I have half an hour to share with you some of the fruits of fifty-two years of life on earth, interacting with and reflecting on the activities and issues that bring us all here today and how what you do, those of you who are best at this, relates to the Bigger Picture of what is happening on the planet, how what you do is a vanguard of a new way of thinking, a new way of being, a new way of acting in the world that is going to be the most valuable thing to know in the next century. I am going to put out some modules which you can plug into each other any way you want, the program will run in any direction.

What this talk is really about it power -- using it, knowing you have it, knowing you're having impact, and what is the best way to exercise power -- and identity (as individuals, and as a culture, and I'm going to be grandiose and talk about our identity as a species which I believe is changing) and paradox - because a lot of people who come here, myself included, often function best alone, yet the only reason to be here is to connect with one another in some kind of community, however transitory, and give and receive information in ways that work, and to mentor one another.

So I am going to try to build in half an hour a structure of possibility, the possibility of what it is going to mean to be fully human going into the next century, even as we are going through a transformation that I think is as deep as anything we have experienced as a species because our interaction with the distributed computer network around the globe is a symbiotic relationship in which we change it, it changes us, and each one of us responds in a dialectic that takes us all up a spiral of mutual transformation. We are not the same as we were ten years ago. We are in transition.

I am now fifty-two years old and I was immersed as a younger man in the world of text. I wrote fiction, I taught literature at the University of Illinois, I was steeped in the world that text gave me as a way to frame reality. And I am struggling to continue to walk the bridge toward being a person engaged instead with the networked world of electronic information. I find the contrast between who I am and who I was really is profound. Each transformation of the Technology of the Word changes what it means to be a human being. Mcluhan said all this a generation ago, but none of us knew how to listen to what he was saying.

When people first began to speak millions of years ago, it's likely the first thing that they did was complain about what had been lost. They found they could talk about ANYTHING and waste time talking about nothing, and they had lost the unconscious communion of the tribe which they had had for millions of years. The objections people raised against the emergence of speech might have been similar to what drove Plato crazy when writing appeared. He thought writing was the end of civilization. The things he said writing was going to do to human consciousness -- which it did -- are identical to things people said would happen after the printing press was invented and after computers began to be connected to one another. Plato said civilization was over, and in a way he was right. Civilization as he knew, as it existed, was over. And civilization as we knew it, as it existed, is over, and what is being born is an ongoing process of transformation.

We do not yet have the language with which to describe this transition.There are plenty of buzzwords to designate it -- paradigm change, transformation -- that have become so common they have lost their potency, but still, they're good words. My experience is that when we go through this kind of transformation, individually or as a culture, it feels like everything is falling apart until things coalesce again in a hierarchical restructuring. Until that happens, many people become rigid, predictable, and change induces, in a large part of the population, fear. A paradox for us here is that our very need for knowledge and power itself comes from fear and the need to be powerful ironically comes from our fear. Example: I've been speaking since I was 20, and I know I went into it because when I was 13 I had to give a speech in school. I started blushing, they started laughing, I blushed more, and so on. I was profoundly self-conscious. Every single time that I have gotten up to speak since then, I have had to push through that same membrane of fear until the words start to come. The way we structure our lives is often a way to deal with what drives us. Fear of speaking drove me to become a speaker, and every profession I have had has involved speaking.

Fear has created a generation gap so large it makes the one in the sixties look like a picnic. For example, a few days ago I spoke with an aide to a senator who described one of the first interactive hearings in Congress using Powerbooks and the Net. The senior senator, a man of considerable power, came in after everything was set up and they said, "Senator, begin your chat." He looked at the powerbook and said, "Hello? Hello?" and when nothing happened, "What do I do, talk to it?" Two thirds of those in congress, the aide told me, don't use email.

When I am speaking about these issues, the audience often divides at once into those who calculate when they will die or retire and evaluate whether or not they can sprint for the finish line without having to learn about any of this, and those who imagine themselves thriving in this world of information and knowledge.

So: in a world in which information is currency and knowledge is capital, your power to move in and out of the channels and data banks of information at the speed of light is the most powerful lever anyone can have under the rock of reality. But I will talk a little bit too about how dangerous it is to think we do that unobserved. The freedom we perceive out there in cyberspace, anonymous and alone, is allowed, not seized, and that's important to remember.

They say things about us -- how isolated we are, what loners we are -- their image is of a person hunched in the darkness over a glowing screen invading boardrooms and bedrooms. When I was a kid, they said the same thing about reading, that I read too much. Don't read so much, they said, come on outside. And I recall my friend who was always in his basement, doing ham radio and other electronic stuff, they called him Tubby and told me to get him out of there. Well, I won't tell you who he is now, but he has a powerful position and they call him Mister Tubby.

You know Arthur Clark said that any technology sufficiently in advance of our own as to be incomprehensible is perceived as magic. What you do is experienced by most of the population around you as magic and you are experienced as sorcerers. This is why it is so frightening. It is their fear and their exaggerated projections of power that we must learn to dominate and use and leverage on our own behalf and then we can understand where our real power comes from.

Every domain has a god and the god of our domain is Odin. Odin hung in a tree for nine days and nights, alone in a windswept tree in the dead of winter, in order to seize the runes. Odin wanted Wisdom and he suffered alone through those nine long nights in order to have it. That myth connects to us and our own long nights, why we will do anything in order to know. We go where we need to go to get what we need to get to do what we know we need to do.

Because this transformation is so profound, I want to hold out the possibility that it may not be a new species that is being born but it is a new variation of the species: I call it homo sapiens hackii. It is a genuinely new variation because you perceive and structure and frame reality in a different way. If that is the way you have always done it, you can't know what it is because there's nothing with which to contrast it.

For example: education. We think of education as something delivered during adolescence, but adolescence was invented by the printing press. Before the printing press, people learned by apprenticeship, that is, they worked alongside the adults who taught them in proximity what they needed to know. They were ten, eleven, twelve -- that's why hormones kick in then. When the printing press was invented, it changed the definition of education to mean the manipulation of typographic symbols on pages, in books, sitting at a bench and reading books. Adolescence was invented as a name for that length of time during which adulthood had to be postponed, about a decade, while people learned how deal with the internalization of those typographic symbols. Is it any wonder that the smartest people (electronically) can't sit still in school, because the very structure of education itself is being undermined and sabotaged.

When I speak to teachers, I notice that it's the best and brightest of them who, when they catch on to what's happening, say, "we've got to get more computers into the schools," but computers aren't cheap and portable like books, and they see suddenly that there is no NEED to get them there. The computers already exist, distributed into the space of the world, and do not need to be housed in special buildings. So apprenticeship is being re-invented, because the structures of education and the structures of work that education is intended to serve are out of joint. Just as the printing press invented benches and books as the building blocks of education, the computer is de-inventing the school system that has existed for several hundred years. That's why so much more education takes place in rooms like these. Businesses hold seminars, do re-education, set up their own universities to cope with the fact the school systems are coming apart because it is a hierarchical structure that delivers information at the pleasure of the curriculum and the command-and-control teacher when what is needed is someone more like a coach who understands what it is you're doing so they can be available to help when needed. The computer delivers the information when we need it, when we've made a mistake and are teachable, not when a teacher decides to deliver it.

One of the best teachers I know is a fourth-grade teacher who was supposed to teach computers to her kids but didn't know how to turn one on. So she asked her three brightest kids to meet with her after school secretly to teach her how to use the computer so she could teach the rest of the class. That is at most a tenuous holding action that will stave off the inevitable for only so long.

This is one of the ways we are changing, but computerization is also changing the future itself. Do you all know about future scenarios? Peter Schwarz and the Global Business Network (GBN) came up with multiple scenarios for imagining the future because exponential change means that you have to predicate a number of possible futures and then consistently get feedback and data to evaluate which ones are evolving so you can cross-correlate that data with your experience and continually readjust your view of the future. That way of structuring the future did not exist before computerization. People thought of the future incrementally in straight lines as a connect-the-dots kind of path. Go into a business a few years ago, you heard about management by objective as if you could control where you were going to go. Instead, today, you have to ally yourself even with enemies to anticipate possible futures you can not discern, because no one has a clue as to what is coming next. You have to partner with others in a way that enables you to be ready for whatever it is that emerges on the horizon.

The future as a possibility for action, a way to structure your way of being in the world, has changed fundamentally, and therefore how you hold yourself in the world as a possibility for action has changed. The future as we now hold it is the same shape as the structures of information -- the computer program, the Internet -- with which we interact.

When you interact with a web or network instead of a hierarchy, you internalize the structure of the system of information with which you interact in a way that redefines your psyche.

Let me give you an example. I was working for a bank beginning a massive reorganization. No one was more frightened than these risk-averse guys dealing with change and knowing they didn't know what to do . I talked to a number of them one-on-one before the retreat and each one of them talked about the bank as an obstacle. Each one was smart, they all had great personal resources, but they all talked about the bank as a barrier over which they could not get. When they were finally in one room at one time, I could ask, "Where is the bank?" Obviously, there was no physical bank there. The bank that stymied them was the bank in their heads. The bank in their heads -- the way they constructed reality -- was the obstacle to action.

In a network or web you learn to exercise power in a different way. You cannot exercise it in a direct command-and-control way. You learn in a network to work by participating and contributing. It's the best of the Hacker Ethic and holds forth a possibility of community in which information is free and freely shared so that you can then use power in a responsible way.

Dead Addict was saying last night -- it was so good I wrote it down: I was listening to my scanner, listening to what must have been a cordless call because cellular isn't legal -- it was one of those wonderful times when you know all the parties in a situation, and you know something they don't know, and it's twenty to midnight, union negotiations end at midnight and you can make the telephone call to your friend who is downtown waiting for the union's response to management's final proposal, a call that would make a difference. But instead of doing that -- which is illegal -- you call the person making the call (who gave their number on the air) and say, "You know, these are sensitive negotiations, and you shouldn't broadcast your conversation on an FM radio." The power rush came, not from calling my friend, but from the way the union rep gasped on the telephone. And Dead Addict said, "That's the trouble with being God: you can look but you can't touch." That's a profound insight: once you start touching things, you start screwing them up.

Another consequence of this transformation, and the reason we're hearing so much this weekend about the global marketplace and security, is that today every individual and every business must function as if they're an independent country, which means intentionally managing both intelligence and information AND counter-intelligence and disinformation. It is no longer an option or luxury for companies to act as if they don't have to worry about who knows what about them and what they can learn about others. This is why so much power is going to be located in mediating structures -- filters, smart agents, people who do competitive business intelligence and know how to get information and above all to connect it in meaningful ways. Competitive business intelligence is going to a 101 course in good schools of business.

Disinformation is a fine art. An article I wrote for an internet magazine in England resulted in an inquiry from a public relations firm in London about doing "brand defense" with them on the Internet. And what is brand defense? "When one of our clients is attacked, we go onto the Internet in various disguises and aliases -- some go to Usenet groups, some set up web pages, some engage in flame wars -- anything to distract the attention of the populace from our poor besieged client so, unnoticed, he can trot off and let the war continue, a war of symbols and abstractions, while he's out of harm's way."

Disinformation is an art because the level of abstraction presented to us by the internet is the highest with which we have ever engaged. What we encounter on the Net are symbols of symbols of symbols or symbols. There is no structure of accountability, such as footnotes, references, or a way to cross-correlate the data in order to infer in a reasonable way what is true about what we see. So Plato was right. We are dealing with copies of copies, sometimes with no originals. And because the Net is such a powerfully projective media, we provide the credibility for the images of images and images of text at which we are looking as if they have their own integrity and internal structure when in fact they may be very artful constructs. The Net in this sense is like a ten-dimensional dog chasing its own tails.

I've never been to a convention in which fear and paranoia is threaded through so many conversations. We are walking, we know, in a hall of mirrors, in which the aliases we have used, the personas and images we have created, may be known, may not be known; we may be talking to someone who once was somebody else, and we don't know who they really work for. Once you start getting lost in that hall of mirrors, our ability simply to show up as a human being and exchange data in a trusted way is undermined, and the way we at least like to dream it used to happen in the hacker community is lost.

Briefly -- one of the things that is being transformed is the structure of religious institutions, what it means to engage in a quest for meaning. Just as the printing press ended the domination of the Roman Catholic Church forever, creating the possibility of a variety of denominations that have been at war with one another ever since, the structure of religious institutions as we have known them is over. You can take a bullet and walk dead for a long time before you fall over. Religious institutions as we have them were created first by writing. Every major religious figure in the world -- Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, Moses, Mohammed -- occurred in a very narrow band of the vast timeline of history that happened to coincide with the emergence of writing. Writing created of those historical figures textual beings; we interact not with the historical beings but with the text that mediates their meaning and presence and discloses a horizon of possibility. When we interact with images and beings disclosed to us electronically, it creates a different kind of horizon and a different possibility for what it means to be human. I have a hunch that it is in the MOOs and MUDs, the brackish swampy tidewaters of the Net, that images, aliases and avatars will emerge on the edge of life where it always happens, that will define the possibilities for future electronic religious communities and deliver the real goods to people who connect and create real communities on line. It will be as Marianne Moore defined poetry, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them." That's what it is to go on line. In and through those symbolic abstractions, we connect with each other and reality.

Last but not least, do not limit yourself to a twentieth century view of what it is that is happening. This talk is titled "Hacking as Practice for Trans-Planetary Life in the 21st Century." We live now primarily on earth but we have been throughout the solar system. We are going to colonize other worlds and live in space stations, the stuff that for me was the stuff of science fiction. When I look at images of other worlds from the Hubble Telescope on the Net, it reminds me that Columbus was a mapmaker before he was an explorer. He drew and internalized the structure of the world he drew sufficiently to then get up and go. Pictures from the Hubble of exploding galaxies and gravitational lenses contracting spacetime makes me want to go. We are now looking at the maps that define for us the horizon. This is relevant to you because the skills needed in trans-planetary culture are the skills hackers have.

(1) You have to live easily in the non-space of the hive mind, in cyberspace. I know a lot of people are tired of the word cyberspace, but please, give me a better one and I'll use it. I am still grateful to Gibson for the imagination that envisioned so well that non-space where we spend so much time -- the non-space of the mind in which, you know how it is, we connect out there, almost bodiless. Time and space are constructed differently; when we're trans-planetary or even trans-galactic, we will have to be comfortable with the contraction of spacetime and moving through wormholes that distort and twist as LSD (that's a drug that used to be used in the sixties) redefines the geodesic lines of our minds.

(2) We have to learn to be at ease with "modular life." What do I mean by that? Back when I graduated from school, it was expected you would go to work, stay with a job, and die from the job. Modular life means, on the other hand, that things come together and come apart quickly like a flower seen in time-lapse photography. Communities online form, coalesce, like shuttles docking at a space station and come apart just as quickly. Life is modular in a developmental sense as well. I am now in my third career and I have never been happier in my life than doing what I am doing, I had to break out of a structure that was suffocating, that did not allow me to think the way I must think. You will move through roles, careers, identities, as a snake sheds skins, and life online -- with avatars, aliases, personas -- is one way to try out what they are ... as long as you stay connected to the core self that you know yourself to be and don't mistake that core self for one of the aliases it has created. Know who you are, separate from that.

This means that people who know how to live on the boundaries of things will thrive. Businesses are suddenly interested in me. Why? People who have always lived on the center need help. I always lived on the edge in what I thought was a creative way while others thought it was rather neurotic. I thought it worked pretty well because you can see from the edge how people inside structure their lives. Under conditions of exponential change, however, people who live at the center are continuously moved to the edge because the center keeps shifting, and they need pathfinders to teach them the survival skills needed on the boundaries where life and new possibilities always emerge. You know how to do that.

(3) You have a desire -- I know this -- you have a desire, a craving, a passion to know. You are need-to-know machines. You are hardwired to need to know what things do, how they work, where is the information stored, how can I get it, connect it, put it together. I too have lived my life in various personas that have enabled me to go to the depths of the lives of the people I worked with and served so I could learn what it meant to be a fully human being. You know that information does want to be free and linked and accessible because that magnifies all of our power and spreads it throughout the hive.

(4) You love adventure. You are willing to take risks. You know the wonderful warmth of the flame on the edge of your wings. You love to live on the edge, put things together and figure them out, and make a difference. You want to leave your mark electronically that says, "I was here," marking your electronic territory like virtual tomcats. This is my territory: I go where I please. This is why you see firewalls as challenges rather than walls.

Remember those experiments with artificial life using algorithms instead of DNA? They measured the speed of the flow of information in relation to the emergence of life. When information travels so slowly it's like molasses, it becomes moribund, there is no life, and when it moves too fast, the system becomes chaotic, and again, no life. But when it is just right, it recombines at an optimal rate, life is optimized just at the edge of chaos. Between rigidity and chaos, right on the edge of chaos, always feeling as if we are going to fall off the edge, but not quite falling falls -- that is a skill needed in a world where change is exponential, to live always on the verge of chaos yet never capitulating to it.

(5) You know how to live with ambiguity. After all, who can you trust? We want to connect with people, to learn from them, but we live in a panopticon. A panopticon is a prison invented by Jeremy Benthem, a prison reformer, in the nineteenth century. The guard tower is in the center and the cells are arranged around it like slices of a pie. The guard can always see the prisoners but they can't see him or one another. Because of what's happening with GPS, the cross-correlation of data in data bases and warehouses, "they" can know anything they want to know about anybody realistically. What will it do to life to know we are always locatable on the face of the earth, always known, always observable? That feeling of power you have on the Net comes in part from anonymity, yet you know that every click of your clickstream is a luminous footprint in the melting snows of cyberspace that anyone who wants to track can track. Every telephone call, as you know, is tappable or scannable, every word you speak is overhearable; you know what can be done with technology because you use it. Who can you trust in this hall of mirrors?

Do we really think we're smart enough to outsmart everybody else? Remember Teddy, the break-in artist in "Body Heat," and what he reminded the lawyer who was planning a crime? He said, "You plan a crime, there are a hundred ways you can screw it up. You think of fifty of them, you're a genius. And counsellor, you ain't no genius."

A friend of mine is connected to 17,000 data bases in 123 countries. She does competitive business intelligence, finding people, money, and things. She has never known someone who could completely disappear. She has tracked people through three identities. You can change eye color, name, and all the rest, she tells me, but you can't hide what you crave or love.

Much of what feels like freedom out there is allowed by those who would steal your gold nuggets if they could, but out there, we don't always know what constitutes the real gold. How close can you fly to the flame without getting burned? In order to snatch the gold nuggets of data or forbidden access from the jaws of the monster? When you least expect it, the game of the Net suddenly becomes the game of Real Life. Click! solve the right puzzle and click! you go to the next level. This is archetypal, this is deep symbolic stuff that resonates with myths of heroism, voyaging, discovery, winning the golden apple, winning the princess - but it's really a quest for our own wholeness, the completion of our selves. That quest is realized when we connect with those we help up the ladder after us.

(6) This is when "film noir" turns into a possibility of real community.

You have got to mentor the younger hackers, as the hacker community itself matures, you have got to grow and transform yourselves with it in order to continue to provide the dissemination of essential information not only about how to hack but how to survive hacking and live to play the game another day. As the community matures, and those of you who started out years ago graduate, if you don't find a way to mentor the new ones coming up, you will stop learning and growing, because that's what it means to graduate, to learn how to share what you know how to do in a meaningful way. At the same time, of course, you have to protect yourself from those who are too lazy to do their homework. You have to find the ones who know what they need to do first in order to bring to you the critical questions.

The bottom line? Know yourself, know who you are. Use your work, use your time online, use projections -- those you impose on others and those others impose on you -- to leverage your power and know who you are. Remember when Luke Skywalker took off Darth Vader's helmet and saw his own face? That's true to my experience. Everything I hate or scorn is true of myself. The dark side of the force is everywhere, and life is so ambiguous, mixed all together, all gray, that you can't easily separate one thing from another. There is so much concern about undercover work here. Every undercover agent I have known, and I have known three in my lifetime as good friends, every one has told me that the line in the movie is true: "I don't know if I'm a cop pretending to be a criminal or a criminal pretending to be a cop." People go into the work that enables them to do what they love to do as freely as they can. Who is the enemy? To whom can we be loyal? Who is the hacker and who is the undercover cop?

It is not a question of behaviors, either: it is not your behaviors that constitute a threat, not what they tell you, not your behaviors. Those behaviors are engaged in by members of the establishment all the time. You can join a government agency or work for a corporation and do the same behaviors that'll get you hard time. It is your perceived allegiance that threatens them, the kind of community you create that frightens them, that is the threat itself, not what you do. So the task is to find a way to do what you want to do in as free and powerful a way as possible but in a way that lets you get up the next morning and come back to the game again.

In conclusion, I want to say this is one of the greatest conventions I've ever attended. A friend asked me what people were like at the con, and I said, I felt like I was finally home. Most of the people are brilliant and most are hopelessly neurotic. My brothers and my sisters! You're a terrific group. And what you know how to do is what you will need to know how to do, and others will pay you a lot of money to show them how to do or to do for them. But please, don't die out there. It is not romantic to crash and burn. It just isn't worth it.

1996

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