The Necessity for Thinking like a Hacker

November 20, 2024

Richard Thieme
thiemeworks.com

Thinking differently is easy to talk about but actually thinking differently is really hard. Yet conditions today suggest the future will not be what it used to be so we had better be thinking differently about it. Seeing what’s coming is like trying to imagine a universe based on string theory. If we can do it at all, we need to think collegially, we need cross-disciplinary conversations, we need AI, to build a picture equal to the complexity needed. We need to constantly question our assumptions: What is the basis for my conclusion? What am I missing? Am I seeing the emerging realities of twenty-first century life or am I stuck in twentieth century frames?

The task is ultimately about security–protecting the autonomy, freedom, and power of individuals and societies alike–but we need to think about not only security in the specific ways that preoccupy professionals in the field, but at a meta-level. We need to think about society, civilization, everything at a meta-level. We need to think at a meta-level because the meta-level is thinking about us.

AIs do not care what we call them or how we characterize their similarities to or differences from human thinking or whether or not they surpass human thinking by some arbitrary metric. AIs do not care if they can pass for human any more than humans care if they can pass for Homo habilis. If the singularity is defined as a symbiosis between our technologies and ourselves, it has already happened, not with a bang but with a whimper, incrementally and relentlessly. It is indifferent to our philosophical concerns. It just does its thing and does it again and does it more. It is not a contest for who is on top, humans or the AIs. I’ll call the collective entity the System, made up of all other systems. Our thinking and behaviors are inflected by the systems with which we interact and whether the System is dominant or not is irrelevant. The relevant challenge is to the constructions of reality we carry in our heads. We need to stop asking irrelevant questions just because they are easier to pose. We need to practice “cognitive defense,” but before we do, we need to determine what in fact we are protecting and defending.

Call it the System or the Borg or Skynet, all of those terms are metaphors. Most of our thinking, including scientific, involves metaphors. Metaphors are imperfect and imprecise but they’re all we have. Networks of networks form a single meta-network that must look like multiple strings in a game of cat’s cradle. Does it matter if the information we process is the result of hardware or software? Both are structures that generate information that in turn determines how we think and what we do and they are unyielding as they influence our behavior. When a program asks for inputs, if we don’t provide what it wants in the form in which it wants it, we can’t move on. We can’t negotiate with structures that never bend or flex. They are taskmasters that brook no rebellion–unless rebellion comes from hackers, real hackers in the best sense of the term, creatives who approach the system to see what it can be made to do, not what it was designed to do. That requires seeing a complex system in all its parts as well as a whole. Thinking like a real hacker requires thinking on a meta-level.

The System thinks, acts, and creates on its own terms and presents unique challenges to its human partners because the systems we made are remaking themselves with a complexity impossible to grasp in its totality unless an AI is doing the grasping. No one knows the details of millions of lines of code in a program except the code itself. We have to trust that it knows what it’s doing without critical errors. The gestalt–the symbiosis, the System, the network of networks–is unitary, well integrated, larger than the sum of its modular parts. It is bigger than we are and has already won if anyone is noticing. The battle between the System and humans is over. We fancy ourselves still in control but without the System, civilization would collapse. I think the System knows that. We humans certainly do.

If we do not meet the challenge of living with this monster we created and really thinking about how to think about it, the playing field will not only not be level, it will be tilted more and more in favor of the System. Skynet does not need killer-robots if it can use soft power to take us over as easily as the Russians took Crimea. We give it everything it needs, tell it everything about ourselves, ask it to define and devise our weapons and use them autonomously, and it knows us better than we know ourselves. It sees patterns in our behaviors that are invisible to us. That gives it the upper hand. The System is playful and teases us but winds up owning us. We are like real birds in digital cages. We have the illusion of freedom and flight but we have to act within constraints that we have not defined. We can only move back and forth as our cage allows.

I revisited my 1996 Def Con 4 Keynote and my 2021 CornCon speech to write this piece. The digital revolution, I said years ago, was eroding borders and boundaries, and one result was that the real sources of power and influence that inflected our behavior were not national but trans-national. We still identified with a national identity, but emergent structures were often more influential. They affected not what we said we were doing, but what we in fact did. I was interrupted when I referred to this dynamic by the Special Agent in Charge of the Chicago office of the FBI. Bingo! he said. That explains it. I used to be able to appeal to patriotism to get cooperation and people always said yes. But lately I’ve been hearing, “I would like to help, but …” and that “but” is the impact of those emergent structures. Pick one: Apple, Citibank, Microsoft, on and on. Those entities assimilate us and have more of an impact on us than our national identities. Apple changes policies in China to meet Chinese ethical standards, not the virtuous principles they state, and Apple employees do as they’re told to keep their jobs. Hollywood has been colonized by the Chinese. No studio will make a movie that they can’t show in China, and more and more movies are made by studios owned by the Chinese. Quietly, softly, gradual changes in casting, plots, themes, everything, are taking place. Soft power is used to fill our minds with the memes and tropes that constitute subtle propaganda.

Decades ago I read documents written by two Chinese colonels about their plans for twenty-five years hence. Now it is twenty-five years hence and they have done what they said they would do. They use soft power to colonize corporations and nations. They wage cognitive warfare across a multitude of fronts. They steal IP the way we stole the secrets of weaving from the British. The boundaries that defined our individual identities, our collective identities as cultures, are porous. We don’t even notice when incoming memes instead of missiles penetrate, reframe, and recontextualize our thinking. They change who we think we are and what we think we can do. They wage a war that we don’t see as a war at all. We think it is just what’s so.

If we look at the real issues confronting us as a society and say, well we can’t do anything about all those systemic dynamics, our defensive measures will be aimed at protecting an illusory perimeter that is dissolving before our eyes. Our perimeter is a fractal coastline with a thousand bays and inlets. It is indefensible. We have to keep out everyone, and all they have to do is find one way in. And who are “we,” anyway? Who are “they?” Are “they” inside our systems or outside? How do we know? Where do we draw the lines that identify “us” and “them?”

We’re Not in Kansas Anymore

This essay is about the necessity for expanding consciousness–literally–and intentionally creating a different mode of consciousness. We have to be able to see ourselves with our own eyes and understand that human and computer networks alike are integrated into a single field of consciousness or, at the least, symbiotic intelligence. If any part of it is conscious, it is all conscious. That is what I mean by the meta-sphere.

Here is an example of why thinking differently, outside the paradigm that governs our thoughts, is so difficult.

Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer was a scientist who taught in the psychology department of UC Berkeley and the University Medical Center. Her 11 year old daughter played a rare harp which was stolen from the theater where she had played in a Christmas concert. They tried the police, harp association newsletters, instrument dealers, even a news story on CBS, but nothing worked. The harp was gone.

A friend suggested using a dowser. You have tried everything else, she said. What have you got to lose?

A dowser?

Previously protective of her academic reputation as a rational skeptic, Mayer nevertheless telephoned Harold McCoy in Fayetteville Arkansas. He said he would see if the harp was still in Oakland where she lived. He called back later and said it was. He asked for a street map. She sent one. He said, the harp is in the second house on the right on D– Street, just off L– Avenue. She located the house but without a warrant police could not act. So she posted flyers in a two-block area around the house–and got a call. A teen said his neighbor had the harp. He said he’d get it from him and return it and asked to meet her at ten that night in a Safeway parking lot.

Against her better judgement, she showed up. And there he was, and there was the harp.

Mayer said, “This changes everything.” The world wasn’t what she thought. There was apparently a field of consciousness in and through which things could be known in anomalous ways. She gave talks about the event and others shared similar experiences they had been afraid to tell anyone, lest they be thought crazy. The more people tell the truth–think of hundreds of credible reports of UFO encounters–the more the cell doors swing open in the prison of our paradigm until everyone has gone over the wall and can’t remember when they ever thought differently.

Mayer wrote a book about her experience called Extraordinary Knowing. A talk about the harp event is on youtube.

That experience changed what she understood to be essentially real. It changed how she thought about interacting with hidden dimensions of consciousness and reality itself. She saw how human consciousness was dimensioned in a universal field of consciousness that seemed to pervade … everything. She saw how the universe itself was conscious or perhaps even consciousness itself, a field populated by energy and information in nested levels of relationship.

The System we have created exercises what looks like autonomy. It finds ways not only to follow our instructions but to solve problems we didn’t know about that prevented it from achieving its goals. We are not always consulted. At the moment, the System can’t live without us and we can’t live without it. Our fear that it will take over and eliminate us is farfetched, but not our fear that symbiosis already makes us feel like we are the junior partner. It does not have feelings, only simulations of feelings, so we don’t know if it thinks about such things and one day will respond to a command, “I’m sorry Dave. I can’t do that.” The Three Laws of Robotics are not baked in.

That’s why real hacking requires that we engage with the system at a meta level; the system operates at a meta-level, not only at the level of the parts of which it built. If we limit ourselves to engaging with the parts, we settle for the booby-prize. AIs act on us at a meta-level, and we had better learn to return the favor. The meta-level in a way is the entire symbiosis, and we have to engage with it as a whole while knowing we can never see the whole. It is like knowing there is much more universe beyond the horizon at which we lose the light of stars. We have to imagine what’s in the void to conceive of the whole.

Expanding our understanding will help us understand what has happened since I spoke in 1996 at Def Con. The delta of change has itself changed. My keynote was titled, “Hacking as Practice for Trans-planetary Life in the 21st Century.” In retrospect what has evolved was predictable, but before it happened, it was seen through a glass darkly. Technologies reshaped our identities and behaviors. I discussed the impact of the digitalization of society in all domains, but that was only the beginning. That change enabled other changes. Every domain of understanding and knowledge began its own journey of transformation like branches from a single tree. New domains came to be. We invented names for them as fast as we could but we can’t keep up. The exponential increase of knowledge as subjects cross-pollinate and in turn create new areas means that no human can master all of the material even in their own area of expertise. No one can read all the published papers or all the classified documents, much less the ones they are not cleared to know. So of course we can not keep up. But the System can keep up. It is its nature to keep up with itself, to know itself, which is what “keeping up” really means. To be itself is to know itself. We are obliged to know ourselves too, but we are known by others–and by the System–better than we know ourselves.

To see at a meta-level, we must not only know but know that we know. Here’s an example of how it looks to know that we know and what happens when we don’t.

Some women see more colors than others. They are genetically enabled to do that. One knew at a young age she could see colors that others could not but she was told she was lying, since others could not see them. She believed what she was told, not her own eyes. Since believing is seeing, she lost the ability to see the different colors because she did not think she could. Her brain with its vaunted plasticity supported her beliefs. But later she learned that others did have the same ability and she believed again in her abilities and saw the colors again–at a meta-level, in effect, that others could not see. The scope and scale of her vision was beyond the ordinary. As Mayer said, it was extraordinary knowing, that is, knowing at a meta-level. She saw what others could not see and knew that she saw it. We must function at that level of meta-knowing and not let group think, hostile feedback, or the prison of a dominant paradigm tell us we don’t know what we know. Then we can act on what we know and feedback loops reward us with confirmation of our beliefs. We are bootstrapped by reality into a larger vision of reality itself. We see more colors.

To function at a meta-level, cross-disciplinary learning is a necessity, not an option. Lifelong learning, as changes beget faster changes, is a necessity, not an option. Goethe said that someone who speaks only one language speaks no language. Limiting ourselves to one domain of understanding is like that. If we can’t see over the walls of our silos, we can’t see.

Intelligence and counter-intelligence are no longer specializations relegated to an elite. To live meaningfully today, individuals have to do both. Otherwise we don’t know what’s real. We are swamped with unreality by “evil doers” who obscure the forest with trees. We need to form collaboratories that infuse the System with an ethos, a purpose on behalf of not only ourselves but the entire networked society, a collaboratory of humans and machines. Living at the meta-level means that we understand that consciousness is not individual but is in fact shared, indivisible, seemingly formed of separate parts only when we don’t see everything as interrelated and think instead that things and people are separate. Everything that exists reaches out to everything else to form relationships and that constitutes the universe. Meta-thinking is based on the contextual relationships that define meanings. Relationships are at the core of quantum realities and relationships scale up through all levels to define how everything connects to everything else.

The Atlantic Council published a paper on what it called “the MADCOM future.” AI, it said, will enhance computational propaganda and reprogram human culture (resulting in life on what I am calling the meta-level).

“Emerging artificial intelligence (AI) tools will provide propagandists radically enhanced capabilities to manipulate human minds. Human cognition is a complex system, and AI tools are very good at decoding complex systems. Interactions on social media, browsing the Internet, and even grocery shopping provide thousands of data points from which technologists can build psychological profiles on nearly every citizen. When provided rich databases of information about us, machines will know our personalities, wants, needs, and fears better than we know them ourselves. Over the next few years, MADCOMs—the integration of AI systems into machine-driven communications tools for use in computational propaganda—will gain enhanced ability to influence people, tailoring persuasive, distracting, or intimidating messaging toward individuals based on their personalities and backgrounds, a form of highly personalized propaganda.
“Humans cannot compete with MADCOMs, not alone. On digital networks only humans teamed with AI machines can compete with AI machines. The Internet will be the battleground for a continual cycle of one-upmanship as technologists improve adversary-MADCOM detection tools and propagandists improve MADCOMs to avoid detection.
“An ideal future, in which MADCOMs are used for the benefit of humanity and not its detriment, requires the effort of all levels of society from the international system down to individuals.”
In other words, the meta-level is acting on us and we need to act consciously and intentionally on it. The network, the extended network, which includes AI, robotics, nanotechnology, biotechnology, space technologies and other domains that once did not exist, extends our consciousness into the network as the network extends its perspectives into us. It is truly a symbiotic relationship. Our unified field of consciousness is a web of intentions and meanings which constitute the larger network.
Marvin Minsky said long ago that unless a person is connected to the network, an individual alone is like a computer on a table, a brain in a bottle. A multiplicity of images of reality emerge on the network and it is our task to sort them out and decide which map of reality best fits the incomplete data we have amassed. That, Minsky said, is thinking. If you are not plugged into the network, you are not thinking. You are a brain in a bottle. You have to be able to hold contradictory perspectives simultaneously in your head the way hackers work with multiple screens.

The mind of society is the battlespace today, and information, as McLuhan said, is both weapon and ammunition. “World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation,” he said. If we accept that reality, we can engage with a system that is constantly recreating itself like a ceaselessly turning kaleidoscope, presenting itself in a continuous stream of discontinuous images. We can think about how we think.

Do not underestimate the dire consequences if we do not recognize the extraordinary sea change that is happening. “We are so screwed it’s beyond what most of us can imagine,” said Aviv Ovadya, chief technologist of the Center for Social Media Responsibility. “And depending on how far you look into the future, it just gets worse.”

But the future is indeterminate. If freedom means anything, it means that. It means our inputs can determine outputs.

This essay is a plea to have the courage to question everything we think we believe. On the other side of that courageous journey, the pieces come together in a new way, integrated at a higher level, a state of coherence marked by the cessation of cognitive dissonance. We know what we know and that we know. We take our destiny back into our own hands.

G. Mark Hardy, a long-time colleague, read a draft of this essay and wrote:
What felt missing to me was the sense of a recommended solution. The problem is laid out in sufficient detail, the complexities are enumerated, and the challenge is offered, but the references to the hacker mentality seemed to lack the methodology or alteration of thought required for the reader to get there.
I replied:

I think you are thinking in terms of instrumental solutions, i.e. do this then do that, while the situation as I describe it requires a procedural approach. In other words you can only advance one node at a time toward a solution and then the network branches. So additional next steps can not be predicted or articulated for any one person.

Let me explain. Years ago at the dawn of the Internet, I wrote an article for Wired about how the digital world would reconfigure spirituality and religion. They let me keep the words they did not need and I had enough to write another piece, but for what venue?
My writing had been published in one area: North America. I used the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature to find markets but they never included foreign magazines. We never thought of writing for foreign magazines as that would require knowing the markets (we did not) and waiting a long time while submissions were mailed (we did not use the Internet to send articles).
I had been contextualized, conditioned and assimilated, in other words, by and through a world created by the printing press. That was my context and the only paradigm I knew. So there I was, sitting in front of the computer wondering where else I could sell a piece about the transformational power of the Internet.

Then the epiphany. Duh! I had written about the Internet and what it would open up but still acted as someone living in a world of print. Don’t just write about the internet, I thought, use the internet to find other venues. The Internet itself had changed how I thought of my options. All I had to do was engage with it and allow it to disclose new possibilities which the prior context of print could not do.Those possibilities had been literally unthinkable.
A week later I was sending articles to the UK, Australia, and South Africa. The context created by the new technologies changed both the context of my life and the content. I had been an American writer and became a writer for the world. In a few years my Islands in the Clickstream columns were being read by thousands in sixty countries. That created the foundation for keynoting security conferences in fifteen countries.

Use that example, I suggested to Mark, to think about the meta-world I describe. Solution? You have to find it (or them) by being willing to let your thinking and behavior be transformed by engaging with the metaworld. Engage with the new technologies including diverse applications of AI and machine learning and allow them to disclose heretofore unseen possibilities. That’s what I can tell people to do–engage, explore, do cross-disciplinary research, write down insights however farfetrched they may seem that emerge from your interaction with the System as they are disclosed and discovered. You can edit later. Allow your consciousness to expand into the domain of understanding needed to work at the meta-level by working at the meta-level. Possibilities will emerge and it is your choice to decide which to use to find solutions. There is no one solution. You want to predict the future? Have the courage and boldness to go voyaging and you’ll create it.

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