Presented at
BruCON 0x07 (2015),
Oct. 9, 2015, noon
(60 minutes)
“In my end is my beginning,” said T. S. Eliot in The Four Quartets, and he might have been talking about hacking. Because radical hacking is a state of mind, an approach to life, the universe, everything, a practice that must be understood with humility, explored with persistence, and mastered with grace and a flair for style.
It begins in the beginning. In Zen we hear of “beginners’ eyes,” which look with no preconceptions and see clearly what is there. That also means we can distinguish what’s in our own minds, see our perceptual apparatus and distinguish it from what’s “out there.” The boundary where those meet, where we half create and half perceive the reality in which we live, is the fertile area where radical hacking takes place. It's the brackish tidewater in which new forms of life are evolving.
So the future of hacking is in a way already here, a mold for possibility that draws us into itself. Those who allow the future to reach back to them and show them the way look like pioneers, creative geniuses, but really, they’re just hackers.
The future may exist, but not as we think it does. It’s not “there” in an objective way, it’s there as a possibility, actualized when we instantiate it. If that sounds like quantum physics, maybe it is: studies testing ESP have detected hits at a rate greater than chance for the next perception, the next event, suggesting the future is already available to us here and now.
But another point of view understands “the future” as how we hold ourselves here and now as possibilities for action. What we call the future is a range of possibilities and when we choose one, it happens in the now. And all is always now.
Thieme suggests possibilities for hacking aligned with these insights based on his experience. The necessity for mastering radical hacking is a non-trivial imperative, mandated by the untimely stories hackers must invent by making and creating contrary to the consensual realities of our time. They are untimely because they cause cognitive dissonance for those who inhabit the consensus, the “userspace” of our world, which is why hacking requires courage, discipline, the management of one’s ego, and a willingness to go as insane as a shaman, remembering how to return to the village of the present, the village of the damned.
Hackers worthy of the name live by the torchlight of doubt and chaos and find their way by fits and starts. Welcome to the world of not try, but do.
Presenters:
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Richard Thieme / neuralcowboy
as Richard Thieme
Richard Thieme (www.thiemeworks.com) is an author and professional speaker focused on the deeper implications of technology, religion, and science for twenty-first century life. He speaks professionally about the challenges posed by new technologies and the future, how to redesign ourselves to meet these challenges, and creativity in response to radical change.
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