s best for themselves. Humplings are happiest when kept busy and not quite comfortable. Then you buy things you don’t need in pursuit of a peace you will never have. The thirty year mortgage, one of our ideas, was sheer genius. During your potentially dangerous years, it keeps you invested in stability, chasing a dream. Because you want to keep believing what you believe, you’re easy to deceive. We use sleight of hand or illusion, and if something leaks, we discredit or ridicule the sources. Then we can hide it in plain sight. Everyone swears it isn’t there and walks all around it.

We Masters make history, then hide it. We have put so many people into power, if I were to tell you their names, these political figures around the world we have assisted in different ways, you’d be amazed. The list is long, and the names are distinguished.

But this isn’t a primer on the Big Picture. I need to tell you just enough about our work to help you make sense of the Roswell event. But first, you need some new points of reference.

You do want to know, don’t you? I mean, ever since you heard that an alien spacecraft might have crashed in the New Mexico desert in 1947, ever since you heard that alien bodies might have been found or that a rancher maybe showed his kid material you couldn’t burn or break, ever since you heard of technologies we might have seeded into R&D, giving them to Bell Labs, Xerox Park, RCA, IBM and other friendly household names so alien technologies would become part of the history Americans pretend to have invented–you do want to know how much of that was real, don’t you?

Think of how the story came to you in pieces. When did you first hear it? What did you hear? You can’t remember, can you? It’s all a confabulated blur. Where do you get your information? From television, right? From a joke in a sitcom or on a talk show, from books or movies or reading tabloid headlines while waiting to pay at the supermarket – that’s how we do it, slipping it little by little into the known and familiar, using repetition and reinforcement until there’s a shared memory. You repeat those falsehoods to each other until they become facts.

You can’t change reality, but you can change the facts.

Anyway, the grays that crashed in the desert were not the first. Aliens had been exploding out of portals for centuries, keeping us under surveillance. Sometimes they landed to check our reactions. Chariots in the skies, visions of angels and saints. Once we were able to see them as machines with people from other places, they altered their strategy, showing themselves but keeping a polite distance until we were used to their presence. Like NORAD telling radar guys to ignore the blips, those are only “visitors” coming down the coast at impossible speeds. It became like walking through pigeons in the park, not even noticing they’re there. Some look a lot like us and blend in well, studying our languages and cultures, doing a physical now and then on a “volunteer.” They did sophisticated brain scans long before we even knew how electric we were.

Mostly they maintained sentinels until—now, I don’t know this for a fact but we believe it’s the least unlikely hypothesis—we were on the brink of becoming a Second Level species. Then they paid closer attention.

This is inference, I want to be clear about that. I know why I believe it but I can’t tell you. There’s too much back story, not all of it verifiable, and anyway, there isn’t time. I wish I had started telling the truth sooner.

I was involved plenty but not at the top. Smarter people than me are managing this thing. We relate to one another through a compartmented matrix of need-to-know modules and comprise an elite managerial class. Of course, sometimes we’re as bumbling as humplings but we always forgive ourselves quickly. We have developed quite a confident culture after several generations of sanctioned protected malfeasance.

But I digress. (I need to take a pill. Please wait).

OK. Here’s an example you ought to be able to understand.

Most of you use the Internet, right? OK, good.

The Internet is a two-edged sword. Like speech or writing or printed words, any symbolic matrix invites projections. We empty the contents of our minds, our souls, even, onto the symbols. We can’t help it. We reveal ourselves every time we communicate. The Net sucks everything out of us, good bad and indifferent.

Bad guys use the net too. (We’re the good guys, remember; whoever we’re fighting is bad.) After Northwoods Two, when the war on terror cranked up and the flow of funds and the fear that fuels it was at a level needed to keep you guys manageable, the evil doers ramped up their use of the Net for all sorts of nefarious purposes. They planned attacks, moved money, communicated with stealth. Their web sites multiplied like roaches.

Now, that fact alone made humplings anxious, just knowing how fast the sites were growing. We amplified your fear by using the “nightly news” to do “in depth” features on terrorist web sites. They would show a few photos with a voiceover that distorted what viewers saw, added a few sound bites, hell, the entire text might be no more than eighty words, all designed to frighten you. Then ads would soothe you and you would go out and buy a ton of stuff.

Some of you, however, quite predictably, became enraged. Fear turns to anger easily, especially in men afraid to feel fear. Then you have to do something to discharge the emotion. If you’re a hacker, you’ll attack those web sites, thinking you’re helping the cause.

But invisible enemies are dangerous. We don’t want the web sites down. We want them up so we can track who visits, watch what they download, see who talks to who. It’s their highway, too, and that way we can track their cars.

So when a well-intentioned humpling defaces or DOSes an enemy web site, we have to go in and put it back up. In the past, we invented anonymizers, built email programs like Hotmail and migrated them into the public domain, made all sorts of honeypots. Half the attractions out there, the most attractive attractions, we made. We have partnered from the beginning with the big guys, don’t you see. We built remote access into the chips, into all the hardware, in fact, even printers, as well as the software that’s now a platform for the business of the world. We go into telecom networks at the front door, sniff cables on the ocean floor, have thousands of redundant sensors in space to watch everything. You can’t sneak out for a cigarette but that we detect the smoke. We’re plugged in at the root, have back doors into most components—we don’t even intercept signals much anymore. We just sit back and let the data come to us.

The whole network is metered. If someone uses crypto, it’s already cracked, and the fact of its use tells us they’ve something to hide. We encourage paranoia by planting those stories, then fear makes people predictable, they go on automatic and they’re easy to track.

Some of those bad guy sites were a real mess. They didn’t have a clue how to write code. We had to do remote administration, install fire walls, close holes, apply patches. Sometimes we kept the holes open, of course. That’s how we get in. So when some do-gooder tells the world about a software flaw, we have to get to them right away and tell them to stop. Those holes are useful. You can’t exploit a secure Net.

So well-intentioned humplings are a headache. They want to do good, when all we want them to do is nothing. We want them distracted. We don’t want partners. We don’t need partners. All we need are secrecy and the vast resources of potentates and kings.

Stay with me, now. OK? I’m telling you this so I can show you what the aliens did. This has a point.
It’s not easy, I know. Humplings are not used to thinking outside the lines, and it’s hard for Americans anyway to understand other cultures. We don’t appreciate people who blow themselves up, for example. Even though we do it too. But we make it look different, like something Americans do. Then you don’t notice.

After we realized why the grays died in the crash, we experimented with chemicals to make our soldiers ferocious. Nothing worked. They killed each other and everyone in sight, not just enemies. We’re getting there, though. Now we know that the fear of death or the fear of anything, really, is a function of protein clusters. Strathin, for example, a protein chain that effaces fear. We’re using it to create warriors who will do just about anything. Berserkers, we call them. In the past, we had to wait for their random appearance in a population. Now we make them.

Berserkers are our version of guys willing to commit suicide. We hide the purpose in the concept of a “hero” and send them down a parade route off to war.

The aliens knew how to make grays fearless when we were just learning to store data by making incisions in wet clay. Grays are the little guys with the big heads and big eyes that seem to hypnotize people (it’s really a kind of magnetic induction—their brains, like ours, are resonant with energies transmitted in fields, but they’re more intentional about it, and of course, their large designer brains do it better).

Anyway, they made grays both with and without fear. The latter we called their suicide crashers, once we knew what they had done. The four small beings found dead or dying at the crash site had volunteered to die for the mission. They made it look like an accident because they knew that our species, barely sentient after a long preparatory sleepwalking sort of ascent, still thinks accidents happen.

The Aliens knew our weapons were getting better, and our propulsion systems, communications, materials science, everything was leapfrogging ahead thanks to our frequent wars. They knew our science and saw that relatively soon, our practice would follow from our theories. We would become dangerous, maybe pose a threat to some of their allies. Even without their help, we would one day learn how to open portals and use them to slip through spacetime. It was implicit in our physics.

They knew we would discover how they went into black holes and came out of white, how they could bunch up spacetime like a rug and bring it from there to here in a snap. They knew we would learn how to negate gravity and use arrays of lasers to create negative energy, then make black holes big enough to exploit.

They decided they would lose little in the long run by accelerating our progress. They sacrificed a pawn to take a queen. They gave us the means of advancing faster along the road we were already traveling in exchange for direct access to our thinking.

Imagine the scene. The hole in the hillside, the remains of the wreckage sticking out, was still smoking. The perimeter had been secured. We had cover stories to give whoever showed up related to whatever clearances they had so they could make sense of what they saw.

It’s dark out there in the desert on a moonless night. We didn’t have night vision then – that was one of the technologies in the wreckage – and we didn’t want to light the place up like Times Square. Hundreds of workers on hands and knees with lights on their hats like miners scoured the site so everything would be gone by dawn. When they finished they brought in shovels and removed the top layers of contaminated sand, then molded the landscape back so no one could tell.

Two grays were dead on the ground. One was nearly dead. The other was injured but alive.

Our medics were useless. The transparent fluid circulating in their well-machined bodies was beyond our understanding. This is when we still thought that “natural” and “artificial” were meaningful distinctions, remember, that “made” and “born” meant different things.

The third alien died in minutes. The forth was leaning on a rock, gasping for breath. It was suffocating but we didn’t know that, we didn’t know if the noises indicated pain or distress or whether it was trying to say something. As it turned out, it was all of the above. It knew that imitating our speech, making noises that carried in the air, that is,
wouldn’t be intelligible, so the being reached out to the small circle of concerned personnel crouching around it with intense beams of electromagnetic energy. Everybody got headaches. They thought they inhaled something toxic. But the gray was simply sweeping a shaped field through an arc to try to tell us that we had taken one or two steps in a journey of a thousand and were just beginning to climb from the vast cave of night into the starlight.

When they were all dead, we shipped the bodies on different flights to Texas and Ohio. They were packed up and crated in the desert, not back at the base. All that nonsense about the mortician and the nurse, that’s crap. Those stories were part of a Loch Ness scenario, locals trying to create a tourist destination.

The counter intelligence guy at the base was terrified when he read the message we told him to send, that one of those flying discs had crashed and we had the wreckage. He should have sent it with a “destroy” memo on a data page but was too freaked. So later I had to track them down and change “disc” to “weather balloon.” We amplified that into Project Mogul once we could.

That’s not speculation. That happened. I know because I did it.

Anyway, we had protocols for investigating crashes, first, of German, then Soviet planes. We collected everything and wiped out any traces that remained. We transported all of the material in special containers for analysis and subsequent distribution. We put our clothing in special containers too. We seized material a rancher had gathered. We rounded up witnesses and kept them in a room for hours. We threatened them with big fines and prison time if they said a word. We told them how traitors were discredited, their careers and reputations destroyed. We alluded to people who had disappeared, who turned up dead one day, victims of “sudden adult death syndrome.” Everyone signed a secrecy agreement with heavy penalties and then went home.

We followed them out into the desert night.

I have lived in that long desert night for sixty years. Dying made me see the light: the light is everything, everything that matters. Darkness is the enemy.

I spent my entire life in that darkness. Now I must betray it.

The small craft that crashed was not what they used for serious trips. Their mother ships are immense—some are half a mile long. They park them remotely and disguise them as space junk, just as we do with backup and killer satellites. But the little ship had plenty of treasure.

Over time we fed everything into R&D. We were developing fronts and proprietaries then that made it easy. The President obliged by giving us carte blanche to do as we liked. Money went to fake foundations with one or two members who transferred it to the Ford Foundation, say, or the Rockefeller Foundation or any of the hundred foundations that existed only on paper. Then it flowed onto balance sheets written with invisible ink, winding up in corporate and university labs. On the government side, we began budgeting black projects and millions of dollars, later billions, were hidden in existing missions. Seeding projects was easy. Keeping secrets was easy. The problem was understanding what the stuff was, what it was good for. Some of it, we still don’t know.

We didn’t have fiber optics, integrated circuits, networks of computers, don’t you see. We didn’t know that humans are electromagnetic systems for animating chemicals, that our brains can be tuned to wave functions to fly ships or fire weapons, make things move. We didn’t know that consciousness was non-local or that we could see anywhere we could think.

We didn’t know then that sentience was everywhere, linking up.

Do the research. Follow the money. See how historians say that microchips and lasers and super-tenacity fibers were invented. Map the process through a paper trail and computer files. Use FOIA, for heaven’s sake.

It looks like everything really was invented here, doesn’t it?

That’s what we did. We thought we were so damned smart.

When you’re dealing with alien civilizations and lack points of reference for how they think, how they construct reality, you don’t know how the pieces fit. There’s no picture on a puzzle box. We believed the event was the accidental crash of a small exploratory crew.

The event, in fact, like everything else, was dual use. It served their purpose and ours at the same time. It was beautifully designed and executed. Let’s give them credit for that. The technological benefit to us was immense—they knew what we valued—but what we created had even greater value for them, for these species that had watched us for ages and watched again as we took their gifts and swarmed out of a dark cave like bats at twilight and colonized our solar system telerobotically with an aggressiveness they knew needed to be modified or managed.

They couldn’t take any chances. They had to understand the mind of the whole hive.

The military industrial complex—add education, entertainment, and the media to the mix—used those tools to build the Net. It was built for easy access, based on trust, as if built for a single tribe. But tribes also distrust one another, and as the Net became a platform for the whole planet, we exploited those attributes to create a capacity for ubiquitous surveillance, data mining, intrusion on a panoptic scale. With back doors in every system, space loaded with multi-spectral ever-open eyes, we had the whole world locked down. We were the smarty-cats that ate the canary. We were the top of the top of the food chain. We became complacent.

We opened the gate and wheeled in the Trojan horse.

We found technology in an “accidental crash” and used it to build the Net, just as they intended. Then we did our thinking on the Net. We poured out the contents of our minds and psyches for everyone to see. Too late we realized what we had done, too late to disconnect mission-critical military and intelligence nets. But it wouldn’t have mattered if we had. Back doors were implicit in how we used the tools they gave us, how we had to use them, given what they were. Self-revelation is axiomatic to the architecture of the Net.

We might as well have sat naked in our bedrooms, shivering in the dark, waiting for the doorknob handle to turn.

We were patsies. We were playing a game that was way over our heads.

They crashed so we would reverse engineer the technology we found. Did anyone wonder at the time why it was all intact? No. The obvious is invisible. Obviously, if they had wanted to destroy the ship they would have wired it to explode. We never war-gamed a vehicle coming to us bearing technological puzzles tailor-made for the kinds of games we like to play.

So we built a platform onto which humankind projected the contents of its soul. Then anyone with access could understand us better than we understood ourselves. We revealed ourselves in embarrassing detail. No longer did our visitors have to sit in libraries, doing tedious research, or listen endlessly to mind-numbing sitcoms that taxed the limits of even their mission-specific brains. They did not have to go to any more cocktail parties and pretend to enjoy themselves while they took notes.

We told them everything, everything about us. Now they know.

And now, you know too. I swore I would never tell. But I am dying and my family is in hiding. I want to shine a little light before the darkness swallows me up.

Our only hope is to link up. They seduced us into building the Net. Now we must use it to transcend ourselves and transcend our former purpose and perhaps theirs. Something genuinely new can still come of all this.

I know it’s hard for you to grasp how you were duped, how you have lived your lives in a maze you could never escape. You were hoodwinked, you were conned by the Masters who manage your planet, an elite that pretends to care for and tend you.

But we too were conned. By diverse unnamable incomprehensible species from the stars.

Once the shock diminishes, once you accept that you were betrayed, please trust each other even if you can’t trust us—and how could you, after what we did? Please be motivated deeply by a thirst for revenge. Use that primitive gene to get back into the game.

Maybe they planned this move too. Maybe they’re fifteen moves ahead. Maybe we play in four dimensions and they play in M-space.

Who knows?

Not me. I only know we have been deceiving you humplings with false stories for years. I didn’t know we were also deceiving ourselves. We said we did it for you, but in fact, we were drunk on power and needed control. Our goal was the social, economic and political control of the planet. You were expendable.

I used you. I’m sorry. I knew what I was doing but I didn’t know the cost.

So that’s the story. Roswell was a zero day and this is the moment of disclosure. But like most disclosure, it’s too late to do anything about it. The zero day is everywhere.

We are owned.

But we can still make it work for us. Everything is dual use, as I said. They can’t play the game if we aren’t here. Hackers don’t crash the Net because then there wouldn’t be a game. The Net should have crashed many times but someone always stood it back up. Domain Name Servers are loaded with holes, but someone keeps patching them.

Someone remotely administers the Earth from a mother ship in the Kuiper Belt.

Someone wants us in the game.

Perhaps you can use the hive mind we have created on the Net to lose and find yourselves, to self-transcend and play the game at the next level with a new handle on your altered identity.

Do what you can. That’s all I ask.

We got you into this mess. It’s up to you to get us out.

[This was published in the Timber Creek Review in 2005. I'm glad it was. Like "The Geometry of Near," it's a geek story, and the people on whom the character Gibby McDivitt was based comes clearly and with a chuckle to mind. The story links to "They Call Him Mister Tubby" in Imaginary Gardens (May 1998). The admonition for a snap judgement about the hero of this story, too, could be, "Think twice."

"Gibby" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.]

The Palace of Dreams in Sheboygan Sprawl, disguised as one of those ordinary shops to which people still come when they want to be with people instead of simulations, is tucked into an alleyway behind cafes, mushroom shops, dollarmark stores and a franchised Thrift Shop. This particular P.D. is a Gambling Den. Some people enter, place bets and watch results without noticing anything unusual. Others pass through the portal and are never heard from again.

The close proximity of the Palace to the Thrift Shop is not accidental. The Palace of Dreams is the fulfillment of an implicit promise made by Gibby McDivitt and Thrift Shops, TTX from the moment they exploded onto the scene. Even Gibby didn’t know that, though, until his celebrated vision years later closed that loop of his life.

Thrift Shops do a booming business, selling decanting and AlterGene ™ kits on narrow margins, relying on volume and economies of scale to make a little money … make that a lot of money, multiply a little times millions of shops, it’s a lot. Thrift Shops, TTX is in all eighteen countries, six hundred fourteen sprawls, and every mini-hood – millions of near-identical plots of housing and retail blocks – has one.

There are only one hundred forty-three Palace of Dream shops, however, and they aren’t easy to find. They are disguised as gambling dens, eat-and-drinks, mini-massage shops, zero-day parks. No directory contains them, no map shows them, and no one who happens to enter one realizes what it is – until it’s too late. Part of the shiver of delight running down everyone’s backs right now is the fact that the Palace is kind of a secret, a rumor, really, a story of a secret that changes in the telling in a world in which privacy doesn’t exist.

But the Palace did not just pop out of thin air. We’re getting ahead of ourselves. There is a history which in retrospect makes sense. So let us return to the early years and what we know or think we know of the life of Gibby McDivitt.

Once upon a time, the CEO of Thrift Shops, TTX, Gibby McDivitt, was a pimply pasty-faced hacker of enormous proportions. Everybody knows the official picture of Gibby, an image projected for decades into the sim-world from an old photo, radically altered, the only one he allowed out, a fish-eye lensing from below and behind of his big butt and back and broad shoulders in his famous chrome-and-leather-flecked chair, his hands out of sight, presumably in his lap, his pumpkin-like head thrust forward at an odd angle toward a wall-screen where three naked women and two naked men play games, vaguely out of focus, with big colorful plastic toys.

Everybody knows too the story the corporation invented for public consumption. As a child and teen, the tale goes, Gibby virtually lived in his basement, or rather, lived virtually in his basement, hacking his heart out. At six he cracked open world bank crypto. At eight he listened to whispers from deserts and jungles of terrorists and cartel chieftains, at nine he heard similar whispers from corporate boardrooms. That was the end of Gibby’s innocence. He infiltrated metranets, piggybacked on satellite transmissions, mirrored multiple broadcasts, commandeered thousands of zombies, filtering massive downloads through an automated program he coded himself. He listened to intercepts and learned that boardrooms were a better place to play than the jungle or desert, so he sent transcripts of the sheiks and chiefs to secret email addys of corporate heads, world police chiefs, and top guys at Franchised Warriors, TTX. Then he intercepted their anxious conversations before they responded formally and learned of the close ties between sheiks and generals and chiefs and corporate boardrooms. The truth, as usual, was worse than anyone guessed. Ah-ha! thought Gibby. So everybody colludes, everybody hides behind false flags and dummy companies, everybody plays the same game.

Nothing, he realized, is what it seems – an important lesson to learn at such a tender age.

So while wannabe hackers rebelled against The Man, planting drive-bys and spraying graffiti on web-sites, Gibby put away childish things and became The Man. He saw that hacking for its own sake was silly. He tired of bragging rights, he had more trophies than all the rest put together. There had to be a bigger payoff, something to make the risks worthwhile. With great patience, he listened and pondered, educating himself in the ways of the world and building a database of clandestine relationships that became the core intellectual property of Industrial Discovery, TTX, his first hugely successful company. And what exactly did ID do? It wore a digital mask, that’s what, hiding behind shelters, veiled by a maze of dummy fronts while Gibby at ten a.k.a. his many diverse aliases sold information in packets of various size. He learned that the key was to leverage the known against the unknown, the possible against the likely, and he always hedged his bets.

Gibby McDivitt became a player.

That’s when he became McDivitt, too. Gibby whoever-he-was borrowed the name from a blonde starlet he loved from afar, whacking off with gusto to her wall-sized simulation. (That was Melissa McDivitt, of course, no secret there). No one knew his real name, but as Gibby said a thousand times until it became the well-known mantra of Thrift Shops, TTX, “What’s real anyhow?”

Gibby seldom left the immense padded chair which replaced the chrome-and-leather-flecked one when it collapsed. That meant he could focus on work and play in ways that healthier entrepreneurs could not. Persistence, obsessiveness and polymorphously perverse hunger and lust, those were his drivers. People who worried about the general good were lamers, Gibby decided. Wise beyond his years in some ways, obviously stunted in others, he focused not on making money, which past a certain point was just another way to collect trophies, but on the pleasures of adolescence which were infinitely saleable as well as supreme bliss to his quasi-developed mind. He played square-wall four-D immersive games in a room-sized knowledge cube, forty by twenty by twenty. He farmed out manufacturing, distribution, and marketing, managing legal issues by knowing the dope on competitors. As his confidence grew he used his name to brand his antics and achieved an astonishing measure of corporate glory, but that was a mere sideshow compared to the satisfaction of knowing his global impact, indicated by the distribution of millions of images of Gibby stooped to the screen in his pleasure dome, as well as the sales of octobillions of sexy digital stuff. A world of users, the ones who mattered, the ones who were plugged in or with it, internalized his image as a goal-state and hungrily swallowed whatever he sold.

This early success was years before Gibby practically invented the industry of SynthoLife ™ and began selling genemod kits under the brand-name AlterGene ™. This all occurred when the world was still simply digital, an innocent time of simulations and symbols, all outside the mind. For young Gibby selling sex was a labor of love. He downloaded millions of pictures and videos, looking and listening and lapping up every fetish and its variations. In his undisciplined ardor, however, he sprained both wrists and developed repetitive stress in both elbows. Sitting one day in the deep cushions of his padded throne, gloomy and inert, his impaired arms strapped to therapy-boards, he realized he needed an assistant. As so often happens in the world of commerce, fulfilling this need in himself simultaneously met the needs of countless others. He built Haptic Hands ™ and made a fortune selling them worldwide.

Haptic Hands attached to any console and worked with any OS. On spoken or tapped command they oozed Vaseline, canola oil, or mayonnaise to taste. The hands felt like real flesh, made from silica-carbonates (basic), vat-grown flesh (enhanced), or whole hands grown on the backs of pigs (super-deluxe). They could be fitted with leather gloves, red or blue latex, or cuddly soft white fleece. The best-selling plug-in was Sheepie, made of cotton wool, fresh liver delivered daily, and squeezable silicon-bubble liners. HandMate ™, designed for women, came with four hundred fourteen options ranging in size from the microtype egg of Zenillia pullata to Toro Gordo surnamed y Gigante.

Haptic Hands 2.0 added audio plug-ins in every known language and hundreds of scents. Pheromones quivered in the air, wall-sized 3-D images bucked and humped, and cries and moans exploded in octophonic Gibby-surround-sound ™ while Haptic Hands did all the work.

He made money hand over fist, so to speak. As the official corporate bio states, his companies “took the experience of Outside In as far as it could go.” They delivered the most real virtual joys a human/computer symbiot could design (supply side) or savor (consumer) but inevitably encountered the limitations of conveying experience solely to the senses. However varied or refined, spectator sex was equivalent to a hungry orphan standing in the snow, watching a family eat in a warm well-lighted cafe, his nose to the cold glass. The success of Haptic Hands, to the degree that it gave great fantasy, revealed the shortcomings of the Hands and of all simulated ventures: It ultimately felt like drinking from a dribble-glass. The user felt used … and very wet.

“We must get inside the user experience,” Gibby wrote in a now-famous memo. “We must create the lived experience of every sexual pleasure, not only from external sources, but inside the subjective field of the user. We must paste it onto the eyeballs from the inside, then couple the subjective experience with a digital container of complementary design.

“Instead of making a filmic experience, we must alter user chemistry so that users co-create their own experience while interacting with digital simulations. This will enable users to choose and then design their own pleasures and engineer them so when we provide a container, they can use it to turn themselves on instead of counting on someone else to do it for them (all italics are Gibby’s).

“If we execute this game plan,” the memo concluded, “habituation will no longer constitute a boundary around profits.”

“Fetish mods!” said his Chief Scientist, the well-known Helly Gerlach, winner of two Nobels. “You’re talking about fetish-mods!”

Indeed he was. Gibby had been dreaming of fetish-mods for years. He had noticed when still a child the growing popularity of animal mods at hacker cons. Tigers with tattooed skin and fangs, spindly bird-men with feather-grafts, barrel-chested primates with thick fur became as common as Klingons at Star Trek fairs. The alterations, however, were cosmetic, however striking the results. Reconstructive surgery went mainstream around the same time, turning people into plastic manikins with implanted smiles. That was all fine, but geez, Gibby realized, if people could mess with their genes, grow feathers or fangs, then kits to make that kind of play possible would sell like crazy.

While he was dreaming, advancements in science made it possible to hack the genome. But that wasn’t enough. Genetic engineering meant shuffling and splicing genes, making tomatoes that didn’t freeze or fish that glowed in the dark, enhancing what evolution spawned, not creating new attributes, talents, new ways of being human, new experience, new varieties, new species, all out of whole cloth. Now, that was exciting!

The breakthrough was called SynthoLife ™ and it meant the generation of unique subjective and/or physical facts (tightly coupled) through the creation, manipulation and alteration of “artificial” protein clusters that in turn initiated body-or-brain to brain-self chains of new human experience. Instead of flooding the apparatus of cognition with conception-level scenarios (like three-on-twos on a vast dynamic screen) they could work at the level of perception; the very means by which we perceive and feel and above all get off can be hacked to the root, Gibby cried. We can hack the mind of God! We can use the best ideas of the biosphere but improve on them and in the lucrative domain of fantasy sex, invent any trigger, scenario or fetish! People can build their own pleasure-sensors and we can be their partners, fabricating the scenery. Give away AlterGene kits and let the good times roll!

Seized by the vision, Gibby beheld in his mind-space something akin to orgasmic pleasure but better, oh so much better. Oh yeah, baby! Better! Gibby saw like a mountain range that went on forever repeated peaks of orgasmic joy achieved through inner-built rituals and then – oh, and this was his genius! – then going ever higher through escalating sets of more, better and different experience using mix-and-match plug-and-play templates for which he already held the patents! had already data based as the matrix of his digital sex delivery system. The only limit to sexual pleasure was human imagination. His thousands of employees had plenty of that but would now be joined by legions of hackers making AlterGenies in their basements, thus combining the best of open source and monopolistic practice.

Gibby hired the best hackers and set them loose. Why, he wondered aloud, had he found so fascinating the primitive pleasures of hacking communications, mapping the digital world, understanding the energy flow in the hive mind? It was child’s play compared to creating new species.

“I was born to dream, yes,” he wrote in a memo to employees, “but this is not my dream, it’s yours! The dream belongs to the world! How do you want to come today? That’s what we sell, the power to make your dreams real! Our digital worlds cooperate or collaborate with your desires to create an authentic seamless experience of your own design and choosing!”

So AlterGenies were born – synthesized protein modules that generated self-defined subjective experience and/or behaviors that when triggered became self-fulfilling prophecies. The user was both arrow and target. Brain-and-body to brain-self, fffthwat! AlterGenies replaced the Digital Circus, making it seem so one-dimensional, so last year.

The first AlterGene kits were distributed free through the underground, letting hackers do proof of concept, test the betas – and get Mister Gibby and company off the hook. In order to get the goodies, users had to remove the LockTite ™ wrap which action in and of itself validated the User Agreement and sent a record of the transaction wirelessly to the Main Database. According to the pact, users signed off on all and any negative effects, including “unforeseen, unwanted, or otherwise horrific shocking or sickening alterations, mutations, psychotic breaks or unintended deaths.” Your miniature dick could become an anaconda and choke you to death, your quail-egg balls could inflate to the size of pumpkins, your clit could engorge like a puffer-fish, none of it would matter. The game could only be played with real meat, real money on the table of life.

The famous case of the Alligator Boy went all the way to the World Court. The panel of judges found for the defendant. “The creative use of AlterGene kits would be inhibited if the manufacturer had to accept responsibility for what users do with them,” the opinion read. “Thrift Shops, TTX is no more responsible for the misfortunes of this poor sad leather-faced lad than a pencil manufacturer for whatever a pencil-user might write with a primitive wooden yellow number two.”

In the aggregate, despite initially high but declining numbers of blunders, the risks were worth it, and anyway, real risk enhanced the rush of early adopters. Thrift Shops, TTX held an AlterGene Festivus in Times Square and one of Gibby’s look-alikes handed out hundreds of thousand of kits free to screaming teens.

They shut down Manhattan Sprawl for two whole days.

Meanwhile patents piled up. To use an AlterGene kit required that the user concede to Thrift Shops, TTX the first right of refusal if a marketable product resulted. The inventor received ten per cent of net profits. Gibby happily franchised patents in agriculture, medicine, cosmetics, physical enhancements like height and speed and wind and mental enhancements like making music or math or thinking fast or deeply or well. Let the biosphere recreate itself with gusto! Let new varieties of humans explore asteroids, plunge to sea depths heretofore unreachable, tunnel into caves and beyond to the center of the earth, plummet in meditation into inner space and return later with shining eyes proclaiming, “I understand! I understand!”

Let them do everything their hearts desired! Gibby laughed all the way to the digital bank, which was only a click away, and stayed faithful to his original goal which was simply getting off then getting off again then getting off once more.

The legislatures of the world were bought and paid for and he folded all of his smaller companies into Thrift Shops, TTX, the only place in the universe, digital or physical, where users could purchase AlterGene kits. Thrift Shops built in feedback loops by hiding Trojan genes that communicated chemically with sensors doubling as bioterror detectors so they always knew what users were doing.

The cautious grew custom fur, made tropical fish sing like birds, even grew shmoo-pigs that upon reaching a certain weight would hurl themselves into frying pans and cook themselves for dinner.

The more adventuresome followed Gibby into the Land of a Thousand Fetishes. They created sexual adventures for every trigger imaginable. No matter what happened in the world, someone somewhere was getting off on it because they had designed themselves to enjoy it. Meanwhile Gibby provided or licensed the right to provide the container.

Hackers brought their mischief and love of fun to the subculture too. They rewired shmoo-pigs to throw themselves out of windows, scrambled fish so they not only sang but screamed at all hours of the night. They created the choke-hold gene, a protein cluster that prevented orgasm just as it was about to erupt. They used monkey-like genes adapted to plastic splice-plugs and made household products and appliances cry “Snake! Snake!” whenever sensors detected a pencil or penis. They undermined fur-lovers in a retro gesture and turned them into hairless gray alien look-alikes.

Well, kids will be kids. Fun and games aside, Gibby was clear: he wanted to live forever in a blossoming garden of sexual delight. He didn’t even have to think about it. That passion, bone-deep, had been bred in him, and he never let an AlterGenie touch it.

Fixation on a particular stimulus, ritual, or bizarre family dynamic was identified as a function of the neuronal subsystem called G2. Once they knew which clusters of protein translated into particular simulations of external experience as it was replicated in adumbrated symbolic form in the subjective field of the human psyche, altering an imprinting or making one up was simple. Every imaginable attachment was generated, linked in odd combinations, and sold for gold.

Fetishes grew on the world farm like varieties of corn. A fetish was after all merely a constrained domain of involuntary excitement generally caused by an arbitrary imprint on an infantile nervous system. If a child was tickled by his mother’s toes, he might forever crave the sight or scent of similar toes. The polish would have to be identical (“I said rose pink, damn it! not burgundy!”), the wriggle of the piggy precise. Or maybe her dark hair brushed his infant face during a feeding. That was that! Forever the helpless lad would go weak at the sight or smell or touch of a brunette wearing a page boy or retro bob. Or maybe he quacked like a duck when lesbian sisters stripped down, ready to play, letting him watch. Because they were arbitrary, the variations were endless. And now people could plug in and play to their heart’s content, inventing the carrot, then trotting happily after.

Of course there was plenty of funny stuff, too, the things they loved to showcase in what they called “News In Depth,” those three minute briefs consisting of a few dozen pictures and thirty or forty words of text. One AlterBoy (as they called the first designer mutants) became excited when a woman simultaneously removed her long white leather gloves and whistled Hey Jude, the entire thing, followed by a heartbreaking rendition of Yesterday, his erection rising only at the last plaintive note. Another required that two men and two women dance in a syncopated rhythm while spitting lemonade out of their mouths in an endless shower called the Pink Fountain.

The really astonishing thing, Gibby reflected, was this: however unusual a passion might seem, within days web sites depicting it sprang up with thousands of graphic images, videos and narratives. AlterGenies did not need to be marketed. Users hunted them down like hounds, swapped and modified possibilities, stored up future thrills like squirrels hoarding nuts.

Then the seemingly inexplicable happened.

At first slowly, then at an accelerating pace, sales of AlterGene kits began to decline. When Thrift Shop analysts examined the data, the sound of hundreds of hands slapping hundreds of foreheads echoed around the campus. They titled the report to Mister Gibby, “A Collective DUH.”

Habituation had once more reared its debilitating head.

Gibby knew from the experience of cycling through excitements that there was a pattern to pursuit. At first he couldn’t get enough. Then he still wanted whatever it was but less often. Then he became bored and needed something new. He either had to escalate to more complex or challenging thrills or change the game he was playing.

Gibby cycled through fetishes, scenarios, and rituals almost as quickly as he ate. If he was no longer excited by a bald woman riding a tricycle in a Wonder Woman costume, he altered his genes and craved Batman or Robin on a snowboard. But he learned to his chagrin that no matter how often he changed pleasures, the joy-to-boredom cycle picked up where he last left off. The content was irrelevant; the experience itself grew tired, the habit of it, the pattern, the very essence of the thing he loved. The rapidly accelerating decay of the cycle was progressive and relentless. He might try a new scenario every day, or three a day, or once an hour. Nothing worked. Even with AlterGenies making all things new every morning after breakfast, the world could not generate sufficient carnal delight to keep him happy.

Gibby’s tantrums were legendary. Employees told stories of his wall-sized digital image apoplectic with rage and frustration, his fleshy arms flapping like flippers over the sides of his leather chair. His forehead wet with perspiration, his eyes buggy, his cheeks flushed, Gibby fulminated until he couldn’t breathe, then sat there gasping for breath, his anger unabated.

But this was his gift: the sane part of his brain remained aware of what was really happening. So Gibby knew that if he felt this way, others did too.

That’s why Gibby the super-sized love-bunny might grow angry or depressed but never despaired. The difference between good and great, he knew, was how one responds to adversity. He instructed R&D to find a fix.

The solution was ingenious and made Gibby happier and fatter than ever.

“Mister Gibby, if we develop a mod that lets users turn on the pleasure center in their own brains regardless of their predilection, they can experience the mother lode of ecstasy. Instead of chasing after the right trigger, the right fetish, the right scenario, the right woman man or animal, the right plastic appliance, users can go straight to the source of their joy.”

“But didn’t we learn in the last century,” asked the savvy entrepreneur, “that rats will press the pleasure-center button unceasingly and die of hunger, chained to their bliss?”

“We anticipated that question,” said the Chief Scientist. “The protein-globe that enables this action will have fail-safe splices. Built in obsolescence, for one. Its effectiveness will degrade over time. And we’ll change the license. Instead of buying outright, users will have to lease. They’ll pay by the minute in increments, barely noticing the drip-drip-drip of their money into our coffers. Our fortunes will expand geometrically as the user-base continues to grow.”

So iTouch ™ and the Golden Globe ™ went to market.

The upward-chaining mod was a big seller at first but once again habituation flattened the trajectory of sales, and it happened a lot faster than anyone anticipated. Undifferentiated pleasure, however – well, pleasurable – steeped the brain in PEA but soon became banal. The power of the drug wore off. Within six months, the world said, once again, ho-hum.

“We’re not rats, then,” Mister Gibby said with obvious irony to his lab man.

“No,” said the scientist ruefully, thinking of his stock options, tugging on his vee-shaped goatee. Gibby looked at the wall-sized face and the silly hair on his chinny-chin-chin and said, “Shave that goddamn thing, will you?”

The next time his image appeared the scientist was clean shaven but also quiet. It was the marketing director who had a solution.

“We need to create a world-wide immersive multi-player virtual environment,” Dorothy LeGume said to a jubilant Gibby. “We’ll call it WorldSpace. It will be brimming with all of the stimulations, attachments, plug-ins, mods and vibrating goodies developed since Haptic Hands … plus an evolving family of AlterGenies to enable users to plug into WorldSpace and become adept at developing scenarios and rituals as a – get this, Mister Gibby – as a team endeavor.”

This was the level of genius Gibby had nurtured in the hive mind of Thrift Shops, TTX, coming to flower. WorldSpace was the supreme pay-off. No longer would individuals lose themselves inside whatever fantasy they had altered themselves to enjoy. They would find greater and greater satisfaction only when they enjoyed sex as a tribal pursuit. The sex itself was the prize, yes, but the complex scenarios of meeting the right people in the digital space, dealing with disappointments, bouncing back, everyone pacing themselves so they all got off at the same time – this was the real reward. They would hunt in packs like wolves and devise alliances spanning the globe. The highest highs would no longer be achieved by individuals, couples or groups in isolation but by those who learned to play their roles in whole societies. AlterGenies to help people become better team players would raise the bar to a new level of competitiveness. Teams would scrounge the nooks and crannies of complex simulated worlds and work tirelessly into the night to create the precise scenarios needed to get off – then explode when and only when everyone was ready. The ripeness was all! Afterward the memory of their mutual orgasm popping through the population like a chain reaction would inspire them to build the next one even better.

Best of all, it would all take time, lots of time, patiently and painstakingly to plan and then execute the fantasy needed for a society to reach a collective climax. Millions would have to learn how to play together to maximize the mind-blowing peak of each, and time, Gibby knew, was money, honey. Time was the ticking of millions of tiny payments drop by drop into the coffers of what now ceased to be known as Thrift Shops, TTX.

WorldSpace, TTX, was the new holding company that absorbed Thrift Shops and the other companies created to sustain the vast play space. Collective play became huge, bigger than AlterGenes even, and soon the tail wagged the genemod dog. Hackers developed mods to equip people to play at a global level, and as people learned that delaying pleasure increased their ultimate ecstasy, a new kind of world emerged.

Within two years seventy per cent of the world’s population was engaged in WorldSpace. Never before had so many been willing to postpone pleasure for so long in order to reap delirium later. Their single primal scream when the spit hit the fat was heard around the world – and, according to the space station crew in low earth orbit, even in space (although that report was suspect, because all of the crew were players).

Secondary factors kicked it. Pleasure for some could only be postponed so long. Not everyone could wait. The impatient making up the tail of the bell curve resembled little children twitching to go to the restroom. So sub-scenarios evolved, littler worlds within WorldSpace, letting the least and the last reach frequent mini-peaks of elation while practicing patience at the same time. Little dribbling come-times functioned like training wheels. In turn, nested levels of different sexual timelines enabled the building of incredibly complex games. The top rung held the Masters who reached higher and higher levels of completion but every rung had to be linked and tuned to the one below and above.

The real surprises were always unforeseen. The biggest shocker was the discovery that the supreme peak toward which multiple games began to build simultaneously in a kind of trans-orgasmic frenzy would be reached only after a fifth of the players were dead. Twenty per cent, in other words, were setting the stage for a blockbuster blow-out that they themselves would miss. Even more shocking was that after this was known, they played anyway. AlterGenies making self-sacrifice rich and delicious replaced their original goals and those who survived to rise to the heights even felt let down, wondering if they had won the red ribbon instead of the blue.

No one could have predicted these events from initial conditions and then-current assumptions. Complexity meant, apparently, that while everyone could predict something, no one could predict everything, No one foresaw, for example, that a following would develop for AlterGenies that kicked in when dying players’ vital signs ebbed to a minimal level, giving them a rush at the last minute of life that soon drove Hospice out of business.

Or that as a consequence of that, Near-dead Headers would engineer a mod that triggered a similar experience but moments before the time of death. The rush was not quite as intense as the Dead-Head Splurge but did have an upside – letting players live to play again.

And so it went, an upwardly spiraling evolution of self-similar nested levels of play, horse after cart and cart after horse, until WorldSpace became so complex it was unmappable. That meant even more unforeseen consequences, including mini-breakdowns, odd pockets of gravitational collapse, and the rearrangement of partnerships and alliances from societal levels down to the individual bonded pair.

Gibby was sitting in front of the Wall of Knowledge watching sixteen scenarios play, the data from their interaction correlated, mapped and rendered as a visualization of SynthoLife in action. It looked to his growing dismay a lot like what they used to call life. For the first time ever, bewildered by too much complexity, Gibby felt overwhelmed. His hands hung limply like vestigial flippers over the worn arms of his chair; his Haptic Hands too hung limply from his console in precise imitation of the world-weary “richest man” at home.

The press release said later that he sat there a long long time under a great cloud of darkness that began to contract and threatened to constrict to a yinyang point when suddenly, inexplicably, the miniscule speck ignited, fission or fusion in Gibby’s brain, expanding with nova-like bright white light.

Gibby McDivitt arrived at lightspeed at the omega point of his vision. What had always been implicit, he saw in retrospect, was manifest at last.

Userspace called it the Palace of Dreams.

Every strength is also a weakness but every weakness can be turned into a strength. By the second decade, so many people were engaged in WorldSpace, searching for stable relationships, learning to be flexible and mend when alliances, treaties, and even those little momentary peaklings of sexual ardor that occurred when AlterBoy and AlterGirl met up and got it on, all broke and literally vanished from the screen. In basements everywhere hackers hustled to make themselves capable of being resilient, endure terminal breakdowns, and plan for the long term. Not only did they mutate to enjoy different kinds of sexual excess, they mutated to endure the failure of unpredictable relationships in a near-chaotic world. The collective wisdom of hackers turned as the winds of necessity demanded. UeberSynthers ramped up to the next level and influenced WorldSpace from a LEO point of view. They not only knew how to get granular, writing tight and elegant genemod code, but could also see the Big Picture. They tolerated ambiguity and endured complexity in a world that wanted both variety and order but preferred the latter every time. Because the complexity of WorldSpace meant that no one could know what was coming next, hackers released into the wild viruses that compelled the herd to confront the unknown, the unexpected, and the malevolent, doing the world a favor by being sheep in the skins of wolves. People got sick from diseases that never before existed but the ones who survived were resilient and strong.

Learning how to fall down and get up again became a new definition of elegant. The standard was applied intuitively to every level of the game from single individual to global organum. To a degree the game stayed true to the original vision and players still pursued pleasure according to sophisticated algorithms that minimized habituation and maximized delight. But it came to be done in ways that were congruent with each interlocking circle at every level of the game. Insight cascaded into design and engineers built a well-organized failsafe space pervaded by the seemingly accidental.

Then Gibby wrote what historians have labeled the Last Memo, authorizing the Palace of Dreams. He never used those words, of course. Instead he sketched out a design in broad strokes and delegated the execution. Soon the first betas were being tested, inserted with stealth into a few select locations, and rumors spread of a wondrous new endeavor that delivered astonishing outsized satisfactions. One sub-group, Blazing Saddles out of Singapore, used the name “the Palace of Dreams” and it stuck. It referred to a new WorldSpace that went so so far beyond the current game it needed a different name (WorldSpace 2.0 did not test well in the marketplace). They whispered of magic portals through which unwary players walked or accidentally stumbled, finding themselves suddenly in a brain-training space of unforeseen transformation.

In WorldSpace 1.0, because levels of interlocking play had to connect to the ones below and above, there had to be a common language. The lowest and highest levels could still communicate through clearly defined coupled links. Transactions plugged into both ends using meta-code they all understood.

The Palace of Dreams was rumored to be different. WorldSpace 2.0 had to be backward compatible with the original somehow but bridges could not be defined in the language of one point oh. A language had to be created through which one could define everything, links, the overall, the way it all connected.

The only one who could do that was Gibby McDivitt. He must have done it. But Gibby wasn’t telling.

It was a very tricky puzzle and UeberSynths loved puzzles. They knew that the actions of those who played in the new space affected directly the ones who lagged behind, so there had to be a way to get there from here and a language to say how to do it. But even those who found themselves in WorldSpace 2.0 didn’t know what it was, or how they got there, or if they did, they didn’t know how to say it.

The Palace obviously contained hints, puzzles, and metaphors to point the way to the portals. Theoretically any player could pass through. Yet everybody knew that only a few would do it.

Thus began the Great Thrust-up, a progressive filtering of players into the DreamPalace. New species of AlterGenies, self-motivated and mobile, crawled through the space like aphids servicing ants. Ordinary players would report that comrades had gone off to make a bet, get laid, or have a meal and were never heard from again. Legal documents authorizing the distribution of their worldly goods circulated which suggested they had not died, but had certainly disappeared. This meant that a route out of WorldSpace 1.0 existed and was legally sanctioned. The Palace of Dreams was real.

This is what someone somewhere suggested might sometimes happen:

An AlterBoy or AlterGirl is fresh from a weekend mini-peak with a momentary mate. They are thinking dreamily of their roles in different scenarios. Spent though they are, they are already anticipating future pleasures, perhaps that very afternoon, a romp with a panda, perhaps, or a tryst with an OctoBun or Yummy. While thus distracted they walk past sugar shops, mushroom shops, the High Life, the Come-on-Inn, idly noticing whores and wares on display in the windows. Perhaps they intend to buy an option on a future possibility. Whatever the incentive, on impulse they choose a door and go inside, stopping in their tracks in sudden darkness unfolding from behind like wings. Uncomprehending, they recognize a moment of transition but have no idea where it might go. They are in a liminal condition not linked to prior knowledge or planned by their team.

If they turn around, they discover that the door to WorldSpace is closed. Above it crossed swords glow faintly, barring the way. The only direction to go is forward toward more.

The darkness turns out to be a thin fabric, barely a quarter-inch thick. If they move forward, the darkness becomes light and they enter a simulation that seems deliciously real.

Life in the Palace of Dreams is radically unstructured, seemingly devoid of order. Those who can stand it discover that the best way to play is apparently at random, planning nothing, trusting their intuition. They learn to release the whole notion of aiming at anything, instead responding to whatever is before them. As they progress the mind they used in the past is seen to be a construct of the brain. They look at it but can not answer the question, who is looking? Nevertheless, the translation of body-or-brain to brain-self is explicit and complete. So they see. They see that the only game worth playing is making AlterGenes to enhance that fundamental transaction.

They see too that to do that, they must pay attention to subtle currents stirring around them – follow directions – and act as if.

Randomly.

Salting the sequence with indeterminate genes.

Palace players are pleasure seekers but differently, finding deep quiet delight in making things happen through all the concentric circles of WorldSpace. They never see how it happens exactly but trust from effects that it does. Their ultimate satisfaction is delayed seemingly forever, although there are rumors that one day everything will be made explicit. Meanwhile they fly by night, luxuriating in thermals.

But that’s an abstraction. Anyway, who has a clue? Certainly not those who think they do, and not Gibby McDivitt, that’s for sure. Gibby is more principle now than person – the world has turned him into a projection of their collective selves. The real Gibby is busy again, busier than ever. Just when he thought his career had peaked it was transformed. When he thought he had experienced everything, everything disappeared and a new board was set up for the next game.

Of course most of us can’t see that. All we see is that old photo of Gibby, his cracked butt and back and broad shoulders in a chrome-and-leather-flecked chair, his head thrust forward at an angle toward a wall of knowledge where a bright fog unceasingly coalesces and dissolves, looking now like naked women and men playing some kind of game, now like a mist after a brief shower illumined by the sudden sun.

Does Gibby know who dreamed it first? Or which one is dreaming? Knowledge or the molecules of knowledge?

The only one who can say is Gibby himself, whoever he is, wherever he is, and the only certain thing in the whole wide world is that Gibby McDivitt will never tell.

ShmooCon 1.0 a Big Success

by

Richard Thieme (rthieme@thiemeworks.com), author of Richard Thieme’s Islands in the Clickstream

The first ShmooCon worked.

Sponsored by the Shmoo Group, known to hackers and security professionals from presentations at Def Con, Toor Con, and other security forums,  ShmooCon was held at the Wardman Park Marriott Hotel in Washington DC February 4-6.

“The con scene is shifting to smaller regional cons,” was frequently said but it became clear that ShmooCon is complementary, not competitive, with larger established franchise cons like Def Con and the Black Hat Briefings and Trainings.

ShmooCon successfully straddled the multiple worlds of the-security-industry-in-transition and all lived together happily at the spacious hotel. Attendees did not put cement in toilets, hijack security frequencies to give false orders, or plant fake bombs under cars. Bruce Potter, who with his wife Heidi led the planning, set the tone with opening remarks that established clear guidelines. Don Bailey (aka Beetle) is also one of the original planners.

Bruce Potter, Don Bailey (aka Beetle), and Heidi Potter

A Senior Associate with Booz Allen Hamilton and founder of the Shmoo Group, Potter made clear that the con was meant to be fun – he identified entertainment venues from the Saturday night DJ party to hacking and halo contests in the hotel ballroom – but also made clear that professional standards were expected to be met.

The Party at FUR Nightclub.

That mindset was amplified by a well-received keynote address from Riley “Caezar” Eller.

Riley (Caezar) Eller’s Keynote.

Widely respected in security and hacking circles for his technical achievements and creativity (Caezar and his cohorts, the Ghetto Hackers, made the Capture the Flag contest at Def Con an elite technical challenge) called for hackers to forego the kinds of narrow niche-dwelling exploits that give props to their buddies in a piece of code that most folks just don’t need. Instead, he called on hackers to use their skills to deliver applications to a population hungry for the fruits of their real expertise.

“People want Bonzi Buddy. Yes, I know,” he said, sharing the crowd’s obvious disgust at the dumb memory-hogging animated talking parrot, “But we have to pay attention to what people want and need.”

Lest that emphasis on the marketplace imply that creative larceny has been expunged from the hacker heart, it should be noted that the most popular presentations indicate a precarious yin-yang balance in the security world. Mark Loveless (Simple Nomad) continued his con-by-con illumination of the necessity for a stealthy online life, outlining the need for piracy and anonymity on the web while explaining what it really takes to achieve it. Nomad spoke from experience directly to the heart of a community that knows who is out there and what they do.

The beating of a hacker heart that’s alive and well was also indicated by the crowd overflowing into the hallways from Deviant Ollams “Lockpicking 101” BOF. Crossing boundaries with passion and stealth still infuses the obsessive hacker spirit.

At the same time, Johnny Long’s Google Hacking (his book of the same name is a powerful treatise on how to hack information) was packed.

j0hnny Long’s Google Hacking Presentation.

Long articulates creative ways to use the popular search engine for sophisticated research and information hacking, showing how the real power of pursuit comes from knowing who’s doing what and with who. Long’s painstaking work discloses techniques for solid online research and intelligence gathering and also moves traditional hacking of machines and systems up a notch to the level at which information has real significance. Long’s presentation  amplified Caezar’s call to a higher purpose with a practical demonstration of one way to do it.

There were plenty of other good technical talks – panels including the likes of Novell’s security director, Ed Reed; the sly sophisticated mechanics of DNS hacking by Dan Kaminsky; and the wisdom of Crispin Cowan, founder and CTO of Immunix, who did justice to complex problems of application security. But perhaps the mellow vibe of the con was best seen in the size of the crowd staying to hear Bruce Potter’s final remarks.  Leaving early is typical of cons like this, but most folks didn’t want to leave. That was due to a first-time con going off with nary a serious glitch, the value of most presentations (hey, nobody bats a thousand) and the supportive context of a well-timed winter reunion. The location of the hotel, just off Connecticut across the Taft Bridge from Dupont Circle, meant lots of restaurants a few minutes away and easy access to the pleasures of a sunny mild weekend in DC. And for those who love social engineering, the National Defense Industrial Association, loaded with beltway bandits and Colonels doing business, was also on site for a while, offering tempting tasty targets.

Dan Kaminsky’s Black Ops of DNS” Presentation

The Potters began planning ShmooCon 2.0 as soon as the con ended. They built the first one from scratch and, to their surprise, had to stop registrations when they reached 440. As Jeff Moss noted, the time was right, the location was right, the setting was right, and a “small regional con” quickly became a bigger one. The Shmooikins brought an obvious  love of the game and high professional standards to the scene and next year looks to be even better.

Richard Thieme is a speaker and writer focused on creative and effective responses to technology-driven change. A collection of his work, “Richard Thieme’s Islands in the Clickstream,” was published by Syngress in 2004.

It’s nobody’s fault. Honest. It’s just how it is.

The future came earlier than expected. They kicked it around for years but never knew what they had. By the time they realized what it was, it was already broken. Broken open, I should say. Even then, looking at the pieces of the egg and wondering where the bird had flown, they didn’t know how to say what it was. The words they might have used had broken too.

Now it’s too late. The future is past.

It was too far. They can’t see far. They can only see near.

Me and my friends, we see far, but we see near, too. It’s linking near and far in fractal spirals that makes a multi-dimensional parallax view, providing perspective. It’s not that we have better brains than our Moms and Pops, but hey, we were created in the image of the net and we know it. They live it, everybody has to live it now, but they still don’t know it.

Look at my Mom and Pop on a Thursday night in the family room. You’ll see what I mean.

They are sitting in front of the big screen digital television set watching a sitcom. The program is “Friends.” Mom calls the six kids, the six young people excuse me, “our friends.” They’ve been watching the show for years and know the characters better than any of the neighbors. The only reason they know the neighbors at all is because I programmed a scanner to pick up their calls. At first they said, how terrible, don’t you do that. Then they said, what did she say? Did she really say that? Then they left it on, listening to cell calls from all over the city, drug deals (“I’m at the ATM, come get your stuff”), sex chat (“I’m sitting at your desk, my feet on the edge, touching myself”), trivia mostly, and once in a while the life of a house down the street broadcasting itself through a baby monitor.

The way they reacted to that, the discovery that walls aren’t walls anymore, reminded me of a night when I told some kids it was time to feed a live mouse to Kurtz, my boa constrictor. Oh, how horrible! they cried. Oh, I can’t watch! Then they lined up at the tank, setting up folding chairs to be sure they could see the mouse trembling, the sudden strike, the big squeeze. They gaped as the hingeless jaw dropped and Kurtz swallowed the dead mouse. They waited for the tip of its tail to disappear into his mouth before getting up saying yuuuchhh! That’s gross!

People in the neighborhood only became real to Mom and Pop when I made them digital, don’t you see, when I put them on reality radio. Only when I turned the neighbors into sitcom characters did Mom and Pop have a clue. When they hacked the system in other words.

That’s what hacking is, see. It’s not hunching over your glowing monitor in your bedroom at three in the morning cackling like Beavus or Butthead while you break into a bank account – although sometimes it is that too – it’s more of a trip into the tunnels into the sewers into the walls where the wires run and the pipes and you can see how things work. It’s hitting a wall and figuring out how to move through it. How to become invisible, how to use magic. How to cut the knot, solve the puzzle, move to the next level of the game. It’s seeing how shit we dump relates to people who think they don’t dump shit and live as if. It’s seeing how it all fits together.

“Our friends.” Said as if she means it. I mean, is that pathetic or what?

The theme music is too loud as they sink down in overstuffed chairs and turn the volume even higher with a remote I had to program so they could use it. Their lives seldom deviate more than a few inches from the family room. Put the point of a compass down on the set and you can draw a little circle that circumscribes their lives. Everything they know is inside that circle. Two dimensions, flat on its back.

The geometry of near.

Those are my friends, Mom says with a laugh for the umpteenth time. The commercial dissolves and expectations settle onto the family room like the rustling wings of twilight. The acting is always overdone, they mug and posture too much, the laugh tracks are too loud. The characters say three, maybe four hundred words in half an hour, barely enough to hand in to an English teacher on a theme, but more than enough to build a tiny world like a doll’s house inside a million heads. Those scripted words and intentional gestures sketch out the walls of houses, the edges of suburban lots, the city limits of their lives, all inside their heads. Hypnotized, they stare at the screen for hours, downloading near vistas, thinking they have a clue.

In family rooms all over the world, drapes closed and lights low, people sit there scratching while they watch, most eat or drink something, and some masturbate. Some get off on Rachel, some Monica. Gays like Joey. Bloat-fetishists go for Chandler. I don’t know who gets off on Ross. I do know, though, that all over the world there are rooms smelling of pizza, beer and semen. Some clean up the food they spill before the show is over and some leave it. Some come into a napkin and ball it up and put it on a table until a commercial but some take it straight to the garbage and wash their hands on the way back. Funny. They beat off to a fantasy character as sketchy as a cartoon but wash their hands before coming back from the commercial. After sitting there for all those hours, they ought to wash out their souls with soap, not their hands.

Everybody masturbates, actually. That’s what it means to watch these shows. People get off on a fantasy and pretend the emptiness fills them up so they do it again. And again.

Who writes these scripts, anyway? People who have lost their souls, obviously. These people have no self. They put it down somewhere then forgot where they put it. They are seriously diminished humans.

But hey, this is not a rant about people who sell their souls. That’s true of everybody who lives in a world of simulations and doesn’t know it. Those who know it are masters, their hands on the switches that control the flow of energy and information. Those gates create or negate meaning, modify or deny. Me and my friends we control the flow. The difference is all in the knowing and knowing how.

But that’s not what we were fighting about. We were fighting about real things.

I just read an army paper some colonel wrote critiquing the army for thinking backwards. Thinking hierarchically, he said, thinking in terms of mechanistic warfare. The writer self-styling himself a modern insightful thinker, Net-man, an apostle of netcentric warfare, a disciple of the digerati.

It’s always colonels, right? trying to get noticed. The wisdom of the seminar room. Talk about masturbation. They write for the same journals they read, it’s one big circle jerk. They never call each other on their shit, that’s the deal, not on the real stuff, but they can’t fool us all the time. Just some of the people some.

It’s funny, see, the colonel talks about hierarchies and nets but this guy’s obviously Hierarchy Man, he lives in a pyramid, he can’t help it. He has the fervor of a convert who suddenly saw the blinding light, saw that he had been living in the near, but all he can do is add on, not transform. An extra bedroom, a new bathroom, is not a new floorplan. The guy is excited, sure, he had a vision that blew his mind, but he thought that meant he could live there and he can’t. Seeing may be believing but that’s about all. The future is past, like I said. The evidence is guys like that writing stuff like that. Those of us who have lived here all of our lives, who never lived anywhere else, we can see that. He’s a mummy inside a pyramid looking out through a chink in a sealed tomb. That’s why we laugh, because he can’t see himself trailing bandages through the dusty corridors. New converts always look funny to people who live on the distant shore where they just arrived, shipwrecked sailors ecstatic to feel the sand under their feet. They think it’s bedrock but it’s quicksand..

Here’s an example. Go downstairs and go into the kitchen where another television set records the President’s speech. (I had to show them how to do that too.)

When we watch it together later, I point out that it’s not really the president, not really a person, it’s only an image in pixels, a digital head speeching in that strange jerky way he has so when you try to connect, you can’t. You think you get the beat but then there’s a pause, then a quick beat makes you stumble trying to synchronize. It’s how his brain misfires, I think. I think he did that doing drugs, maybe drinking. He was in and out of rehab and who the hell knows what he did to himself. Of course the Clintons did coke and all kinds of shit. Anyway he is talking to people who are eating and drinking and masturbating, not even knowing it, hands alive and mobile in their pockets, getting off on his projected power and authority. He talks about “our country” and I laugh. Pop shoots me a glare because he doesn’t have a clue. Pop thinks he lives in a country. Because the prez keeps saying “our country” and “this nation” and shit like that. But countries are over. Countries ended long ago. This president or his dad made money from oil or wherever else they put money to make money. Millions of it, more than enough to keep the whole family in office for generations. They have this veneer of patricians but their hands are dripping with blood. His grand-dad too, look it up. They taught evil people how to torture, kill, terrorize, but they wear this patrician veneer and drip with self- righteousness, always talking about religion. It is so dishonorable. Yet this semi-literate lamer, this poser, we honor, his father the chief of the secret police, his brother running his own state, this brain-damaged man who can’t connect with himself or anyone else, his words spastic like bad animation out of synch with that smug smirk, this man we honor? Give me a fucking break.

Anyway, he isn’t really there, it’s all pixels, that’s the point. The same people who made “Friends” and made that mythical neighborhood bar and made that mythical house on the mythical prairie created him too out of whole cloth. So people sit there and scratch, eat drink and masturbate, getting off on the unseen artifice of it all. And these people they have made, these people who project power, they all have their own armies, see, they have their own security forces, their own intelligence networks. They have to because countries ended and they realized that those who are like countries, forgive me, like countries used to be, now must act like countries used to act. They have their own banks and they even have their own simulated countries. Some Arabs bought Afghanistan, the Russian mafia bought Sierra Leone, they own Israel too, can I say that without being called an anti-Semite? These people in their clouds of power allow countries to pretend to exist and download simulations of countries into the heads of masturbating scratchers because it works better to have zombies. So people who think they live in countries can relate to what they think are countries inside their heads. Zombies thinking they are “citizens of countries” because they can’t think anything else, because they live inside the walls of the doll’s house in their heads. “I am a citizen of this country,” says the zombie, feeling safe and snug inside a non-existent house in the non-space of his programmed brain. All right then, where is it? The zombie says here, there, pointing to the air like grandma after surgery pointed to hallucinations, telling them to get her a glass of water, telling them to sit down and stop making her nervous. It’s all dribble-glass stuff, zombies in Newtonian space that ended long ago; they stare through the glass at the quantum cloud-cuckoo land the rest of us live in, calling it the future. Mistaking space for time the way that colonel inside his pyramid thinks he’s net-man.

People who live in clouds of power live behind tall walls, taller than you can imagine. We never really see what’s behind those walls. Zombies never climb those walls because of the private armies. Their “security forces” would have a zombie locked up in a heartbeat if he tried.

On the network when we take over thousands of machines and load trojans letting them sit there until we are ready to use them in a massive attack, we call them zombies. The zombies are unaware what is happening to them. We bring them to life and they rise from their graves and march. Those are our clouds of power, tit for tat. Mastering the masters.

Meanwhile Moms and Pops sit in their chairs not knowing that trojans are being downloaded into their brains. The code is elegant, tight, fast. Between the medium in which the code is embedded and the television or network that turns it into illusions of real people, real situations, the sleight of hand is so elegant, enticing bird-like Moms and Pops into digital cages. Then when they move the cages, the birds move too. They give the birds enough room to flap their wings so they think they’re free.

Or look at the bigger picture. Imagine a country with borders drawn in black. Then imagine a mouth blowing a pink bubble and the bubble bursting obliterating borders and then there’s a pink cloud instead of the little wooden shapes of states or countries they used to play with when they were kids. Bubblegum splatters all over the world creating cloud-places that have no names. They are place markers until names are invented. These are the shapes kids play with now, internalizing the difference.

Try telling that to zombies, though. They sit there listening as sitcoms and so-called reality shows and faux news put them into a deep sleep. Images of unreality filter into their brains and define their lives. Tiny images, seen near, seem big. Seem almost lifelike. Inside these miniature worlds, Moms and Pops believe they are far-seeing, thinking they think. Because they are told that near is far and little is big and so it is.

That’s what the fight was about. It wasn’t personal. It’s just that we see how silly it is, the way they think, what they think is real. It’s not personal! Honest!

When I was twelve I ran a line out to the telephone cable behind the house. I listened to the neighbors talk mostly about nothing until the telephone company and a cop dropped by. I pleaded stupidity and youth and Pop gave me a talk and I nodded and said yeah, right, never again. Those were the good old days when hacking and phreaking were novelties and penalties for kids were a slap on the wrist.

My favorite telephone sitcom was “The Chiropractor’s Wife.” That woman she lived around the corner and lowered the narrowness bar beyond belief. You see her on the street with her kids or walking that damned huge dog of theirs, you wouldn’t know it. She looked normal. On good days she looked good even with her blonde hair down on her shoulders, smiling hello. Still, she raised oblivious to the level of an art form.

I guess she was terrified. Her life consisted of barely coping with two kids who were four and six I think and serving on a committee or two at school like for making decorations for a Halloween party. Other than that, near as I could tell, she talked to her mother and made dinner for the pseudo-doc. Talked to her mother every day, sometimes for hours.

The conversation was often interrupted by long pauses. Well, the wife would say. Then her mother would say, well. Then there might be silence for twenty seconds. I am not exaggerating, I clocked it. Twenty-four seconds was their personal best. That might not sound like much but in a telephone conversation, it’s eternity. Then they would go back over the same territory. They were like prisoners walking back and forth in a shared cell, saying the same things over and over. I guess it was mostly the need to talk no matter what, drawing the same circles on a little pad of paper. I imagined the wife making those circles on a doodle pad in different colors and that’s when I realized that people around me lived by a different geometry entirely. How the landscape looks is determined by how you measure distance. How far to the horizon. That’s when I began to invent theorems for a geometry of near.

Example.

Here in Wolf Cove there is the absolute silence of shuttered life. The only noise we hear is traffic from the freeway far over the trees. We have lots of trees, ravines, some little lakes. That’s what it is, trees and ravines and houses among the trees. That sound of distant traffic is like holding a seashell up to your ear. It’s the closest we come to having an ocean. No one can park on the street so a car that parks is suspect. The cops know everyone by sight so anyone different is stopped. The point I am making is, Wolf Cove encloses trees and lakes and houses with gates of silence, making it seem safe, but in fact it has the opposite effect. It creates fear that is bone deep. It’s like a gated community with real iron gates and a rent-a-cop. It makes people inside afraid of what’s outside so no one wants to leave. It’s like we built an electric fence like the kinds that keep dogs inside except we’re the dogs.

One day there was a carjacking at a mall ten miles away. Two guys did it who looked like someone called central casting and said hey, send us a couple of mean-looking carjacker types. They held a gun on a gray lady driving a Lexus and left her hysterical in the parking lot. I knew the telephone sitcom was bound to be good so I listened in on the wife and her hold-me mother.

They talked for more than two hours, the wife saying how afraid she was she wouldn’t get decorations done for the Halloween party at the school. She almost cried a couple of times, she was that close to breaking, just taking care of a couple of kids and making streamers and a pumpkin pie. But every now and again she said how afraid she was they’d take her SUV at gunpoint next time she went shopping. The television had done its job of keeping her frightened, downloading images of terrified victims morning noon and night. Fear makes people manageable.

Finally the wife said, maybe we ought to move. I couldn’t believe my ears. I mean, she lived in Wolf Cove inside an electric fence, so where the hell would she go? Her fears loomed in shadows on the screen of the world like ghosts and ghouls at that Halloween party. Everywhere she looked, she saw danger. Wherever there was a door instead of a wall, she felt a draft, an icy chill, imagining it opening. She got out of bed and checked the locks when everyone else was asleep. Once she had to go get something on the other side of town and you would have thought she was going to the moon. She went over the route on a map with her mother. Did she turn here? Or here? She had a cell phone fully charged – she checked it twice – and a full tank of gas, just in case. Just in case of what? So I wasn’t surprised when she said after the carjack that maybe they ought to move to Port Harbor, ten miles north. Then her mother said, well. Then the wife said well and then there was silence. I think I held my breath, sitting in my bedroom listening through headphones. Then her mother said, well, you would still have to shop somewhere.

Oh, the wife said. I hadn’t thought of that.

The geometry of near.

So many people live inside those little circles, more here than most places. I live on the net, I live online, I live out there. I keep the bedroom door shut but the mindspace I inhabit is the whole world.

When I was eleven I found channels where I learned so much just listening. I kept my mouth shut until I knew who was who, who was a lamer shooting off his mouth and who had a clue. Then somebody asked a question I knew and I answered politely and they let me in. I wasn’t a lurker any longer, but I took it easy, asking questions but not too many. I stayed up late at Border’s and other midnight bookstores, aisles cluttered with open O’Reilly books, figuring out what I could before I asked. You have to do the homework and you have to show respect. Once they let me in, I helped guys on rungs below. I was pretty good at certain systems, certain kinds of PBX, and posted voice mail trophies that were a hoot. Some came from huge companies that couldn’t secure their ass with a cork. The clips gave the lie to their PR, showing what bullshit it was. So everybody on the channel knew but had the good sense not to say, not let anybody know. That would be like leaning over a banister and asking the Feds to fuck us please in the ass.

So I learned how to live on the grid. I mapped it inside my head, constantly recreating images of the flows, shadows in my brain creating a shadow self at the same time. The shadow self became my self except I could see it and knew how to use it.

It wasn’t hacking the little systems, don’t you see, the boxes or the telephones, it was the Big System with a capital B and a capital S. Hacking a system means hacking the mind that makes it. It’s not just code, it’s the coder. The code is a shadow of the coder’s mind. That’s what you’re hacking. You see how code relates to the coder, shit, you understand everything.

Anyway, Mom and Pop were talking one night and Mom said she had seen the Bradley’s out on their patio. They were staring down at the old bricks, thinking about redoing it. It meant rearranging shrubs and maybe putting it some flowers and ground cover. It sounded like big deal, the way they talked about it, making this little change sound like the Russian Revolution. It was like the time the Adams built a breakfast nook, you would have thought they had terraformed a planet.

So Mom said to Virginia Bradley, how long have you been in this house now? as long as we have? Oh no, Virginia said. We’ve been here thirteen years. Oh, Mom said We’ve been fifteen. But then, Virginia said, we only moved from a block away. Mom said, Oh? I didn’t know that. Virginia said, yes, we lived in that little white house on the corner the one with the green shutters for seventeen years. Mom said, I didn’t know that. Not only that, Virgina said with a little laugh, but Rick, that was her husband, Rick grew up around the corner. You know that ranch where his mother lives? Mom said, the one where the sign says Bradley? I didn’t realize (only neighbors thirteen years) that was his mother. Yes, he grew up in that house, then when we got married we moved to the white house with the green shutters and thirteen years ago when Stonesifers moved to the lakes then we moved here.

The heart enclosed in apprehension becomes so frightened of its own journey, of knowing itself, that it draws the spiral more and more tightly, fencing itself in. Eventually the maze leads nowhere. This village with its winding lanes and gas lamps for all its faux charm was designed by a peasant culture afraid of strangers, afraid of change, a half-human heart with its own unique geometry.

Yep, you guessed it. The geometry of near.

Hypnosis does an effective job of Disneylanding the loneliness of people who live near. Sometimes that loneliness leaks out into their lives and that, really, was what the fighting was about.

Some business group asked Pop to give a dinner speech. They asked him over a year ago, so he had it on the calendar all that time. He really looked forward to it, we could tell by the time he spent getting ready. He even practiced his delivery. They told Pop to expect a few hundred people but when he showed up with all his slides, there were only twenty-three.

I am so sorry, said Merriwether Prattleblather or whoever asked him to speak. It never occurred to any of us when we scheduled your talk that this would be of all things the last episode of Jerry Seinfeld.

Pop got a bit of a clue that night. He was pretty dejected but he knew why. These are people, he said, who have known each other for years. This meeting is an opportunity to spend time with real friends. But they preferred to spend the night with people who are not only not real, but don’t even make sense or connect to anything real. They would rather passively download digital images, he said, using my language without realizing it, than interact with real human beings.

So Pop had half a clue and I got excited, that doesn’t happen every night, so I jumped in, wanting to rip to the next level and show how it all connects from Walter Lippmann to Eddie Bernays to Joseph Goebells, news PR and propaganda one and the same. That got Pop angry. It undermined that doll’s house in his head, I can see now. The walls would collapse if he looked so he can’t look. Besides, he had to put his frustration somewhere and I was safe. Naturally I became quite incensed at the intensity of his commitment to being clueless. Christ, Pop, I shouted, they stole your history. You haven’t got a clue because everything real was hidden. Some of the nodes are real but the way they relate is disguised in lies. He shouts back that I don’t know what I’m talking about. The second world war was real, he says, hitting the table, not knowing how nuts he looks. Oh yeah? Then what about Enigma? Before they disclosed it, you thought totally differently about everything in that war. You had to, Pop! Context is content and that’s what they hide, making everything look different. It’s all in the points of reference. They’ve done that with everything for fifty years. It’s like multispectral camouflage that I read about in space, fake platforms intended to look real. Nothing gets through, nothing bounces back. You live in a hall or more like a hologram of mirrors, Pop, can’t you see that?

We both kept shouting and sooner or later I figured fuck it and went to my room which is fine with me because I would rather live in the real world than the Night of the Living Dead down there.

I know why Pop can’t let himself know. I understand. Particularly at his age, you can’t face the emptiness of it all unless you know how to fill it again, preferably with something real. Knowing you know how to do that makes it bearable like looking at snakes on Medusa’s head in a mirror. It keeps you from turning to stone.

Me and my friends we don’t want to turn to stone ever. Not ever. Maybe it’s all infinite regress inside our heads, nobody knows. But playing the game at least keeps you flexible. It’s like yoga for the soul.

When do I like it best? That’s easy. Four in the morning. I love it then. There’s this painting by Rousseau of a lion and a gypsy and the world asleep in a frieze that never wakes up. That’s what it feels like, four in the morning, online. The illusory world is asleep, shut up like a clam, I turn on the computer and the fan turns into white noise. The noise is the sound of the sea against the seawall of our lives. The monitor flickers alight like a window opening and I climb through.

It’s all in the symbols, see, managing the symbols. That makes the difference between half an illusion and a whole one. Do you use them or do they use you? If they use you, do you know it, do you see it, and do you use them back? Who’s in charge here? Are you constantly taking back control from symbols that would sweep you up in a flood? Are you conscious of how you collude because brains are built to collude so you know and know that you know and can take back power? Then you have a chance, see, even if the hall of mirrors never shows a real reflection. Then we have a chance to get to the next level of the game if only that and that does seem to be the point.

Me and my friends we prefer the geometry of far. This bedroom is a node in a network trans-planetary or trans-lunar at any rate, an intersection of lines in a grid that we navigate at lightspeed. This is soul-work, this symbol-manipulating machinery fused with our souls, we live cyborg style, wired to each other. The information we exchange is energy bootstrapping itself to a higher level of abstraction.

Some nights you drop down into this incredible place and disappear. Something happens. I don’t know how to describe it. It’s like you drop down into this place where most of your life is lived except most of the time you don’t notice. This time, somehow you go there and know it. Instead of thinking leaning forward from the top of your head its like lines of electromagnetic energy showing iron filings radiating out from the base of your skull. Information comes and goes from the base of your brain, goes in all directions. Time dilates and you use a different set of points of reference, near and far at the same time.

It’s a matter of wanting to go, I think, then going. Otherwise you turn into the chiropractor’s wife. I want to see up close the difference that makes the difference but once I go there, “I” dissolves like countries disappeared and whatever is left inhabits clouds of power that have no names. It’s better than sex, yes, better.

So anyway, the point is, yes, I was laughing but not at him, exactly. You can tell him that. It was nothing personal. It just looked so funny watching someone express the truth that they didn’t know. The truth of a future they’ll never inhabit. It’s like his mind was bouncing off a wall, you see what I mean? So I apologize, okay? You can tell him that. I understand what it must be like, coming to the end of your life and realizing how it’s all been deception. When it’s too late to do anything about it.

Now if it’s all right with you, I just want a few minutes with my friends. I just want to go where we don’t need to be always explaining everything, where everybody understands.

Okay? And would you mind closing the door, please, as you leave?

Real Hacking Rules!

Or,

Before the word is totally useless, what is the essence of hacking?

published October 4, 2002 in O’Reilly Media

On the tenth anniversary of Def Con, the annual Las Vegas meeting of computer hackers, security professionals, and others, I reflected on how the con – and hacking – had changed since I spoke at Def Con 4 seven years earlier.

The word hacker today means everything from digging into a system – any system – at root level to defacing a website with graffiti. Because we have to define what we mean whenever we use the term, the word is lost to common usage. Still, post 9/11 and the Patriot Act, it behooves hackers by any definition to be keenly aware of the ends to which they hack. Hackers must know their roots and know how to return to “root” when necessary.

At DefCon IV I said that hacking was practice for trans-planetary life in the 21st century. I was right. The skills I foresaw as essential just a short generation ahead have indeed been developed by the best of the hacker community who helped to create – and secure – the net that is now ubiquitous. But the game of building and cracking security, managing multiple identities, and obsessing over solving puzzles is played now on a ten-dimensional chess board. Morphing boundaries at every level of organizational structure have created a new game.

In essence, hacking is a way of thinking about complex systems. It includes the skills required to cobble together seemingly disparate pieces of a puzzle in order to understand the system; whether modules of code or pieces of a bigger societal puzzle, hackers intuitively grasp and look for the bigger picture that makes sense of the parts.  So defined, hacking is a high calling. Hacking includes defining and defending identity, creating safe boundaries, and searching for the larger truth in a maze of confusion and intentional disinformation.

In the national security state that has evolved since World War II, hacking is one means by which a free people can retain freedom. Hacking includes the means and methodologies by which we construct more comprehensive truths or images of the systems we hack.

Hackers cross disciplinary lines. In addition to computer hackers, forensic accountants (whistleblowers, really), investigative journalists (“conspiracy theorists”),  even shamans are hackers because hacking means hacking both the system and the mind that made it. That’s why, when you finally understand Linux, you understand … everything.

The more complex the system, the more challenging the puzzles, the more exhilarating the quest. Edward O. Wilson said in “Consiliance” that great scientists are characterized by a passion for knowledge, obsessiveness, and daring.

Real hackers too

The Cold War mentality drew the geopolitical map of the world as opposing alliances; now the map is more complex, defining fluid alliances in terms of non-state actors, narco/weapons-traffickers, and incendiary terrorist cells. Still, the game is the same: America sees itself as a huge bulls-eye always on the defensive.

In this interpretation, the mind of society is both target and weapon and the management of perception – from deception and psychological operations to propaganda, spin, and public relations – is its cornerstone.

That means that the modules of truth that must be connected to form the Bigger Picture are often exchanged in a black market. The machinery of that black market is hacking.

Here’s an example.

A colleague was called by a source after a major blackout in the Pacific Northwest who claimed that the official explanation for the blackout was bogus. Instead, he suggested, a non-state aggressor such as a narco-terrorist had probably provided a demonstration of power, attacking the electric grid as a show of force.

“The proof will come,” he said, “if it happens again in a few days.”

A few days later, another blackout hit the area.

Fast forward to a security conference at which an Army officer and I began chatting. One of his stories made him really chuckle.

“We were in the desert,” he said, “testing an electromagnetic weapon. It was high level stuff. We needed  a phone call from the SecDef to hit the switch. When we did, we turned out the lights all over the Pacific Northwest.” He added, “Just to be sure, we did it again a few days later and it happened again.”

That story is a metaphor for life in a national security state.

That test took place in a secured area that was in effect an entire canyon. Cover stories were prepared for people who might wander in, cover stories for every level of clearance, so each narrative would fuse seamlessly with how different people “constructed reality.”

The journalistic source  was correct in knowing that the official story didn’t account for the details. He knew it was false but didn’t know what was true. In the absence of truth, we make it up. Only when we have the real data, including the way the data has been rewritten to obscure the truth, can we know what is happening.

That’s hacking on a societal level. Hacking is knowing how to discern or retrieve information beyond that designed for official consumption. It is abstract thinking at the highest level, practical knowledge of what’s likely or might or must be true if this little piece is true, informed by an intuition so tutored over time it looks like magic.

Post 9/11, the distinction between youthful adventuring and reconstituting the bigger picture on behalf of the greater good is critical. What was trivial mischief that once got a slap on the wrist is now an act of terrorism, setting up a teen for a long prison term. The advent of global terrorism and the beginning of the Third World War have changed the name of the game.

Yet without checks and balances, we will go too far in the other direction. The FBI in Boston is currently notorious for imprisoning innocent men to protect criminal allies. I would guess that the agents who initiated that strategy had good intentions.  But good intentions go awry. Without transparency, there is no truth. Without truth, there is no accountability. Without accountability, there is no justice.

Hacking ensures transparency. Hacking is about being free in a world in which we understand that we will never be totally free.

Nevertheless, hackers must roll the boulder up the hill. They have no choice but to be who they are. But they must understand the context in which they work and the seriousness of the consequences when they don’t.

Hackers must, as the Good Book says, be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.

Hacking Chinatown
By Richard Thieme

“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

Those are the last words of the movie “Chinatown,” just before the police lieutenant shouts orders to the crowd to clear the streets so the body of an innocent woman, murdered by the Los Angeles police, can be removed.

“Chinatown,” with Jack Nicholson as Jake Gittes, is a fine film: it defines an era (the thirties in the United States) and a genre — film noir — that is a unique way to frame reality.

“Film noir” is a vision of a world corrupt to the core in which nevertheless it is still possible, as author Raymond Chandler said of the heroes of the best detective novels, to be “a man of honor. Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.”

“Chinatown” also defines life in the virtual world — that consensual hallucination we have come to call “cyberspace.” The virtual world is a simulation of the “real world.” The “real world” too is a symbolic construction, a set of nested structures that — as we peel them away in the course of our lives — reveals more and more complexity and ambiguity.

The real world IS Chinatown, and computer hackers — properly understood — know this better than anyone.

There are several themes in “Chinatown.”

(1) People in power are in seamless collusion. They take care of one another. They don’t always play fair. And sooner or later, we discover that “we” are “they.”

A veteran police detective told me this about people in power.

“There’s one thing they all fear — politicians, industrialists, corporate executives — and that’s exposure. They simply do not want anyone to look too closely or shine too bright a light on their activities.”

I grew up in Chicago, Illinois, known for its political machine and cash-on-the-counter way of doing business. I earned money for my education working with the powerful Daley political machine. In exchange for patronage jobs — supervising playgrounds, hauling garbage — I worked with a precinct captain and alderman. My job was to do what I was told.

I paid attention to how people behaved in the real world. I learned that nothing is simple, that people act instinctively out of self-interest, and that nobody competes in the arena of real life with clean hands.

I remember sitting in a restaurant in a seedy neighborhood in Chicago, listening to a conversation in the next booth. Two dubious characters were upset that a mutual friend faced a long prison term. They looked and sounded different than the “respectable” people with whom I had grown up in an affluent part of town.

As I grew up, however, I learned how my friends’ fathers really made money. Many of their activities were disclosed in the newspaper. They distributed pornography before it was legal, manufactured and sold illegal gambling equipment, distributed vending machines and juke boxes to bars that had to take them or face the consequences. I learned that a real estate tycoon had been a bootlegger during prohibition, and the brother of the man in the penthouse upstairs had died in Miami Beach in a hail of bullets.

For me, it was an awakening: I saw that the members of the power structures in the city — business, government, the religious hierarchy, and the syndicate or mafia — were indistinguishable, a partnership that of necessity included everyone who wanted to do business. Conscious or unconscious, collusion was the price of the ticket that got you into the stadium; whether players on the field or spectators in the stands, we were all players, one way or another.

Chicago is Chinatown, and Chinatown is the world. There is no moral high ground. We all wear masks, but under that mask is … Chinatown.

(2) You never really know what’s going on in Chinatown.

The police in Chinatown, according to Jake Gittes, were told to do “as little as possible” because things that happened on the street were the visible consequences of strings pulled behind the scenes. If you looked too often behind the curtain — as Gittes did — you were taught a painful lesson.

We often don’t understand what we’re looking at on the Internet. As one hacker recently emailed in response to someone’s fears of a virus that did not and could not exist, “No information on the World Wide Web is any good unless you can either verify it yourself or it’s backed up by an authority you trust.”

The same is true in life.

Disinformation in the virtual world is an art. After an article I wrote for an English magazine about detective work on the Internet appeared, I received a call from a global PR firm in London. They asked if I wanted to conduct “brand defense” for them on the World Wide Web.

What is brand defense?

If one of our clients is attacked, they explained, their Internet squad goes into action. “Sleepers” (spies inserted into a community and told to wait until they receive orders) in usenet groups and listservs create distractions, invent controversies; web sites (on both sides of the question) go into high gear, using splashy graphics and clever text to distort the conversation. Persons working for the client pretend to be disinterested so they can spread propaganda.

It reminded me of the time my Democratic Party precinct captain asked if I wanted to be a precinct captain.

Are you retiring? I asked.

Of course not! he laughed. You’d be the Republican precinct captain. Then we’d have all our bases covered.

The illusions of cyberspace are seductive. Every keystroke leaves a luminous track in the melting snow that can be seen with the equivalent of night vision goggles.

Hacking means tracking — and counter-tracking — and covering your tracks — in the virtual world. Hacking means knowing how to follow the flow of electrons to its source and understand on every level of abstraction — from source code to switches and routers to high level words and images — what is really happening.

Hackers are unwilling to do as little as possible. Hackers are need-to-know machines driven by a passion to connect disparate data into meaningful patterns. Hackers are the online detectives of the virtual world.

You don’t get to be a hacker overnight.

The devil is in the details. Real hackers get good by endless trial and error, failing into success again and again. Thomas Alva Edison, inventor of the electric light, invented a hundred filaments that didn’t work before he found one that did. He knew that every failure eliminated a possibility and brought him closer to his goal.

Listen to “Rogue Agent” set someone straight on an Internet mailing list:

“You want to create hackers? Don’t tell them how to do this or that. Show them how to discover it for themselves. Those who have the innate drive will dive in and learn by trial and error. Those who don’t, comfortable to stay within the bounds of their safe little lives, fall by the wayside.

“There’s no knowledge so sweet as that which you’ve discovered on your own.”

In Chinatown, an unsavory character tries to stop Jake Gittes from prying by cutting his nose. He reminds Gittes that “curiosity killed the cat.”

Isn’t it ironic that curiosity, the defining characteristic of an intelligent organism exploring its environment, has been prohibited by folk wisdom everywhere?

The endless curiosity of hackers is regulated by a higher code that may not even have a name but which defines the human spirit at its best. The Hacker’s Code is an affirmation of life itself, life that wants to know, and grow, and extend itself throughout the “space” of the universe. The hackers’ refusal to accept conventional wisdom and boundaries is a way to align his energies with the life-giving passion of heretics everywhere. And these days, that’s what needed to survive.

Robert Galvin, the patriarch of Motorola, maker of cell-phones and semi-conductors, says that “every significant decision that changes the direction of a company is a minority decision. Whatever is the intuitive presumption — where everyone agrees, “Yeah, that’s right” — will almost surely be wrong.”

Motorola succeeded by fostering an environment in which creativity thrives. The company has institutionalized an openness to heresy because they know that wisdom is always arriving at the edge of things, on the horizons of our lives, and when it first shows up — like a comet on the distant edges of the solar system — it is faint and seen by only a few. But those few know where to look.

Allen Hynek, an astronomer connected with the U. S. Air Force investigation of UFOs, was struck by the “strangeness” of UFO reports, the cognitive dissonance that characterizes experiences that don’t fit our orthodox belief systems. He pointed out that all the old photographic plates in astronomical observatories had images of Pluto on them, but until Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto and said where it was, no one saw it because they didn’t know where to look.

The best computer consultants live on the creative edge of things. They are path-finders, guides for those whom have always lived at the orthodox center but who find today that the center is constantly shifting, mandating that they learn new behaviors, new skills in order to be effective. In order to live on the edge.

The edge is the new center. The center of a web is wherever we are.

When I looked out over the audience at DefCon IV, the hackers’ convention, I saw an assembly of the most brilliant and most unusual people I had ever seen in one room. It was exhilarating. We all felt as if we had come home. There in that room for a few hours or a few days, we did not have to explain anything. We knew who we were and what drove us in our different ways to want to connect the dots of data into meaningful patterns.

We know we build on quicksand, but building is too much fun to give up. We know we leave tracks, but going is so much more energizing than staying home. We know that curiosity can get your nose slit, but then we’ll invent new ways to smell.

Computer programmers write software applications that are doomed to be as obsolete as wire recordings. The infrastructures built by our engineers are equally doomed. Whether a virtual world of digital bits or a physical world of concrete and steel, our civilization is a Big Toy that we build and use up at the same time. The fun of the game is to know that it is a game, and winning is identical with our willingness to play.

To say that when we engage with one another in cyberspace we are “Hacking Chinatown” is a way to say that asking questions is more important than finding answers. We do not expect to find final answers. But the questions must be asked. We refuse to do as little as possible because we want to KNOW.

Asking questions is how human beings create opportunities for dignity and self-transcendence; asking questions is how we are preparing ourselves to leave this island earth and enter into a trans-galactic web of life more diverse and alien than anything we have encountered.

Asking questions that uncover the truth is our way of refusing to consent to illusions and delusions, our way of insisting that we can do it better if we stay up later, collaborate with each other in networks with no names, and lose ourselves in the quest for knowledge and self-mastery.

This is how proud, lonely men and women, illuminated in the darkness by their glowing monitors, become heroes in their own dramas as they wander the twisting streets of cyberspace and their own lives.

Even in Chinatown, Jake. Even in Chinatown.

Hacking Chinatown
By Richard Thieme

“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

Those are the last words of the movie “Chinatown,” just before the police lieutenant shouts orders to the crowd to clear the streets so the body of an innocent woman, murdered by the Los Angeles police, can be removed.

“Chinatown,” with Jack Nicholson as Jake Gittes, is a fine film: it defines an era (the thirties in the United States) and a genre — film noir — that is a unique way to frame reality.

“Film noir” is a vision of a world corrupt to the core in which nevertheless it is still possible, as author Raymond Chandler said of the heroes of the best detective novels, to be “a man of honor. Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.”

“Chinatown” also defines life in the virtual world — that consensual hallucination we have come to call “cyberspace.” The virtual world is a simulation of the “real world.” The “real world” too is a symbolic construction, a set of nested structures that — as we peel them away in the course of our lives — reveals more and more complexity and ambiguity.

The real world IS Chinatown, and computer hackers — properly understood — know this better than anyone.

There are several themes in “Chinatown.”

(1) People in power are in seamless collusion. They take care of one another. They don’t always play fair. And sooner or later, we discover that “we” are “they.”

A veteran police detective told me this about people in power.

“There’s one thing they all fear — politicians, industrialists, corporate executives — and that’s exposure. They simply do not want anyone to look too closely or shine too bright a light on their activities.”

I grew up in Chicago, Illinois, known for its political machine and cash-on-the-counter way of doing business. I earned money for my education working with the powerful Daley political machine. In exchange for patronage jobs — supervising playgrounds, hauling garbage — I worked with a precinct captain and alderman. My job was to do what I was told.

I paid attention to how people behaved in the real world. I learned that nothing is simple, that people act instinctively out of self-interest, and that nobody competes in the arena of real life with clean hands.

I remember sitting in a restaurant in a seedy neighborhood in Chicago, listening to a conversation in the next booth. Two dubious characters were upset that a mutual friend faced a long prison term. They looked and sounded different than the “respectable” people with whom I had grown up in an affluent part of town.

As I grew up, however, I learned how my friends’ fathers really made money. Many of their activities were disclosed in the newspaper. They distributed pornography before it was legal, manufactured and sold illegal gambling equipment, distributed vending machines and juke boxes to bars that had to take them or face the consequences. I learned that a real estate tycoon had been a bootlegger during prohibition, and the brother of the man in the penthouse upstairs had died in Miami Beach in a hail of bullets.

For me, it was an awakening: I saw that the members of the power structures in the city — business, government, the religious hierarchy, and the syndicate or mafia — were indistinguishable, a partnership that of necessity included everyone who wanted to do business. Conscious or unconscious, collusion was the price of the ticket that got you into the stadium; whether players on the field or spectators in the stands, we were all players, one way or another.

Chicago is Chinatown, and Chinatown is the world. There is no moral high ground. We all wear masks, but under that mask is … Chinatown.

(2) You never really know what’s going on in Chinatown.

The police in Chinatown, according to Jake Gittes, were told to do “as little as possible” because things that happened on the street were the visible consequences of strings pulled behind the scenes. If you looked too often behind the curtain — as Gittes did — you were taught a painful lesson.

We often don’t understand what we’re looking at on the Internet. As one hacker recently emailed in response to someone’s fears of a virus that did not and could not exist, “No information on the World Wide Web is any good unless you can either verify it yourself or it’s backed up by an authority you trust.”

The same is true in life.

Disinformation in the virtual world is an art. After an article I wrote for an English magazine about detective work on the Internet appeared, I received a call from a global PR firm in London. They asked if I wanted to conduct “brand defense” for them on the World Wide Web.

What is brand defense?

If one of our clients is attacked, they explained, their Internet squad goes into action. “Sleepers” (spies inserted into a community and told to wait until they receive orders) in usenet groups and listservs create distractions, invent controversies; web sites (on both sides of the question) go into high gear, using splashy graphics and clever text to distort the conversation. Persons working for the client pretend to be disinterested so they can spread propaganda.

It reminded me of the time my Democratic Party precinct captain asked if I wanted to be a precinct captain.

Are you retiring? I asked.

Of course not! he laughed. You’d be the Republican precinct captain. Then we’d have all our bases covered.

The illusions of cyberspace are seductive. Every keystroke leaves a luminous track in the melting snow that can be seen with the equivalent of night vision goggles.

Hacking means tracking — and counter-tracking — and covering your tracks — in the virtual world. Hacking means knowing how to follow the flow of electrons to its source and understand on every level of abstraction — from source code to switches and routers to high level words and images — what is really happening.

Hackers are unwilling to do as little as possible. Hackers are need-to-know machines driven by a passion to connect disparate data into meaningful patterns. Hackers are the online detectives of the virtual world.

You don’t get to be a hacker overnight.

The devil is in the details. Real hackers get good by endless trial and error, failing into success again and again. Thomas Alva Edison, inventor of the electric light, invented a hundred filaments that didn’t work before he found one that did. He knew that every failure eliminated a possibility and brought him closer to his goal.

Listen to “Rogue Agent” set someone straight on an Internet mailing list:

“You want to create hackers? Don’t tell them how to do this or that. Show them how to discover it for themselves. Those who have the innate drive will dive in and learn by trial and error. Those who don’t, comfortable to stay within the bounds of their safe little lives, fall by the wayside.

“There’s no knowledge so sweet as that which you’ve discovered on your own.”

In Chinatown, an unsavory character tries to stop Jake Gittes from prying by cutting his nose. He reminds Gittes that “curiosity killed the cat.”

Isn’t it ironic that curiosity, the defining characteristic of an intelligent organism exploring its environment, has been prohibited by folk wisdom everywhere?

The endless curiosity of hackers is regulated by a higher code that may not even have a name but which defines the human spirit at its best. The Hacker’s Code is an affirmation of life itself, life that wants to know, and grow, and extend itself throughout the “space” of the universe. The hackers’ refusal to accept conventional wisdom and boundaries is a way to align his energies with the life-giving passion of heretics everywhere. And these days, that’s what needed to survive.

Robert Galvin, the patriarch of Motorola, maker of cell-phones and semi-conductors, says that “every significant decision that changes the direction of a company is a minority decision. Whatever is the intuitive presumption — where everyone agrees, “Yeah, that’s right” — will almost surely be wrong.”

Motorola succeeded by fostering an environment in which creativity thrives. The company has institutionalized an openness to heresy because they know that wisdom is always arriving at the edge of things, on the horizons of our lives, and when it first shows up — like a comet on the distant edges of the solar system — it is faint and seen by only a few. But those few know where to look.

Allen Hynek, an astronomer connected with the U. S. Air Force investigation of UFOs, was struck by the “strangeness” of UFO reports, the cognitive dissonance that characterizes experiences that don’t fit our orthodox belief systems. He pointed out that all the old photographic plates in astronomical observatories had images of Pluto on them, but until Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto and said where it was, no one saw it because they didn’t know where to look.

The best computer consultants live on the creative edge of things. They are path-finders, guides for those whom have always lived at the orthodox center but who find today that the center is constantly shifting, mandating that they learn new behaviors, new skills in order to be effective. In order to live on the edge.

The edge is the new center. The center of a web is wherever we are.

When I looked out over the audience at DefCon IV, the hackers’ convention, I saw an assembly of the most brilliant and most unusual people I had ever seen in one room. It was exhilarating. We all felt as if we had come home. There in that room for a few hours or a few days, we did not have to explain anything. We knew who we were and what drove us in our different ways to want to connect the dots of data into meaningful patterns.

We know we build on quicksand, but building is too much fun to give up. We know we leave tracks, but going is so much more energizing than staying home. We know that curiosity can get your nose slit, but then we’ll invent new ways to smell.

Computer programmers write software applications that are doomed to be as obsolete as wire recordings. The infrastructures built by our engineers are equally doomed. Whether a virtual world of digital bits or a physical world of concrete and steel, our civilization is a Big Toy that we build and use up at the same time. The fun of the game is to know that it is a game, and winning is identical with our willingness to play.

To say that when we engage with one another in cyberspace we are “Hacking Chinatown” is a way to say that asking questions is more important than finding answers. We do not expect to find final answers. But the questions must be asked. We refuse to do as little as possible because we want to KNOW.

Asking questions is how human beings create opportunities for dignity and self-transcendence; asking questions is how we are preparing ourselves to leave this island earth and enter into a trans-galactic web of life more diverse and alien than anything we have encountered.

Asking questions that uncover the truth is our way of refusing to consent to illusions and delusions, our way of insisting that we can do it better if we stay up later, collaborate with each other in networks with no names, and lose ourselves in the quest for knowledge and self-mastery.

This is how proud, lonely men and women, illuminated in the darkness by their glowing monitors, become heroes in their own dramas as they wander the twisting streets of cyberspace and their own lives.

Even in Chinatown, Jake. Even in Chinatown.

Games Engineers Play was one of the first Islands-in-the-Clickstream columns I wrote. In it I observed that a society socializes its young through games, teaching them through play the attitudes and skills we want them to have. Those of us who have grown to middle age through the current technological revolution have learned to partner with the young. We know that they know intuitively things we have never learned. We listen to how they frame the world for clues to where new technologies will take us. Executives at Sony bring in children to test prototypes of the Playstation, watching them do things with the platform that its inventors never imagined. In exchange for their insight and perspective, we offer them our insight and perspective, knowing that all partnerships are quid’s-pro-quo in which something of value must be exchanged.

We need to go to the edges, I often tell audiences, to see what’s emerging outside of our conventional thinking. The edge is the new center. We must be dislodged from our comfortable niches, our snug little cubbies, in order to see what’s real.

The edges I encourage people to explore are the latest military technology, commercial sex sites, and children’s games. All three offer clues to what’s coming next.

This is not rocket science, really. The military needs the most current technologies. Five years ago, an Air Force report on war in space in 2025 referenced the use of holographic image projection, cloaking devices, multispectral camouflage, and the creation of synthetic environments which the attacker believes to be real as necessary for the defense of the battlespace. If we consider those technologies metaphors for what will be needed in all competitive environments, we can anticipate some of the directions from which new winds will blow, just as ten years ago the migration of intelligence agents from government to industry signaled the growing power of trans-national corporations and dissolving geopolitical boundaries. The manipulation of perception itself, not just the concepts which frame those perceptions, will increasingly inform the arts of government and commerce. The masters of illusion will be masters of the space.

Nor is it rocket science to know that human beings love sex and will pay for it, real or imagined. We buy what looks or feels like love. New technologies of communication – books, photographs, VCRs, the Net – are always used to sell sex. So consumers fund the R&D that will bring the next advances, knowing that what the sex trade develops will migrate into the daylight commercial space.

And I try to pay attention to the games children play and anticipate how they will evolve into the playspace of the next generation of adults.

Last weekend I waited in line for an IMAX movie next door to a museum shop. I noticed posters on the window inviting children inside. This is what they advertised:

offworld gear
weapons for the mind
cyber-pets
idea generators
cosmic debris
alien life forms
space armor
space junk
thought reactors

I flashed back to the Viking Lander settling down on Mars. When it began transmitting the first pictures from the red planet, I waited with a neighbor, a video ham, and watched as the first image of the Martian desert painted itself pixel by slow pixel across his monitor. I looked at that desert and yearned to be there, I burned to climb Olympus Mons, to hike across the plains of Mars with the red wind at my back.

When I heard that the third successor to the Survivor television series planned to take contestants to the cosmonaut training center at Star City where the Russians would eliminate one each week until the finalist went to Baikonur in Kazakhstan to be launched to Mir, I wrote my application in twenty minutes and emailed it to the network. They said I was one of the first to apply. I knew that if I were a contestant, I would do anything, anything to go into space.

When we tack back and forth on our clear intention like a shark on its prey, nothing can stop us.

Or almost nothing. Mir no longer exists, having flamed to an ignominious end after its glorious moment in the sun. Since I don’t have twenty million to pay the Russians for a ride, I had better find another route out of the gravity well of the earth.

Offworld gear … alien life forms … space armor …

I felt like I was looking through a shimmering window onto the future that is here now but just out of reach. I felt like Winnie the Pooh hanging under his balloon next to the honey tree. He could see the honey, he could smell the honey, but he couldn’t quite reach the honey.

So the military tells us that the practice of deception will be more and more important. A friend who taught cover and deception to intelligence experts says: “Deception consists of illusion, misdirection, and ridicule, these three.” Then he smiles. “But the greatest of these is ridicule.”

Ridicule is how we defend ourselves from the first images of the future as they crawl out of the darkness. Ridicule can be defeated, however, with the right tools, the tools that track down the truth, the real weapons of the mind. There is plenty of cosmic debris out there, plenty of illusion too. Talk about alien life forms and offworld colonies and the herd might think you’re odd. The herd loves illusions, after all, loves being a herd. But for us little cyber-pets frolicking in a greater cosmic glory, what we see on that monitor is Mars, what we see in that museum window is right here, right now … don’t you see? it’s within our reach.

It’s only a matter of going.

The danger with taking the moral high ground is that, once you take it, you no longer have it.

Saul Alinksy, a great community organizer, was committed to delivering power into the hands of the powerless. He worked to create structures that would shift the flow toward the dispossessed. He was an engineer of the Tao, or “Way,” which is often likened to a waterflow seeking its own level. The Tao is impossible to resist because it’s how energy in the universe flows, it’s the flow, and it’s the energy, all at the same time. So when we align our energies with the Tao, our actions are boosted beyond anything we might achieve on our own. Alinsky focused on the flow, not the organizational structures. The structures were necessary but temporary, like irrigation ditches designed to channel the waters of a river. He helped organize the Back of the Yards Council in Chicago, for example, to give power to neighborhood people but when, a decade or so later, the Council has become reactionary, he organized others against it.

Once we seize the moral high ground, we lose it if we try to hold it. We become what we are fighting. Organizational structures become constraints instead of means of liberation. When we identify the right with organizational structures and then act on behalf of those structures, we can justify anything. Once we think we’re right because we belong to the organization instead of determining right action by the context, we turn the Tao into a river of blood.

Enter hactivism.

We hear a lot these days about hacktivism. One form of hacktivism is the use of hacking skills to crack web sites and deface them or replace them with political messages.

During recent Israeli-Palestinian battles, criminal hackers or “crackers” affiliated with both sides attacked one another’s Web sites. In one incident, a Pakistani stole the credit card numbers of members of a pro-Israel lobbying group and posted them on the Web.

A single computer in the hands of a child has more leverage in the digital era than a rock in the hands of a rioter. Destroy one node in the network and another node becomes the center.

Hactivism is celebrated by some as a sign that young technophiles are growing up and using their skills to a purpose. Instead of leaving graffiti, they are “hacking with a higher purpose.”

If we mean that technophiles are creating software like “Hactivismo,” a program that enables oppressed people to access human rights information or news reports blocked by their governments, that might be true.

But the use of cracking skills to defame and deface, regardless of one’s side, always defeats the higher purpose. Whatever sense of righteousness motivated the act in the first place is lost in the act itself.

Such hactivism is “hacking-and-hiding,” throwing stones, then ducking for cover, which merely escalates the level of virtual violence. It’s a power play on behalf of a power rush.

Action on behalf of the Tao, that is, action on behalf of the powerless, the dispossessed, the genuinely victimized, always transforms the battlefield by revealing injustice in the bright light of undeniable revelation. Such action manifests what Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. called “soul power,” which is the power of a human being with integrity, focus, and high intentionality to expose an unjust law by confronting it … and accepting the consequences.

King’s letter from a Birmingham jail sounds like it was written on the Internet.

“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, ” he wrote, “tied in a single garment of destiny.”

This “systems approach” to human consciousness ought to resonate with people who live on the Web. But for that to happen, we have to not just live in a web – we all do, online and off – we have to SEE the web in which we live, we have to see the luminous threads connecting us indissolubly into a single field of consciousness. We have to see that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” because life in our quantum world is non-local.

“Whatever affects one directly,” said King, “affects all indirectly.”

A hacker once suggested to me that the chat rooms in which he once hung out resembled an island of lost boys, bootstrapping themselves into adulthood without benefit of counsel. They needed an image or icon of higher possibility, he said, which could disclose, illuminate and called forth their hidden possibilities into the light of day.

He too was talking about “soul power.”

First, said King, collect the facts to determine whether injustices are alive. Then negotiate. Then comes self-purification, and only then, direct action.

Self-purification has a quaint ring to it, doesn’t it, after decades in which we extolled greed and self-indulgence?

But listen to the words of a man who spent his life as a spy.

“We need something like a ‘holy knight,’ he said. “We need people trained in the deepest spiritual truths. In some of the situations in which we put our agents, the only thing preventing a horrible death is their capacity to tune into multiple levels of awareness.

“We looked to the east, to martial arts and generic spiritual disciplines back-engineered from other cultures, to train them in those spiritual arts. But I think we have models in our own traditions, we just don’t know how to use them.”

He was talking about the will and discipline to act on behalf of what we see in the depths of our souls. The structures we build on behalf of liberation may constrain us or set us free, but ultimately, it is right action that creates freedom: Right action on behalf of real victims of injustice, after which we have the courage not to mistake the means for the end, the tools for the task, or the people now set free for the freedom they sought.

The Magic is in the Mix

SEPTEMBER 2000/NEWS&VIEWS

Information Security Magazine

BY RICHARD THIEME

NEWS

Nearly 6,000 multi-generational hackers, crackers, corporate security gurus, intelligence officers, journalists, corporate recruiters, federal officials and scene junkies flocked to Las Vegas in late July for two security conferences: The 8^th Annual Def Con, held at the Alexis Park Hotel  and the Black Hat Briefings, a more mainstream security conference held two days before Def Con at Caesar’s Palace.

VIEWS

My, how time flies.

Eight years ago, 100 computer hackers who had previously connected only in cyberspace–mostly through bulletin boards–decided to meet in Las Vegas. Why Las Vegas? “It’s the only city that builds hotels faster than we can use them up,” said one.

The con took root and began to grow. And grow. And grow. Founded and led by Jeff Moss (a.k.a. Dark Tangent), Def Con then began sponsoring the Black Hat Briefings, now in its fourth year. Originally conceived as a forum for security experts presented by elite hackers, Black Hat has grown from 350 to more than 1,500 attendees. Black Hat also offers annual conferences in Amsterdam and Hong Kong and is adding specialized seminars like Security for Windows 2000. Moss recently left his job at Secure Computing’s consulting division to devote himself full time to growing Black Hat/Def Con (BH/DC).

Eight years after its modest beginnings, the magic of BH/DC is in the mix. While some mourn the loss of the old days–when Def Con more closely resembled hacker-only cons like Pump Con, Summer Con and Cuervo Con–Moss always intended DefCon as a bridge that would include many “straight” government and corporate computer security types. He saw that real security was created through collaborative conversation. Def Con’s opening session, a “Federal Panel” that included such speakers as Art Money, Asst. Secretary of Defense, testifies to the success of Moss’s effort to transform the con. Still, it’s not by chance that Moss added BlackHat to the mix four years ago. It is much more profitable than Def Con, whose dirt-cheap admission prices attract a lot of Gen-Xers who couldn’t afford the pricier BlackHat.

In contrast to H2K, a hacker gathering held earlier this summer in New York which seemed to many like a cyberWoodstock reunion, BH/DC has grown with the times. Moss now has multiyear contracts with hotels, and the “Def Con goons”–volunteers who serve as support staff–are now joined by professional convention organizers.

Of course, other computer security conferences have also evolved, including SANS, CSI, Usenix, TISC, MIS’s Infosec World and various vendor-sponsored conventions, such as the RSA Data Security Conference. Thanks to the open borders of the Internet, computer security is big business. So how well does Def Con/Black Hat stack up to its more mainstream competitors? Why do so many people come to the burning desert in July when other conferences are available?

Multi-Ring Circus

First, a disclaimer: I have spoken at Def Con for five years and Black Hat for four years. For me, BH/DC is a primary community populated with friends and colleagues. So rather than give my own (admittedly biased) opinion here, I asked others for their evaluations while I was there.

While the sister cons do not get straight A’s from everyone, all agreed that the unique flavor of the multi-ring circus, with its great diversity of resources, and the good-to-high quality of technical presentations make it a “must go” for many.

Vaughn Hendricks, a staff systems integrator of Lockheed Martin Mission Systems, has worked in computing for 35 years and computer security for 20. He limits the conferences he attends to Black Hat/DefCon and CSI.

“Black Hat/Def Con offers a unique opportunity for collaboration between good guys and bad guys,” Hendricks said. “I can listen to premiere network security gurus and ex-hackers and discuss vulnerabilities in depth. I’ve been to both for two years, so it’s at the top of my list for gathering information for protecting government resources.”

A senior security engineer who goes by the handle “Noid” seconded Hendricks’s sentiments. “BH/DC has a certain edge that no other mainstream security convention can compete with. When it comes to hacking systems or being on the cutting edge of protecting systems, there’s a certain mindset one must possess, and all of the speakers at BH/DC have it,” said Noid, who works for SecurQuest, an Irvine, Calif.-based security firm. “I’ve been to most mainstream conventions and they’re good at teaching textbook methods of attacking/defending systems, but at BH/DC you get to talk face to face with the person who pioneered the particular attack/defense, which you can’t get anywhere else. I went to SANS this spring, for example, and they taught us all about L0phtcrack and BO2k. It was informative and interesting, but at DefCon I can have a beer with Mudge (author of L0phtcrack) or DilDog (author of Back Orifice 2000) and have my questions answered directly by the authors.”

Drew Fahey, a computer security and investigative specialist for e-fense Inc., added that the BH/DC cons aren’t for everyone, however. “You don’t go for hands-on training,” he said. “You go to meet new people and see who is really ahead in information security. That is not to say you don’t get good information at Usenix or SANS, but you don’t get to meet members of the underground or groups like CDC [Cult of the Dead Cow] at traditional security conferences. You really have to experience it to understand its value.”

Veterans of traditional security conferences may also be uncomfortable, at first, with the nonconformist environment at BH/DC. Though its rebel image has softened over the years, DefCon, in particular, still attracts a large contingent of tattooed, blue-haired teens decked out in black from head to toe. And while the rabble-rousing was kept to a minimum this summer, Def Con still attracts a contingent of attendees who insist on hacking into the PA system, pouring cement into their room toilets and dumping bubble-bath into the Jacuzzi. You’re certain to get none of that at CSI or RSA.

However, most of the attendees I spoke to chalked these incidents as minor annoyances, preferring to emphasize the other unique aspects of the BH/DC. Charles Neal, senior director of cyberterrorism detection and incident response for Exodus Communications, said that “Black Hat brings people closer to the edge of the black and white side of the security knife than other security conferences.” That made it a “valuable experience” for Neal–who is also a recently retired FBI special agent of the L.A. computer crime squad–“in spite of a few speakers with good knowledge but underdeveloped presentation skills.”

Originally appeared in the September 2000 issue of Information Security Magazine (infosecurity.mag.com). Copyright (c) 2000. All rights reserved.