[00:00.880 --> 00:02.060]  Erogenous, no, just kidding.
[00:02.320 --> 00:03.800]  Human autonomous zones.
[00:04.780 --> 00:06.020]  Stick around, it's going to be great.
[00:06.260 --> 00:07.360]  Can we do it now?
[00:07.640 --> 00:08.380]  Yup, you're on.
[00:12.000 --> 00:12.800]  Okay, hey.
[00:15.800 --> 00:17.800]  Lock pickers, please keep it down.
[00:18.380 --> 00:21.120]  We can continue the demos, which just...
[00:26.810 --> 00:28.290]  Okay, thanks for having me.
[00:30.630 --> 00:32.550]  First off, you should know that...
[00:32.550 --> 00:43.990]  I mean, hackers, both as a concept and as a population, have been particularly inspiring to me in the books I write.
[00:44.150 --> 00:51.710]  Pretty much everything I write has been inspired in one way or another by what hackers do, have done, or will continue to do.
[00:52.690 --> 00:54.090]  Could you keep it down a little bit?
[00:54.530 --> 00:55.750]  It's just hard, it's just...
[00:56.970 --> 01:00.490]  I can be a good speaker, but I've got to put on my...
[01:00.490 --> 01:03.570]  I can get enough Ritalin to not get distracted.
[01:05.270 --> 01:11.730]  Even the most recent book I've just finished, which is about Judaism, it's called Nothing Sacred, it's essentially about the same thing.
[01:11.830 --> 01:13.930]  It's about how to hack into Judaism.
[01:14.170 --> 01:15.490]  And looking at what are the...
[01:15.490 --> 01:18.250]  What is the source code of Judaism and how can one...
[01:19.290 --> 01:20.450]  How can one get in?
[01:21.490 --> 01:21.930]  Thanks.
[01:24.250 --> 01:27.970]  Sorry, we don't mean to be rude, it's just trying to keep focus.
[01:29.930 --> 01:37.330]  I think hackers' roles have changed in the 20 or so years that I've been aware of their existence.
[01:37.610 --> 01:41.950]  And I think it's important that we take stock of how the role has changed.
[01:41.950 --> 01:47.470]  If anything, it's become much more important now than it was before.
[01:48.770 --> 01:55.450]  Back in the internet's colonial period, the role of the hackers was revolutionary.
[01:55.450 --> 01:57.890]  In the really standard sense of the word.
[01:58.330 --> 02:01.510]  And it was against government power or against corporate power.
[02:02.030 --> 02:08.010]  And hacker actions really tended to undermine one or the other of those institutions.
[02:08.010 --> 02:13.950]  Now I believe, and I truly believe this, that hackers are the agents of consciousness itself.
[02:14.770 --> 02:18.650]  In a world where autonomy is becoming increasingly outlawed.
[02:19.430 --> 02:20.930]  So it's not...
[02:20.930 --> 02:24.990]  I don't see it as a battle against any particular institution anymore.
[02:25.210 --> 02:26.890]  But a battle against sleep.
[02:27.450 --> 02:29.070]  I think that we've been...
[02:30.250 --> 02:33.130]  We've been through a very interesting time in the last 20 years.
[02:33.250 --> 02:35.530]  And a lot of people have had the opportunity to wake up.
[02:35.530 --> 02:38.490]  Whether it's been through psychedelic drugs or through new media.
[02:38.950 --> 02:40.010]  Or through new ideas.
[02:40.550 --> 02:44.610]  And I think now that people are very consciously and intentionally going back to sleep.
[02:45.650 --> 02:48.470]  And there are a few people that are deciding to stay awake.
[02:48.790 --> 02:51.790]  And the question is either, what are we going to do while they're all sleeping?
[02:52.010 --> 02:54.010]  How are we going to keep them from going to sleep?
[02:54.190 --> 02:56.390]  Or what are we going to program into their dreams?
[02:56.510 --> 03:00.330]  So that the next time they wake up, they might choose to stay awake for a little bit longer.
[03:02.190 --> 03:08.490]  As I see it, and not just me, we are living in a story.
[03:08.950 --> 03:14.530]  You know, we are human beings and we create stories in order to understand the reality that we live in.
[03:15.870 --> 03:17.370]  That's a slightly dark...
[03:18.870 --> 03:20.270]  A slightly dark fact.
[03:20.450 --> 03:23.830]  The thing that makes it a little bit lighter, as far as I'm concerned, is that...
[03:23.830 --> 03:29.070]  At least everyone in this room knows that we are writing those stories ourselves.
[03:29.570 --> 03:31.690]  We are the people writing those stories.
[03:35.930 --> 03:41.210]  The trick with living in a world of stories is that there's a lot of different stories out there.
[03:41.290 --> 03:43.670]  And those stories are competing for believers.
[03:44.510 --> 03:46.510]  And these aren't just religious stories.
[03:46.670 --> 03:53.710]  These are stories ranging from capitalism to communism to Christianity to McDonaldism.
[03:55.350 --> 03:57.290]  And stories compete in two ways.
[03:57.510 --> 04:01.670]  They compete either through their content, which is what we could call the what of a story.
[04:01.830 --> 04:07.530]  And they compete through the medium or through the technology, the tools through which the story is being told.
[04:10.350 --> 04:26.470]  Now, if you have exclusive access to the how of stories, to the technology through which stories are being told or perpetrated, then you've got pretty much exclusive access and exclusive hold over the stories that people are going to believe about what's going on in the world around them.
[04:26.470 --> 04:28.670]  And that's really... that's tricky.
[04:29.030 --> 04:36.110]  I mean, since the beginning of time, storytellers have had exclusive access to a technology that has mystified other people.
[04:36.310 --> 04:46.270]  Whether it's the epic storyteller back in ancient Greece coming into a town, nobody knew how this guy could remember 40,000 lines of the Iliad in order to recite it for people.
[04:46.270 --> 04:48.230]  And people were, ooh, wow, look at him.
[04:48.390 --> 04:53.310]  If he can learn those 40 lines, 40,000 lines, then he must be telling the truth in some way.
[04:53.730 --> 04:59.270]  Or the newscaster, who used to be able to pipe into your home with this magical ability of television.
[04:59.850 --> 05:07.210]  In the old days, when I was growing up, Walter Cronkite used to actually end his broadcasts by saying, and that's the way it is.
[05:07.210 --> 05:10.010]  And people would nod, right, that's the way it is.
[05:10.230 --> 05:11.430]  And why could he say that?
[05:11.530 --> 05:15.890]  It's because he had exclusive control over this box that no one knew how it worked.
[05:17.250 --> 05:20.990]  You know, they don't call this stuff on television programming, coincidentally.
[05:21.550 --> 05:21.990]  Right?
[05:22.050 --> 05:23.830]  They're not programming the television set.
[05:23.970 --> 05:25.450]  They're not programming the schedule.
[05:25.590 --> 05:27.270]  They are programming the viewer.
[05:27.550 --> 05:30.650]  You choose which channel and then accept the programming.
[05:32.030 --> 05:36.410]  So there are these two ways in which we get programmed.
[05:36.870 --> 05:41.690]  One is through the content of the story, which is what Aristotle figured out a long time ago, right?
[05:41.950 --> 05:48.150]  You create a character the audience likes, put that character into a bunch of danger, and then come up with a solution.
[05:48.450 --> 05:48.750]  Right?
[05:48.870 --> 05:57.150]  Whether it's Arnold Schwarzenegger at the end of the movie getting the big ray gun, or whether it's the businessman at the end of the commercial getting a new, et cetera, and extra strength.
[05:58.210 --> 06:02.750]  We have to swallow the storyteller's pill to get out of the tension of that story.
[06:02.750 --> 06:06.890]  It's what you could call the male orgasm curve of narrative, right?
[06:07.010 --> 06:09.570]  Tension, tension, tension, climax, sleep.
[06:10.410 --> 06:10.670]  Right?
[06:13.370 --> 06:16.730]  But this only works if you have a captive audience.
[06:16.730 --> 06:25.290]  And the way you get your captive audience, the way you entertain them, literally entertain, hold within, is through a technology, is through a different kind of storytelling medium.
[06:26.550 --> 06:38.730]  The best example that I know of when I came to be aware of how this worked was in the worst, well, the second now, second to worst of the Star Wars movies, Star Wars III, Return of the Jedi.
[06:39.270 --> 06:47.270]  There's this great moment where Luke and Hans, they get stuck on that little moon with the Ewoks, and the Ewoks tie them up and make them prisoner.
[06:47.690 --> 06:50.770]  I mean, they let Princess Leia walk around, but they're all tied up.
[06:50.910 --> 06:52.170]  And how do they get out?
[06:52.750 --> 06:57.370]  C-3PO and R2-D2 tell a story to all the little Ewoks, right?
[06:57.470 --> 07:02.010]  C-3PO speaks their language, and he's talking about, oh, Master Luke and Great Hans.
[07:02.010 --> 07:08.490]  And R2-D2 is shooting these holographic images of the Millennium Falcon fighting against the Death Star and all that.
[07:09.030 --> 07:10.990]  And all the little Ewoks are...
[07:11.910 --> 07:13.750]  You know, they're watching this story.
[07:15.130 --> 07:18.270]  And they so fall for this story, right?
[07:18.410 --> 07:28.810]  With great content through C-3PO and great technology through R2-D2, that they not only release Hans and Luke, but they fight a war on their behalf against the Empire.
[07:29.150 --> 07:31.770]  And Ewoks die in this war, right?
[07:31.770 --> 07:32.910]  They get shoved against things.
[07:33.030 --> 07:33.330]  You see...
[07:34.830 --> 07:42.930]  And what I thought in the movie as I watched that was, what would have happened if Darth Vader had gotten down to that moon first and told his story with his technology?
[07:43.870 --> 07:45.190]  Ewoks would have fought for him.
[07:47.910 --> 07:53.970]  It actually, you know, if you think about it later when you're stoned, it goes to the heart of the problem in the whole Star Wars movies.
[07:55.370 --> 07:56.590]  But that's another story.
[07:57.650 --> 08:05.210]  So people who want to control the stories that we live by and are successful at it actually control our reality.
[08:06.230 --> 08:11.510]  You know, what is the simple programming and the how is the magic of the telling?
[08:12.770 --> 08:14.490]  It's when you have an exclusive technology.
[08:14.810 --> 08:21.370]  It's why, you know, I do these kinds of talks and things, and people are upset when I don't have a PowerPoint presentation to show.
[08:21.650 --> 08:29.630]  Do you remember there was a time back in like the 70s or the 80s, when if you had a PowerPoint presentation, it actually made people believe what you had to say more.
[08:30.090 --> 08:34.090]  Now, can you imagine how people in this room would react to PowerPoint as a technology?
[08:34.090 --> 08:37.490]  Ooh, the things I'm saying are in text on a screen.
[08:37.790 --> 08:38.170]  Ha-ha!
[08:38.470 --> 08:39.790]  I must be right.
[08:42.230 --> 08:58.230]  Well, television has this storytelling monopoly down to a true science that's studied in advertising agencies and marketing agencies and movie studios down to this perfect 28-second programming vehicle called the commercial.
[08:59.910 --> 09:03.690]  And they helped to lock down the story by which we live by.
[09:03.790 --> 09:06.590]  By we, I mean mostly Americans, because we really are the TV culture.
[09:07.990 --> 09:17.870]  For me, the beauty of interactivity, the beauty of hacker culture, was that it began to break the spell of captive programming.
[09:18.190 --> 09:29.770]  It did it in both ways, by breaking down the story, by breaking up the stories that we were being told, and more importantly, by demystifying the technology through which the stories were being told.
[09:30.230 --> 09:30.590]  Right?
[09:30.710 --> 09:36.170]  And this is first I'm just talking about in the very small world of media and storytelling.
[09:36.530 --> 09:42.650]  And the three steps through which this happened were the remote control, the joysticks, and the computer keyboard and mouse.
[09:43.670 --> 09:44.130]  Right?
[09:44.250 --> 09:48.310]  The remote control allowed people to deconstruct the content of media.
[09:48.310 --> 09:59.770]  So now if a kid is watching that 28-second commercial, being brought up the inclined plane of tension, going to have to swallow whatever pill the advertiser has at 26 seconds into the commercial, what can he do?
[10:00.950 --> 10:01.670]  Click away.
[10:02.190 --> 10:07.170]  My father would have to take the popcorn off his lap, pull up the lazy boy chair, walk up to the television set and turn the dial.
[10:07.410 --> 10:11.470]  Which is probably 15 or 20 calories of human effort to go do that act.
[10:13.250 --> 10:13.690]  Right?
[10:13.930 --> 10:17.450]  Versus like six calories of tension before he gets to the end of the commercial.
[10:17.930 --> 10:19.010]  He'll take the tension.
[10:19.170 --> 10:23.030]  Kid with a remote control, .0001 calories of effort, and he's gone.
[10:23.850 --> 10:30.430]  If you watch a kid with a remote, or watch yourself with a remote, we are not clicking away because we're bored with the programming.
[10:30.670 --> 10:34.970]  We're clicking away because we know someone is about to put us in a state of tension.
[10:35.250 --> 10:39.830]  Someone who we do not trust is going to fuck with us, so boom, we're gone.
[10:41.590 --> 10:45.750]  So a kid with a remote control is deconstructing the content of television.
[10:45.750 --> 10:51.130]  The next great interactive device, this is really before home computing, was the joystick.
[10:51.650 --> 10:56.710]  If you think back, if you're old enough, the first video game you ever played, it was probably Pong.
[10:57.750 --> 10:58.010]  Right?
[10:58.110 --> 11:08.410]  Now, those of us for whom Pong was the first video game we ever saw, that was like the Kennedy assassination in terms of remembering where you were and what you were doing the first time you saw it.
[11:12.770 --> 11:14.970]  Now, why was that such a magical event?
[11:15.110 --> 11:18.410]  Is it because you were thinking, wow, I love table tennis.
[11:18.630 --> 11:27.830]  This is a terrific simulation of ping pong, which is going to be useful in case we have to, you know, fight the Chinese again in the Olympics with ping pong and I don't have room in my apartment for this thing.
[11:28.090 --> 11:29.210]  What a good simulation.
[11:29.970 --> 11:31.070]  No, it wasn't that at all.
[11:31.150 --> 11:32.530]  It was, look, there's a white square.
[11:32.670 --> 11:34.070]  I can move it up and down on the screen.
[11:34.610 --> 11:37.370]  If you remember, when you played that game, it was like, yeah, ba-boom, ba-boom.
[11:37.530 --> 11:40.970]  But when was the fun part was when the ball would go out and you'd wait for the game to reset.
[11:41.270 --> 11:47.850]  People would just go like this with the white thing, trying to make like a white rectangle, if you could do it fast enough, out of the white square.
[11:48.990 --> 11:50.910]  That was the fun of it, was moving pixels.
[11:51.090 --> 11:52.030]  That's revolution.
[11:52.370 --> 11:52.730]  Right?
[11:52.830 --> 11:57.030]  So the sacred turf of Walter Cronkite is now ours.
[11:57.030 --> 11:58.650]  We can move the pixels on the screen.
[11:59.390 --> 12:06.090]  So just as the remote control deconstructed the content of television, the joystick demystified the technology of television.
[12:06.350 --> 12:15.030]  Then along with the VCR, which turned it into an asynchronous medium instead of synchronous, and the camcorder, the pixel was demystified.
[12:15.270 --> 12:23.790]  Then finally, the computer mouse and the keyboard, well, when connected through a modem, turns what had been a receive-only monitor into a portal.
[12:24.130 --> 12:38.950]  So a kid growing up with a computer in the house no longer sees the television as the receive-only box, but as another one of those boxes that, well, it's basically arbitrary whether you're deciding to express yourself through it, or receive someone else's ideas from it.
[12:39.550 --> 12:42.030]  And it broke the whole thing open.
[12:42.250 --> 12:43.970]  This was a big deal.
[12:43.970 --> 12:47.670]  You know, I got... I was lucky enough to write about it in the early 90s.
[12:47.750 --> 12:50.450]  I got called into boardrooms of very scared companies.
[12:51.510 --> 12:52.650]  What are we gonna do?
[12:52.850 --> 12:53.250]  Oh no!
[12:53.490 --> 12:53.810]  Oh no!
[12:56.310 --> 12:59.890]  Mainstream media was very upset about this for a bunch of reasons.
[13:00.530 --> 13:03.710]  You know, we were getting our information from alternative sources and all that.
[13:03.870 --> 13:05.150]  We were spending our money differently.
[13:06.410 --> 13:09.130]  But worst for them, the story had been broken.
[13:09.530 --> 13:19.750]  We were now willing to deconstruct their stories, demystify the technologies through which it was being transmitted, and finally, DIY, do our own stories.
[13:20.110 --> 13:30.310]  Start to write our own stories and participate collectively in the creation of a narrative that we write instead of William Randolph Hearst, or God, or the Pope, or Bush.
[13:31.850 --> 13:32.410]  Scary.
[13:32.690 --> 13:33.630]  So what did they do?
[13:34.450 --> 13:38.750]  Well, I don't... I don't know if I want to go to the evil part yet.
[13:39.170 --> 13:40.330]  I'm a little more happy first.
[13:41.570 --> 13:47.810]  The DIY culture, and this was really 1988 when it really started for me.
[13:48.070 --> 13:48.430]  Phytonet.
[13:48.570 --> 13:50.230]  Are people old enough for that?
[13:52.730 --> 13:56.190]  There's no... I mean, whatever they do to the internet, whatever they...
[13:56.190 --> 13:59.270]  I mean, the yucky people, if they take it back, we can still go back and do Phytonet.
[13:59.290 --> 13:59.850]  That's the thing.
[14:00.570 --> 14:01.470]  It'll be fine.
[14:01.630 --> 14:03.610]  And I'm sure there's faster, better ways to do it.
[14:03.610 --> 14:04.730]  Is everyone calling each other?
[14:04.890 --> 14:07.050]  You know, from 12 to 1, let them all quickly call each other.
[14:07.810 --> 14:08.770]  And we'll be fine.
[14:09.010 --> 14:09.550]  I mean, I'm fine.
[14:09.850 --> 14:11.270]  Asynchronous is fast enough.
[14:11.650 --> 14:12.570]  It really is.
[14:13.210 --> 14:13.930]  That's another thing.
[14:14.270 --> 14:15.810]  But it broke the whole thing open.
[14:15.890 --> 14:17.010]  There was shareware, remember?
[14:17.270 --> 14:17.350]  Huh?
[14:18.310 --> 14:18.710]  Freeware.
[14:19.270 --> 14:19.670]  People...
[14:19.670 --> 14:20.450]  None of...
[14:20.450 --> 14:21.250]  I mean, we all know...
[14:21.250 --> 14:23.810]  I'm sure you've all heard this here and all know this.
[14:23.810 --> 14:27.210]  There hasn't been a serious software innovation since...
[14:27.210 --> 14:29.110]  That hasn't been through shareware.
[14:29.710 --> 14:32.250]  I mean, everything that's being sold now, whether it's, you know...
[14:32.250 --> 14:35.250]  Every streaming piece of media is just see you, see me.
[14:35.370 --> 14:36.610]  Every email program is Eudora.
[14:36.730 --> 14:37.430]  I mean, these are all...
[14:37.430 --> 14:41.810]  This is all actually government and self-sponsored technology.
[14:41.810 --> 14:47.570]  But we got a lot of different cultural events happening because of the breakdown of the story.
[14:48.290 --> 15:01.250]  DIY, shareware, the popularization of chaos math and new physics, rave culture, fantasy role-playing games, extreme sports, true original micro-brands, the open source movement.
[15:01.490 --> 15:02.570]  These were all...
[15:02.570 --> 15:11.250]  These were and are all results of the crackdown, the breakdown of the overarching narrative that we've used in America.
[15:11.250 --> 15:12.610]  The capitalist narrative.
[15:13.490 --> 15:18.950]  Our media space also changed from a top-down system that respected only the law of gravity, right?
[15:19.230 --> 15:24.590]  Whatever Rupert Murdoch decides at the top of a glass building and decides to trickle it down to the public.
[15:24.970 --> 15:27.510]  Now there's feedback and iteration in the media.
[15:27.710 --> 15:30.470]  And the media starts to look more like an emergent system.
[15:30.730 --> 15:34.630]  With all sorts of little high leverage points, remote high leverage points all over it.
[15:34.770 --> 15:38.690]  Whether it's, you know, Rodney King getting beaten by cops in Los Angeles.
[15:38.690 --> 15:44.370]  And because it's on a camcorder tape, it feeds through the whole system and leads to rioting in 12 U.S. cities.
[15:46.350 --> 15:51.590]  Or one little group of hackers that brings down Yahoo two years ago.
[15:51.750 --> 15:55.110]  Which was, to me, one of the most important hacks that's yet happened.
[15:56.750 --> 15:57.190]  Hmm?
[16:37.530 --> 16:37.730]  Crack.
[16:38.370 --> 16:39.330]  It's not about this.
[16:39.490 --> 16:40.490]  It's about, aha!
[16:40.890 --> 16:42.930]  It's these openings, these connections.
[16:42.970 --> 16:46.510]  It's a very, very different style of drama.
[16:46.690 --> 16:47.470]  And what is it for?
[16:47.590 --> 16:58.170]  It's for a population that is now attempting to do pattern recognition in a chaotic system in which they are living, rather than trying to accept and digest stories that they're being spoon-fed.
[16:58.410 --> 16:59.690]  It's a very different energy.
[17:00.930 --> 17:03.230]  We also had... Beavis and Butthead was what?
[17:03.670 --> 17:04.530]  Media theory.
[17:05.110 --> 17:10.630]  These were two people deconstructing MTV videos for us, so that we wouldn't respond to them in the same way.
[17:10.950 --> 17:12.710]  Liv Tyler's tits come through the screen.
[17:13.010 --> 17:15.090]  If you're alone, you go, ooh, Liv Tyler's tits.
[17:15.230 --> 17:16.950]  If you're with Beavis and Butthead, what do you hear?
[17:17.030 --> 17:18.630]  Beavis goes, ah, nice tits, aha!
[17:19.050 --> 17:21.210]  And you've been punished for having had that reaction.
[17:22.830 --> 17:24.030]  Read Bertolt Brecht.
[17:24.090 --> 17:25.270]  He was the guy that talked about it.
[17:25.330 --> 17:31.110]  It's called the alienation effect, where the screen becomes the screen within the screen, and you don't look at the story the same way.
[17:31.110 --> 17:36.230]  That's why they took rock videos off MTV, because these two kids deconstructed them all.
[17:36.630 --> 17:38.090]  Mystery Science Theater, same thing.
[17:38.270 --> 17:44.230]  It's about having little robots help you, help you identify the patterns in your media space.
[17:44.610 --> 17:46.810]  Finally, South Park, which is what?
[17:47.030 --> 17:49.710]  It's basically demystification of the animation process.
[17:50.050 --> 17:52.270]  It's like, don't worry, we're not doing any tricks here.
[17:52.370 --> 17:57.030]  This is really, really primitive, so now you can watch our story again, because nobody trusts the media space.
[17:57.890 --> 18:05.970]  So, during this great, chaotic, wonderful DIY, shareware, universal revolution, who was it that we saw as the enemy?
[18:06.490 --> 18:07.390]  The government.
[18:07.950 --> 18:08.490]  Why?
[18:08.630 --> 18:10.270]  Because they cast themselves as the enemy.
[18:10.750 --> 18:12.830]  Operation Sun Devil, do you guys remember that?
[18:13.070 --> 18:14.250]  From back, oh my god.
[18:14.710 --> 18:15.310]  I mean, yeah.
[18:15.610 --> 18:19.630]  Operation Sun Devil, the export restrictions, the Computer Decency Act.
[18:19.830 --> 18:24.810]  Government set itself up as the enemy to DIY, demystified, deconstructed culture.
[18:24.810 --> 18:29.550]  And we sicced ourselves on them and pretty much repressed government.
[18:29.730 --> 18:30.730]  We got them out of the way.
[18:30.870 --> 18:39.010]  Whether it was by using, you know, terrific, wonderful blowhards, like John Barlow and the EFF, or whether it was we were attacking them.
[18:39.110 --> 18:40.570]  We got government down.
[18:40.890 --> 18:43.450]  All these great hackers became libertarians and everything.
[18:43.550 --> 18:44.350]  No, government sucks.
[18:44.370 --> 18:44.810]  No government.
[18:45.090 --> 18:46.650]  Well, what did we find out?
[18:47.530 --> 18:51.250]  When you repress government, business comes up.
[18:52.070 --> 18:52.470]  That's what...
[18:52.470 --> 18:55.150]  Government and business are like fungus and bacteria.
[18:56.670 --> 18:57.710]  They need...
[18:59.210 --> 19:02.070]  You need both to stay in balance, right?
[19:02.270 --> 19:05.730]  So we took the antibiotics and got rid of the bacteria and the fungus came.
[19:06.350 --> 19:06.690]  Right?
[19:07.270 --> 19:09.450]  So business ended up being the real enemy.
[19:09.610 --> 19:11.070]  What were they saying about all this?
[19:11.070 --> 19:17.370]  They were saying, well, any family that seems to have an internet connection in their house is watching nine hours less television every week.
[19:17.890 --> 19:18.530]  Uh-oh.
[19:18.750 --> 19:19.650]  What does that mean?
[19:19.810 --> 19:20.110]  Money.
[19:20.250 --> 19:20.510]  Gelt.
[19:22.830 --> 19:23.850]  So they got upset.
[19:24.010 --> 19:24.890]  It had to be stopped.
[19:25.170 --> 19:26.190]  This had to be stopped.
[19:26.330 --> 19:32.290]  This DIY, demystification, deconstructed culture must be stopped before it gets out of control.
[19:33.430 --> 19:34.430]  So what did they do?
[19:34.590 --> 19:36.470]  Start anti-internet media.
[19:37.690 --> 19:38.130]  Time.
[19:38.130 --> 19:42.870]  Time's first internet cover that I could find was cyber porn.
[19:43.770 --> 19:46.190]  It was this little baby looking at a computer screen.
[19:46.930 --> 19:50.590]  You know, in the Atlanta Olympics, remember when that bomb went off?
[19:50.690 --> 19:51.250]  What did they call it?
[19:51.310 --> 19:52.630]  An internet-style bomb.
[19:53.490 --> 19:53.910]  What?
[19:54.250 --> 19:54.590]  Yeah.
[19:54.990 --> 19:57.710]  There was all the first newscasts about this bomb.
[19:57.810 --> 20:00.850]  The nail bomb that went off in Atlanta, they called it an internet-style bomb.
[20:01.290 --> 20:01.990]  Go back.
[20:02.070 --> 20:06.270]  Look at the original news media sourcing on there.
[20:06.470 --> 20:09.550]  And so many kids found out about internet-style bombs from those newscasts.
[20:10.070 --> 20:12.570]  Two kids in New Jersey actually blew something up in their school.
[20:12.790 --> 20:14.790]  And they said, oh, did you find out about this on the internet?
[20:14.890 --> 20:17.370]  They said, no, actually, we found out about it on the news and then went on the internet.
[20:22.030 --> 20:26.170]  Stories about dangerous hackers going to invade your privacy, right?
[20:26.390 --> 20:31.850]  Time Warner and Quest and TRW, they're the only ones that are supposed to have the information on you, right?
[20:31.850 --> 20:32.850]  Not hackers.
[20:33.790 --> 20:38.390]  It had nothing to do about people losing their privacy, but losing their privacy to different people.
[20:41.540 --> 20:45.880]  So the effects of the remote control, the joystick and the mouse, had to be undone.
[20:46.120 --> 20:52.640]  And they were very consciously undone by people who actually acted as if they were technology advocates.
[20:52.640 --> 21:00.380]  That was the darkest part of the whole wired libertarian corporate episode.
[21:01.560 --> 21:04.040]  Was that they acted like they were techno-utopians.
[21:04.160 --> 21:06.200]  They acted like they liked technology, but they didn't.
[21:06.340 --> 21:07.100]  They liked money.
[21:07.280 --> 21:11.840]  They saw money as the operating system under technology.
[21:13.120 --> 21:15.580]  And that's a very dangerous view to have of the world.
[21:15.580 --> 21:18.340]  So they had to undo the remote, the joystick and the mouse.
[21:18.500 --> 21:19.800]  How did they undo the remote control?
[21:20.240 --> 21:23.780]  Any kid clicking on his TV, what has he got?
[21:24.080 --> 21:25.980]  He's got attention deficit disorder.
[21:26.240 --> 21:27.300]  This is a disease.
[21:27.320 --> 21:28.740]  He can't pay attention.
[21:29.020 --> 21:29.780]  It's not that he won't.
[21:29.880 --> 21:30.660]  It's that he can't.
[21:30.780 --> 21:31.920]  So what are we going to do?
[21:32.260 --> 21:34.740]  Let's drug him so he can watch better attention.
[21:34.780 --> 21:37.400]  So he can pay better attention to the world around him.
[21:37.920 --> 21:41.840]  In the same year that Wired announced we're living in an attention economy.
[21:41.840 --> 21:42.600]  Remember that term?
[21:42.600 --> 21:45.840]  Attention economy with eyeball hours and sticky websites?
[21:46.340 --> 21:50.220]  Because the attention economy is limited where internet real estate is infinite?
[21:51.400 --> 21:55.480]  Look at how much the prescriptions for Ritalin went up in that same year.
[21:55.860 --> 21:58.980]  How do you get more attention out of the same number of people?
[21:59.200 --> 21:59.620]  Drug them.
[22:00.580 --> 22:04.100]  So they undid the effects, the deconstructing effects of the remote control.
[22:04.440 --> 22:15.320]  By labeling disenfranchisement, by labeling resistance as a disease and drugging children from an early age to pay better attention to basically sponsored messages.
[22:16.280 --> 22:19.320]  How did they undo the demystification of the joystick?
[22:20.560 --> 22:23.820]  Well, look at Windows 98 for one.
[22:24.060 --> 22:24.840]  Windows 95.
[22:25.240 --> 22:29.640]  Each new interface, each new public interface for the regular people, right?
[22:29.840 --> 22:32.100]  Each new computer interface is increasingly opaque.
[22:32.500 --> 22:36.440]  It distances you further and further from the actual workings of the machine.
[22:36.440 --> 22:38.240]  That's the object of the game.
[22:40.380 --> 22:41.780]  The World Wide Web itself.
[22:42.060 --> 22:42.700]  I mean, come on.
[22:42.920 --> 22:44.360]  Compare the World Wide Web to the internet.
[22:44.640 --> 22:47.280]  There's a lot of people that think the World Wide Web is the internet.
[22:48.260 --> 22:49.040]  They don't know.
[22:49.180 --> 22:50.520]  They don't know that there was this...
[22:50.520 --> 22:53.560]  They don't know IRC ever existed, for example, or Usenet.
[22:54.220 --> 22:54.580]  They don't...
[22:54.580 --> 22:58.600]  And nothing against pictures online, nothing against video online.
[22:58.780 --> 23:02.360]  But a text-only internet is a level playing field, right?
[23:02.360 --> 23:07.800]  A designed interactive space, the more opaque it is, the less of a level playing field it is.
[23:07.880 --> 23:12.200]  The more you are the client to someone else's server.
[23:14.440 --> 23:18.240]  And finally, this DIY ethic, right?
[23:18.440 --> 23:20.480]  This do-it-yourself ethic had to be undone.
[23:20.560 --> 23:21.660]  And how was that undone?
[23:22.140 --> 23:27.500]  Well, business came along and said, The important thing is not that people are talking to each other.
[23:27.680 --> 23:28.540]  The big thing?
[23:28.780 --> 23:30.080]  Content is king.
[23:30.480 --> 23:33.740]  That's what they decided, that the internet was about information.
[23:34.340 --> 23:45.820]  So instead of calling this a communications revolution, which is what it is, the building of a telecommunications infrastructure through which people can talk to one another, they turned it into an information age.
[23:47.580 --> 23:50.180]  Because publishers have these vast storehouses of information.
[23:50.180 --> 23:51.400]  And what can you do with information?
[23:51.400 --> 23:52.860]  You can buy it and sell it.
[23:53.040 --> 23:59.220]  So everyone thought, okay, now we're going to have these magazines online, and people are going to subscribe, and we're going to make all this money selling data.
[24:00.200 --> 24:01.980]  Because I so don't care about data.
[24:02.880 --> 24:04.520]  You know, data is, ugh, data.
[24:04.800 --> 24:05.240]  It's data.
[24:05.660 --> 24:06.860]  People is something real.
[24:08.940 --> 24:10.280]  So they were going to sell data.
[24:10.360 --> 24:11.060]  Well, that didn't work.
[24:11.160 --> 24:13.300]  So okay, they're going to sell products instead.
[24:13.300 --> 24:14.840]  So they decided, no, no, it's e-commerce.
[24:15.140 --> 24:17.760]  It's about people buying and selling things online to one another.
[24:18.240 --> 24:19.940]  Well, that didn't work either, did it?
[24:20.060 --> 24:22.040]  So then they decided, no, no, it's about investing.
[24:22.660 --> 24:23.100]  Right?
[24:23.260 --> 24:26.380]  So the internet became about E-Trade.
[24:26.540 --> 24:26.980]  Right?
[24:27.060 --> 24:28.680]  That was going to be the internet's killer app.
[24:28.780 --> 24:32.640]  Through which people would use the internet to invest money in what?
[24:32.840 --> 24:33.940]  In internet companies.
[24:36.060 --> 24:37.820]  That's really what was going on.
[24:38.700 --> 24:40.520]  That's a pure pyramid scheme.
[24:40.980 --> 24:44.020]  You know, that's what, going back to Judaism, that's what they teach in the Bible.
[24:44.020 --> 24:45.780]  People who build pyramids are slaves.
[24:47.960 --> 24:49.760]  But it became the new story.
[24:49.960 --> 24:53.140]  It became the new overarching story of the internet.
[24:53.500 --> 24:53.860]  Right?
[24:54.180 --> 24:56.600]  That a 22-year-old kid comes up with an idea.
[24:56.760 --> 24:59.540]  An angel investor comes down at the next level and gives him money.
[24:59.780 --> 25:02.880]  Then you find Salmon, you know, Smith Barney or Goldman Sachs to come in.
[25:03.000 --> 25:04.640]  Then you find qualified investors.
[25:04.760 --> 25:06.440]  Then you find less qualified investors.
[25:06.660 --> 25:08.360]  Then you go public, IPO.
[25:08.540 --> 25:09.120]  Which means what?
[25:09.300 --> 25:11.580]  These people have done an exit strategy.
[25:12.400 --> 25:12.880]  Right?
[25:12.900 --> 25:14.040]  That's what an exit strategy is.
[25:14.200 --> 25:17.080]  It's the carpet bag for these people to get out before the public can get in.
[25:17.660 --> 25:19.580]  And now everybody's paying the price.
[25:21.420 --> 25:23.980]  So finally that crashed, as anything will.
[25:24.180 --> 25:26.380]  And when that crashed, what did people say about the internet?
[25:26.720 --> 25:28.500]  Well, now the internet's over, right?
[25:29.000 --> 25:29.960]  It crashed!
[25:33.000 --> 25:37.740]  As I see it, the internet really just fought off another attack.
[25:38.080 --> 25:38.560]  Right?
[25:38.820 --> 25:41.360]  In the early 90s, it had a fight off the government attack.
[25:41.360 --> 25:47.440]  And now business grew like fungus on this beautiful, pristine network known as the internet.
[25:47.880 --> 25:51.980]  Business came and tried to force it into submission.
[25:52.080 --> 25:57.660]  But because the internet is basically social, the internet is a culture.
[25:58.060 --> 26:00.480]  A culture like yogurt is a culture.
[26:00.640 --> 26:02.400]  It's a natural living thing.
[26:03.120 --> 26:04.740]  It fought that thing off.
[26:04.880 --> 26:05.940]  It shrugged it off.
[26:06.080 --> 26:08.740]  Like the earth will shrug off humanity if we don't watch ourselves.
[26:09.040 --> 26:10.880]  It shrugged off business.
[26:11.440 --> 26:12.680]  And now it's back.
[26:13.020 --> 26:14.960]  This is a golden time on the internet.
[26:15.100 --> 26:15.880]  It's a great time.
[26:16.040 --> 26:16.760]  They're running.
[26:17.320 --> 26:19.700]  And look what they built while they were there.
[26:19.700 --> 26:21.680]  I mean, we've got better bandwidth.
[26:21.960 --> 26:23.240]  We've got cheaper toys.
[26:23.460 --> 26:24.440]  This is better.
[26:30.730 --> 26:37.830]  The problem is, after this whole nightmare, most people don't remember what computing is.
[26:38.390 --> 26:39.750]  They really don't remember.
[26:39.750 --> 26:48.810]  When I was a kid going to high school in the late 70's, learning computers meant learning the anything machine.
[26:49.170 --> 26:49.230]  Right?
[26:49.310 --> 26:50.750]  A computer is a modeling machine.
[26:50.870 --> 26:51.750]  You can model anything.
[26:51.930 --> 26:52.590]  You guys know this.
[26:52.690 --> 26:52.870]  I don't understand.
[26:53.090 --> 26:55.370]  You can model a typewriter and call it a word processor.
[26:55.450 --> 26:58.370]  You can model a spreadsheet and call it a spreadsheet.
[26:58.630 --> 27:00.890]  You can model anything.
[27:02.110 --> 27:05.830]  When I learned computers, we learned basic, basic extensive.
[27:06.330 --> 27:07.510]  Fortran, Pascal.
[27:07.510 --> 27:09.870]  I mean, I failed, but still.
[27:11.850 --> 27:16.390]  The object was, you know, I mean, the part where I got stuck was in Fortran.
[27:16.530 --> 27:18.610]  I was supposed to write a program that would get three elevators.
[27:18.830 --> 27:21.830]  Did you guys all do this one where you have to get three elevators to go to the right floors?
[27:23.450 --> 27:24.170]  It didn't work.
[27:24.310 --> 27:24.930]  It just didn't work.
[27:25.750 --> 27:29.630]  But I knew, and this is the important thing, it doesn't matter whether you can do it or not.
[27:29.850 --> 27:32.430]  The important thing is that, you know, you could do it if you wanted to.
[27:32.530 --> 27:37.250]  The important thing is that, you know, you could pick a lock if you had that thing and worked with it a while.
[27:39.130 --> 27:40.290]  People don't know that.
[27:40.430 --> 27:42.510]  Kids in school now, in computer class, what are they taught?
[27:42.690 --> 27:44.190]  They're taught Microsoft Office.
[27:44.910 --> 27:48.330]  They're taught how to use software, not how to work computers.
[27:48.570 --> 27:49.810]  There's a big difference.
[27:55.650 --> 27:59.650]  And the kids... the kids that think they are learning computers...
[28:00.390 --> 28:00.830]  Cool.
[28:01.430 --> 28:04.930]  I mean, the kids that think they are learning computers, they're learning markup languages.
[28:05.210 --> 28:06.510]  And they think that that's code.
[28:07.110 --> 28:07.610]  You know?
[28:08.370 --> 28:09.950]  It was like Commodore 64.
[28:10.170 --> 28:12.230]  Remember when you had to do... do you guys remember WordStar?
[28:12.710 --> 28:13.210]  And things like that?
[28:13.450 --> 28:14.890]  That's markup language, you know?
[28:15.170 --> 28:16.710]  That's not programming.
[28:17.610 --> 28:20.230]  It's just a bad interface, is what it is.
[28:20.670 --> 28:21.790]  An early interface.
[28:22.070 --> 28:27.470]  I mean, actually, if you know the keys, it's faster than grabbing and dragging and all that crap.
[28:28.350 --> 28:34.410]  The most important thing about computers was how it changed our perspective on the greater reality as well.
[28:34.410 --> 28:37.050]  We realize that the world we live in is open source.
[28:37.250 --> 28:41.270]  Or certainly, that a lot more of it is open source than we've been led to believe.
[28:41.590 --> 28:44.090]  I do think some of reality is fixed, for sure.
[28:44.350 --> 28:45.890]  There's hardware going on here.
[28:46.410 --> 28:50.210]  But there's a lot of stuff that's software that we've been told is hardware.
[28:50.630 --> 28:51.910]  And it's not hardware.
[28:52.090 --> 28:52.890]  It's up for discussion.
[28:52.890 --> 28:54.630]  It's been arbitrarily created.
[28:54.630 --> 29:11.070]  But by losing our ability, by losing our knowledge of what is coded, of what has been coded by human beings for specific reasons with specific agendas, we mistake code for the very building blocks of reality.
[29:11.710 --> 29:15.370]  And the people who retain the knowledge are outlaws.
[29:16.430 --> 29:17.670]  That's what you are.
[29:17.910 --> 29:25.670]  If you retain the knowledge, whether it's knowledge of agriculture, whether it's knowledge of energy, whether it's knowledge of psychopharmacology.
[29:26.950 --> 29:28.810]  What if it's knowledge of economics?
[29:29.230 --> 29:29.670]  Right?
[29:29.830 --> 29:32.270]  Economics is a closed source universe.
[29:32.270 --> 29:33.550]  You're not allowed to print money.
[29:34.610 --> 29:37.390]  Local currencies are still illegal in most places.
[29:38.090 --> 29:41.150]  What is local currency but an open source economy, which would actually work?
[29:43.110 --> 29:54.570]  I mean, don't get me started on economics, but if you want to buy a house, you've got to borrow like $100,000 from a bank and pay back $200,000 or $300,000.
[29:55.010 --> 29:57.850]  But nobody put the other $200,000 or $300,000 in there.
[29:57.990 --> 30:02.150]  You've got to then compete with everyone else for that fixed quantity of money that those guys printed.
[30:03.250 --> 30:04.590]  That's a weird thing.
[30:05.270 --> 30:07.230]  That's a weird... It's another story though.
[30:07.370 --> 30:11.790]  It's like 95% of the cash transactions have nothing to do with us buying and selling stuff.
[30:11.870 --> 30:13.310]  It has to do with speculation on the cash.
[30:14.790 --> 30:16.650]  So we lost the building blocks.
[30:17.450 --> 30:22.210]  And a few people remember that we're the ones who put them together, like masons even.
[30:22.490 --> 30:24.390]  It's an analogous situation.
[30:24.830 --> 30:31.210]  What I think is that we are in the midst of or toward the end of a renaissance, a true renaissance.
[30:31.210 --> 30:33.350]  Not a revolution against a particular force.
[30:33.390 --> 30:35.990]  I don't like revolutions because they go in circles, right?
[30:36.310 --> 30:39.170]  But a renaissance, which is a recontextualization.
[30:39.350 --> 30:42.410]  It's where you start with a frame and go, Oh, I get it.
[30:42.430 --> 30:43.450]  I've been looking at a picture.
[30:44.730 --> 30:45.890]  That's what a renaissance is.
[30:45.950 --> 30:46.990]  Look at the original renaissance.
[30:46.990 --> 30:48.210]  What were the main inventions?
[30:48.690 --> 30:53.910]  Perspective painting, circumnavigating the globe, calculus, and the printing press.
[30:54.130 --> 30:57.970]  Each one of these things were changing our relationship to dimensions.
[30:58.630 --> 30:59.410]  I mean, what is calculus?
[30:59.410 --> 31:02.390]  But a way to relate X to the X squared to the X cubed.
[31:02.690 --> 31:03.870]  What was perspective painting?
[31:03.870 --> 31:07.410]  But a way to experience the illusion of three dimensions in two.
[31:07.690 --> 31:09.290]  What was circumnavigating the globe?
[31:09.590 --> 31:11.530]  Flat world into a round world.
[31:11.910 --> 31:14.730]  I think we have equivalence to those renaissance inventions.
[31:14.730 --> 31:20.850]  The equivalent of perspective painting is the holograph, which now actually lets us see something in four dimensions rather than just three.
[31:20.990 --> 31:22.690]  Because you can see time across it.
[31:23.310 --> 31:27.230]  Instead of being able to circumnavigate the globe, we can now blow up the world with the A-bomb.
[31:28.350 --> 31:30.210]  Changes our dimensional understanding of it.
[31:30.990 --> 31:33.850]  Instead of calculus, we have chaos math in the fractal.
[31:33.930 --> 31:34.570]  What is a fractal?
[31:34.870 --> 31:35.970]  Fractional dimensionality.
[31:36.150 --> 31:37.430]  It's a new relationship to dimension.
[31:37.750 --> 31:40.370]  And instead of the printing press, of course, we have the computer and the internet.
[31:40.370 --> 31:47.890]  Which is now no longer... Each of these ones in our renaissance are no longer about having a personal perspective on what's out there.
[31:48.050 --> 31:51.490]  But being able to actually generate your own point of view.
[31:51.630 --> 31:52.750]  To generate your own thing.
[31:52.910 --> 31:55.210]  To publish your own ideas.
[31:55.710 --> 31:59.550]  The first renaissance moved people from readers to deconstructors.
[31:59.730 --> 32:03.850]  The second renaissance, the one we're in now, turns us from deconstructors into authors.
[32:04.130 --> 32:05.190]  Into programmers.
[32:05.930 --> 32:09.690]  And that's why programmers, real programmers, are the most dangerous people.
[32:10.310 --> 32:13.050]  It's the same three stages any good gamer goes through, right?
[32:13.330 --> 32:14.150]  You buy a game.
[32:14.830 --> 32:17.250]  First you play the game according to the rules that it came with.
[32:17.390 --> 32:17.970]  Then what do you do?
[32:18.130 --> 32:19.370]  Second step, to deconstruct it.
[32:19.410 --> 32:22.490]  You go out online, go to the chat room, find out the cheat codes, right?
[32:23.530 --> 32:25.910]  Is the kid with the cheat codes, is he still playing the game or not?
[32:25.970 --> 32:27.030]  Of course he's playing the game.
[32:27.290 --> 32:30.850]  You know, by now most of the cheat codes are put out online by the people who made the games anyway.
[32:32.590 --> 32:34.090]  And then third, what should he do?
[32:34.250 --> 32:38.190]  He learns how to program and actually make his own levels of the game or improve the game or change the game.
[32:39.590 --> 32:42.010]  Now not everyone wants to know how to pop the hood.
[32:43.070 --> 32:44.130]  And that's fine.
[32:44.410 --> 32:45.970]  Not everyone needs to know how their car works.
[32:46.010 --> 32:46.870]  They can call a mechanic.
[32:47.070 --> 32:49.030]  But they need to know that it does work.
[32:49.350 --> 32:52.090]  They need to know that someone is making choices about it.
[32:52.850 --> 32:56.830]  I think that's the measure of how alive and conscious a person is.
[32:57.070 --> 33:01.670]  Is how much they know is arbitrary and how autonomous they are.
[33:01.790 --> 33:04.010]  How conscious they can be about the choices they make.
[33:05.350 --> 33:11.330]  So the ultimate story that we're all dealing with now, I mean, is the religious story, right?
[33:11.410 --> 33:12.510]  The good old Christian story.
[33:12.690 --> 33:19.390]  You know, God created this earth, we're gonna get in all this trouble, and then he's gonna come at the end and save it, right?
[33:19.550 --> 33:23.190]  It's a scary moment though, what science has brought us to and what media has brought us to.
[33:26.030 --> 33:34.070]  Is that we know now, because of emergence technologies and emergence science and chaos math, we know that we probably weren't created, right?
[33:34.490 --> 33:36.330]  When most of us already believe in evolution.
[33:36.670 --> 33:40.290]  Which I know is a big step for a lot, but still, evolution probably happens.
[33:42.370 --> 33:49.110]  Right now, the myth that we were put here, the myth that there is a pre-existing story, is very reassuring.
[33:49.890 --> 33:52.650]  Especially when things get rough, right?
[33:52.870 --> 33:55.150]  The myth that Microsoft was always here.
[33:56.730 --> 33:57.450]  You know?
[33:57.650 --> 33:59.630]  That Bill Gates invented BASIC.
[34:01.970 --> 34:04.610]  Which you find in kids' school reports all the time.
[34:07.290 --> 34:09.710]  The myth that there is an original code.
[34:12.920 --> 34:14.220]  Is a dangerous one.
[34:15.160 --> 34:15.600]  It's...
[34:15.600 --> 34:18.660]  I mean, it's no more dangerous than the capitalist myth, right?
[34:20.900 --> 34:23.080]  That, you know, the capitalist myth has a god in it.
[34:23.320 --> 34:24.680]  The god is called the auctioneer.
[34:24.840 --> 34:27.300]  Who makes sure that all the transactions work out.
[34:27.900 --> 34:30.480]  That everything will work out just fine.
[34:31.280 --> 34:32.520]  The myths are all reassuring.
[34:33.140 --> 34:36.560]  But, as hackers, you should know the dark, dark truth.
[34:38.080 --> 34:39.780]  And really, it's probably true.
[34:39.780 --> 34:43.960]  We are fungus on a rock, hurling through cold and meaningless space.
[34:44.940 --> 34:46.440]  And we've gotten more developed.
[34:46.680 --> 34:48.020]  But that's the truth, right?
[34:48.100 --> 34:50.680]  And that's the thing that everybody's afraid to talk about these days.
[34:50.700 --> 34:52.640]  That's why we've got to have meaning and all.
[34:53.240 --> 34:58.440]  But just because we're fungus on a rock, hurling through cold and meaningless space, doesn't mean we can't make meaning.
[34:59.040 --> 34:59.240]  Right?
[34:59.240 --> 35:00.960]  Life emerged.
[35:01.580 --> 35:02.680]  Naturally, it emerged.
[35:03.340 --> 35:05.580]  Meaning can emerge from life the same way.
[35:06.180 --> 35:09.400]  All I mean to say is, we are in charge here.
[35:09.840 --> 35:15.880]  I feel a lot like Captain Kirk in one of those episodes where they see these little, you know, natives living on their planet.
[35:15.980 --> 35:20.680]  And they've got a computer sitting in a cave that was left by aliens long ago.
[35:21.360 --> 35:23.600]  And they don't know that they're just following these codes.
[35:26.790 --> 35:33.730]  You know, the renaissance is a window of opportunity to say, oh, I get it.
[35:34.490 --> 35:35.490]  It's this moment.
[35:35.650 --> 35:37.530]  And I think we're still in that moment culturally.
[35:37.530 --> 35:40.750]  The question is, as the programmers, which is what you are.
[35:41.230 --> 35:44.310]  It's you and a few guys in Bangalore are the only ones who know how this stuff works.
[35:46.930 --> 35:50.210]  Because no one in this country values how it actually works, oddly enough.
[35:50.650 --> 35:54.330]  They ship it out in a few H-1B visas and other countries.
[35:57.980 --> 36:04.280]  What you can do, and what I like about hackers the most, is that you can take actions that momentarily break the veneer.
[36:05.240 --> 36:11.840]  You can take actions that momentarily show that the choices that have been made on your behalf are arbitrary.
[36:12.660 --> 36:17.160]  You know, we are not living in a world for which the story is already written.
[36:17.360 --> 36:22.740]  We are living in a world where we can still hack our way in to the knobs of creation.
[36:22.980 --> 36:25.420]  And to the creation of the story.
[36:26.440 --> 36:34.380]  You know, we are, or better, you are the programmers who understand that all of the stories and scenarios we use to understand this world are models.
[36:35.000 --> 36:35.480]  Right?
[36:35.560 --> 36:36.040]  They are models.
[36:36.220 --> 36:37.580]  None of them is actually true.
[36:37.760 --> 36:39.020]  Any scientist will tell you.
[36:39.140 --> 36:41.000]  All we have are models to work with.
[36:41.220 --> 36:45.080]  The important thing to remember is not which model is best, but that they are models.
[36:45.720 --> 36:51.380]  That is the secret, that is the dark secret that gets lost when Renaissance moments are over.
[36:51.900 --> 36:54.480]  But the models can be changed.
[36:54.760 --> 36:56.120]  The models can be shifted.
[36:56.260 --> 36:57.280]  The models can be altered.
[36:57.320 --> 36:58.500]  Because they are just models.
[36:58.740 --> 37:00.320]  They are open to our intervention.
[37:00.320 --> 37:11.980]  And the only reason I came here today, and the main reason why I, you know, worship at the altar of the hacker, is because they can intervene.
[37:11.980 --> 37:14.260]  They have the power to intervene.
[37:14.620 --> 37:18.600]  And all I implore you, please, is intervene.
[37:19.420 --> 37:20.060]  Intervene.
[37:20.180 --> 37:27.240]  Because your intervention is the last gasp, the only gasp, of autonomy left in the human species right now.
[37:27.240 --> 37:28.740]  So good luck to you.
[37:35.340 --> 37:36.040]  Am I allowed?
[37:36.200 --> 37:37.260]  I got a couple of minutes.
[37:37.580 --> 37:39.500]  A couple of minutes for thoughts, comments.
[37:39.680 --> 37:39.760]  Yeah.
[37:47.160 --> 37:47.600]  Hello?
[37:48.620 --> 37:49.060]  Okay.
[37:50.780 --> 37:56.440]  Yeah, my question is in regard to this kind of overarching kind of historical thing.
[37:56.440 --> 38:04.860]  I'd like to hear your perspective on, you're sort of saying that it was corporations and government, which is people.
[38:06.200 --> 38:11.960]  And now we're moving to a situation where we understand that there's models, and how important that is.
[38:11.960 --> 38:18.260]  Now, what I'm interested in is the models that we're starting to have to realize can be changed.
[38:18.360 --> 38:19.720]  Are they models set up by people?
[38:20.100 --> 38:21.740]  Like, is it kind of a social thing?
[38:21.900 --> 38:28.820]  Or are we looking at a future where we're having to actually kind of basically be fighting against the machines?
[38:28.820 --> 38:31.460]  Kind of like a Scott McNeely kind of...
[38:31.460 --> 38:31.600]  Yeah.
[38:31.720 --> 38:34.500]  I mean, I hate to get sci-fi about it.
[38:34.680 --> 38:43.200]  But in a sense, a person who has been hypnotized to believe that a corporation is real is no different from a machine.
[38:43.960 --> 38:44.340]  Right?
[38:44.500 --> 38:46.820]  I've gone into corporations and talked to these people.
[38:47.020 --> 38:49.320]  They think that a corporation is a real thing.
[38:49.600 --> 38:53.060]  They don't understand that a corporation is a bunch of bylaws.
[38:53.340 --> 38:53.660]  Right?
[38:53.720 --> 38:54.960]  A corporation is a program.
[38:55.720 --> 38:57.020]  They don't understand that.
[38:57.020 --> 38:57.900]  They think it's real.
[38:58.160 --> 39:04.460]  They think their 401k plan is as real as salvation was real to a Christian in the earlier part of the century.
[39:05.000 --> 39:06.660]  So, I mean, there's this great...
[39:06.660 --> 39:12.280]  I hate to get biblical, but I've been writing this Jewish book, so I'm like totally in Torah shit now.
[39:12.440 --> 39:19.040]  But there's this great moment in Exodus where God says, I'm going to harden Pharaoh's heart.
[39:19.480 --> 39:22.580]  Pharaoh's the bad guy who's keeping the Jews prisoner, making all the pyramids and stuff.
[39:23.320 --> 39:26.820]  And all the rabbis for like hundreds, thousands of years have gone, what did God mean?
[39:26.940 --> 39:27.540]  Harden his heart.
[39:27.740 --> 39:30.440]  He took his free will away from him, is what God's saying.
[39:30.480 --> 39:31.960]  I'm going to take his free will away.
[39:33.680 --> 39:36.900]  And it's not that God took his free will away, because God doesn't really exist.
[39:36.960 --> 39:38.280]  I don't even think God exists in Torah.
[39:39.440 --> 39:46.260]  What happened was Pharaoh, by using these repetitively evil patterns, ended up taking his own free will away.
[39:46.260 --> 39:48.380]  And ended up responding like an automaton.
[39:49.380 --> 39:52.580]  But more specifically to answer your question, yeah, I think there is a difference.
[39:52.740 --> 39:58.580]  I think until the 1970s, most of the technologies used for coercion were human run.
[39:58.980 --> 40:02.360]  It was very like Dale Carnegie, how to make friends and influence people.
[40:03.060 --> 40:05.540]  Oh look, I can see her... people...
[40:08.570 --> 40:12.710]  She's got a... I see people are getting like light in their eyes from this thing.
[40:12.710 --> 40:14.270]  Here, sorry.
[40:19.360 --> 40:20.980]  Banner ad blocking too, right?
[40:25.250 --> 40:26.890]  The difference is...
[40:26.890 --> 40:28.050]  Alright, so...
[40:29.050 --> 40:34.870]  In the old days, telemarketers would call up, they'd find out what worked on people and what didn't, and they would slowly change their methods over time.
[40:35.250 --> 40:41.230]  These days, telemarketer has a computer program, and they have a database, and you're in that database.
[40:41.550 --> 40:47.170]  And exactly when you hung up the phone in the branched hierarchy of their decision-making tree is recorded.
[40:47.170 --> 40:48.350]  They know where you hung up.
[40:48.470 --> 40:49.230]  They want me to be done.
[40:49.390 --> 40:49.510]  I know.
[40:49.590 --> 40:49.730]  I know.
[40:49.850 --> 40:50.550]  But they took so...
[40:50.550 --> 40:52.210]  They took a long time with the rock picking.
[40:54.270 --> 40:54.630]  Um...
[40:54.630 --> 40:55.090]  I got...
[40:55.090 --> 40:55.330]  I'll...
[40:55.330 --> 40:56.810]  I'm just gonna go like three minutes over.
[40:57.150 --> 40:58.330]  It's only 1.58 anyway.
[41:00.370 --> 41:00.730]  Um...
[41:00.730 --> 41:01.550]  They know.
[41:01.750 --> 41:02.530]  They know where you...
[41:02.530 --> 41:03.090]  Where you...
[41:03.090 --> 41:08.270]  Where you made your wrong decision last time, or where you hung up last time, and they're gonna take the other branch this time.
[41:08.510 --> 41:21.890]  I mean, we are now essentially taking the best things we know, the most devious things we know about neuro-linguistic programming, about hypnosis, about captology, which is how to keep people moving in the direction you want them to move.
[41:22.590 --> 41:35.950]  And rather than using them as humans on each other and testing them out, we are teaching our machines to do those things and then to modify their own programming and behaviors based on their success rates, both on a mass level and on an individual level.
[41:35.950 --> 41:41.830]  And the question is whether the machines can evolve faster than we can develop defense mechanisms against it.
[41:42.010 --> 41:42.350]  That's right.
[41:42.410 --> 41:44.570]  Kids can develop generation X.
[41:44.710 --> 41:47.030]  Kids can develop the ability to use a remote control.
[41:47.190 --> 41:52.210]  Kids can develop ways to recontextualize media so that commercials don't have the same effect on them.
[41:52.750 --> 41:59.130]  It's a little bit trickier to respond... to respond as rapidly as a machine can to...
[42:02.730 --> 42:04.130]  our neural defense mechanisms.
[42:05.030 --> 42:06.110]  It's going to be an interesting thing.
[42:06.290 --> 42:18.350]  But I think what's going to have to happen is that that's why instead of talking about like I used to, about specific ways to resist media control and to resist programming, I think it's more important to maintain basic consciousness.
[42:18.930 --> 42:21.090]  You know, I think we have to take a step back.
[42:21.210 --> 42:22.670]  Otherwise, we end up in an arms race.
[42:22.770 --> 42:23.930]  We develop a defense mechanism.
[42:23.990 --> 42:24.890]  They develop a new attack.
[42:25.050 --> 42:26.130]  We develop a defense mechanism.
[42:26.210 --> 42:29.110]  And they're faster because they've got more money and more time and more money.
[42:29.110 --> 42:30.010]  more machines and more stuff.
[42:30.490 --> 42:32.050]  So instead, we just go, okay, I get it.
[42:32.090 --> 42:33.050]  There's a war going on.
[42:33.530 --> 42:35.950]  Whenever I turn on the TV, someone's trying to fuck with me.
[42:36.130 --> 42:36.590]  You know?
[42:36.730 --> 42:41.670]  And all I can do is try to make my life better in a real way.
[42:41.890 --> 42:44.790]  I mean, the greatest weapon... and I got in trouble for doing...
[42:44.790 --> 42:48.770]  I almost got pulled from a documentary I was narrating because I talked about this.
[42:48.910 --> 42:55.950]  The best weapon against them, and this gets into Genesis P. Origin Industrial and all that, is, as it was suggested when I started, is sex.
[42:56.550 --> 42:59.230]  Sex is really... that's since the beginning.
[42:59.610 --> 43:01.290]  They disconnect you from your sex.
[43:01.570 --> 43:03.350]  And that's what disconnects you from your power.
[43:03.630 --> 43:07.530]  All of the other manipulation that's going on is a subset of that in one way or another.
[43:07.930 --> 43:08.830]  It really is.
[43:08.950 --> 43:10.350]  From religion to technology.
[43:10.530 --> 43:16.970]  It's as simple as if you're a 16-year-old kid sitting on a couch, watching a Blue Jeans commercial that's trying to intimidate you.
[43:17.010 --> 43:18.990]  Let's say it's Diesel or someone really intimidating.
[43:19.750 --> 43:28.050]  If you've got a girl next to you who you are screwing, that commercial isn't going to work on you the same way as it will if you don't have a girl next to you who you're screwing.
[43:29.570 --> 43:29.970]  Right?
[43:30.090 --> 43:32.970]  Because if you're already getting laid, you don't need them anymore.
[43:33.750 --> 43:35.450]  You know, so that's...
[43:42.210 --> 43:43.530]  Okay, one more and then we go.
[43:43.910 --> 43:45.270]  Just to revolt.
[43:46.950 --> 43:47.350]  Yeah.
[43:50.600 --> 43:58.020]  Oh, if you're a 16-year-old girl sitting on the couch next to a 16-year-old guy and you watch a commercial for Diesel Jeans and...
[43:58.480 --> 43:58.880]  What?
[43:59.960 --> 44:01.220]  Or another 16-year-old girl.
[44:01.400 --> 44:01.460]  Yeah.
[44:02.960 --> 44:13.100]  Usually if you've gotten to the point by the time you're 16 where you are willing to have sex with someone of the same sex, they're going to have a lot harder time getting you as it is because you've already demonstrated your autonomy, right?
[44:14.240 --> 44:15.580]  Yeah, it's not just sex.
[44:15.720 --> 44:16.180]  It's anything.
[44:16.180 --> 44:34.240]  If you are engaged in a meaningful way in real life, in something that actually feeds you socially with other people, then you no longer need the mediator, whether it's the marketer or the person making media, to facilitate that social relationship.
[44:34.560 --> 44:37.180]  The fact is, people are social naturally.
[44:37.700 --> 44:40.620]  What the internet does is not facilitate social interaction.
[44:40.620 --> 44:44.760]  It helps us puncture through the obstacles to social interaction.
[44:44.760 --> 44:49.540]  The internet is remedial help for a society that's lost the ability to communicate with each other.
[44:49.740 --> 44:51.580]  Not just sexually, but talking.
[44:51.840 --> 44:52.460]  Hanging out.
[44:53.420 --> 44:54.620]  It's not an end.
[44:54.620 --> 44:58.940]  It's like braces or training wheels or medicine or LSD.
[44:59.300 --> 44:59.600]  Yeah.
[45:00.160 --> 45:00.720]  Finally.
[45:01.740 --> 45:02.440]  Are we on?
[45:02.700 --> 45:02.820]  Yeah.
[45:03.500 --> 45:06.080]  You appear to have a sensitivity to a community effect.
[45:06.280 --> 45:10.140]  You talked about Judaism community, some spiritual, religious community.
[45:10.520 --> 45:15.900]  Obviously, we're all here because we have a strong sense of identity with the hacker community.
[45:15.900 --> 45:20.800]  Anyone who's here at this conference and isn't affected, we're learning from each other.
[45:20.940 --> 45:21.700]  We're talking with each other.
[45:21.780 --> 45:22.480]  We're dialoguing.
[45:22.780 --> 45:23.740]  We're being inspired.
[45:23.900 --> 45:27.700]  Anyone who's not affected obviously has an insensitivity to the community.
[45:28.660 --> 45:34.020]  In that community sense, what do you see as being the strongest challenge to the hacker community?
[45:34.020 --> 45:40.380]  And what do you see as something that we could do to enhance our sense of community so that we can accomplish some of these goals?
[45:40.480 --> 45:44.620]  Such as affecting society, as you say, we have the unique opportunity to accomplish.
[45:48.000 --> 45:51.920]  Affecting society is going to happen, I think, on a more incremental level than a giant level.
[45:52.180 --> 46:04.760]  I don't think that however fun they are, the giant, Abbie Hoffman style, let's levitate the Pentagon kinds of actions, although they're fun, they're not necessarily the real thing.
[46:05.040 --> 46:15.580]  You know, it's great, you come to something like this, you meet people who you agree with, you find out new things, you go to an organizational meeting for a WTO protest, another great thing.
[46:15.780 --> 46:21.180]  People get laid, people find good drugs, people have great social events, and they organize in reality.
[46:21.460 --> 46:32.280]  But then they go home on Christmas break from college, and they're in the car on the way back from the mall with Buffy and Mindy and Cindy and Mandy, and they go, okay, let's go to McDonald's.
[46:32.800 --> 46:37.200]  And you go, well, actually, no, I won't go to McDonald's because, oh, come on, you can get the veggie burger.
[46:37.600 --> 46:38.760]  Come on, let's go to McDonald's.
[46:39.680 --> 46:45.500]  It's a lot harder to stick up for what you believe in in those little incremental situations.
[46:46.000 --> 46:50.700]  You know, I had a long talk, a two or three hour talk with an environmentalist in San Francisco once.
[46:50.700 --> 46:55.740]  This woman was talking about the Amazon rainforest being the lungs of the planet.
[46:56.120 --> 47:00.120]  And as she spoke, she must have chain-smoked ten clove cigarettes.
[47:02.800 --> 47:07.440]  And it was hard for me to take her seriously because she wasn't making the tiny changes.
[47:07.620 --> 47:16.200]  I do believe, as anyone who's studied network effects understands, tiny, tiny effects can lead to huge...
[47:16.200 --> 47:18.140]  or tiny causes can lead to huge effects.
[47:18.460 --> 47:20.220]  So I think it's a matter of incremental things.
[47:20.380 --> 47:26.240]  And how do we learn, as a community, to reward one another for the tiny things rather than the showy things?
[47:26.680 --> 47:28.740]  It's really hard, right?
[47:35.230 --> 47:37.160]  Okay, that's probably a good place to stop.
[47:37.320 --> 47:39.300]  I know they'll be happy to get back on time.
[47:39.480 --> 47:40.180]  So thanks a lot.
[47:40.320 --> 47:40.420]  Thanks.
[47:40.500 --> 47:41.980]  I really do appreciate being able to come here.
[47:42.060 --> 47:43.120]  It's an honor for me.
[47:43.250 --> 47:43.500]  Thank you.