Hacker Generations

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

Forwarded from: Richard Thieme <rthieme () thiemeworks com>

Hacker Generations
by Richard Thieme 

Richard Thieme (rthieme () thiemeworks com) speaks writes and consults
about life on the edge, creativity and innovation, and the human
dimensions of technology.

First, the meaning of hacker.

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

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

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

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

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

Second, the meaning of "hacker generations."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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