[et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ fullwidth=”on” _builder_version=”4.9.0″ _module_preset=”default” global_module=”3307″][et_pb_fullwidth_header title=”@ET-DC@eyJkeW5hbWljIjp0cnVlLCJjb250ZW50IjoicG9zdF90aXRsZSIsInNldHRpbmdzIjp7ImJlZm9yZSI6IiIsImFmdGVyIjoiIn19@” text_orientation=”center” _builder_version=”4.9.0″ _dynamic_attributes=”title” _module_preset=”default”][\/et_pb_fullwidth_header][\/et_pb_section][et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ _builder_version=”3.22″][et_pb_row _builder_version=”3.25″ background_size=”initial” background_position=”top_left” background_repeat=”repeat”][et_pb_column type=”4_4″ _builder_version=”3.25″ custom_padding=”|||” custom_padding__hover=”|||”][et_pb_text admin_label=”R Thieme Header Text” _builder_version=”4.9.4″ text_font_size=”16px” background_size=”initial” background_position=”top_left” background_repeat=”repeat”]<\/p>\n
[\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text admin_label=”Opening Bullets Text” _builder_version=”4.9.4″ text_font_size=”16px” background_size=”initial” background_position=”top_left” background_repeat=”repeat”]<\/p>\n
As a professional presenter, I speak to:<\/p>\n
Clients say that, above all else, I make people think. One wrote, \u201cYour ability to move everyone out of their comfort zone is a remarkable talent to have.\u201d<\/p>\n
[\/et_pb_text][et_pb_accordion admin_label=”Speaking Topics Accordion” _builder_version=”4.9.4″ _module_preset=”default”][et_pb_accordion_item title=”The Difference It Makes Being Different ” open=”on” _builder_version=”4.9.4″ _module_preset=”default”]When CEUs in diversity training were desired, Richard Thieme was often invited to address diversity issues because he had lived as a minority in five different ways. He knew that “dominants” socialize “minorities”–as dominants call them–in similar ways–and with similar consequences. <\/p>\n
Richard is now an #actuallymature white CIS male who has lived in six different cultures, not five. His unique experience enables him to illuminate these critical dynamics and some optimal ways to deal with them. This presentation spells out practical strategies for engaging with the facts of diversity effectively.[\/et_pb_accordion_item][et_pb_accordion_item title=”Computers, Breaking the Rules, and Huckleberry Finn” _builder_version=”4.9.4″ _module_preset=”default” open=”off”]What does it take to be an expert? How do experts differ from non-experts? How far can AI and machine learning go in matching or surpassing the expertise of humans? <\/p>\n
And how do experts in ethics manifest their expertise? Why do they often seem to break so many rules?
\nThe director of a SOC at the Pentagon and Huckleberry Finn puffing on his pipe after a sleepless night have more in common than one might think. Both had an ability to leap into a domain of meta-rules intuitively where binary rules followed by beginners do not hold. Those rules are like training wheels when we learn to ride a bicycle. Once we know how to balance, the training wheels can go.<\/p>\n
Richard Thieme brings the experience of sixteen years as an Episcopal clergyman and twenty-seven years as an author and speaker to this cross-disciplinary presentation. He shows why rules are useful but can be constraining and he shows how experts really make decisions \u2013 and how they can serve as examples for all of us.[\/et_pb_accordion_item][et_pb_accordion_item title=”Now More Than Ever: The Hacker Revolution Meets the Post-Pandemic Post-Insurrection World” _builder_version=”4.9.4″ _module_preset=”default” open=”off”]A quarter-century ago, I began addressing the impacts of the hacker revolution on the human in the machine–how it would transform our lives, our thinking, our work, our identities. I was describing the “digital revolution” as a transformational engine, not as an academic exercise–and it all came to be as I described. Hackers created the frames in which others lived, inside the bigger picture, without even knowing it. <\/p>\n
Two new challenges–the pandemic and the widespread acceptance of insurrection as suitable political action–are creating another complex paradigm change which demands that we apply real hacker methodologies to the consequences of these new realities. Hackers have the tools to identify separate pieces of a complex system–think, society–and use them to create new structures–think, new institutions. Hackers can lead an insurrection of a different kind entirely–think, new ways of thinking about thinking itself.<\/p>\n
Hackers have internalized procedures, assumptions, and working models to see, separate, and reintegrate parts of complex systems built to attain specific ends to attain other ends, to break down to breakthrough. <\/p>\n
Hackers model thought leadership during a time of radical change. This talk illuminates how the “hacker ethos” translates into a practical approach to deal with 21st-century realities–which, as Philip K. Dick said, “won’t go away just because we refuse to believe in it.” At Def Con 4 in 1996, I told the young technocrats they would be thought leaders in the twenty-first century. Many of them have become just that. This presentation redirects my aim at a future few saw coming and ports the strategies and methodologies of real hacking to face those serious challenges. The tools must be sharpened and wielded with the precision and skill of a Jedi master.[\/et_pb_accordion_item][et_pb_accordion_item title=”Real Birds in Digital Cages: The Chickens Come Home to Roost” _builder_version=”4.9.4″ _module_preset=”default” open=”off”]Who do we think we are? <\/p>\n
Identity is by social agreement. Social agreement is manufactured, managed, and manipulated on the internet these days. We all know that now, but knowing something and acting on it are two different things. <\/p>\n
We live in the confines of prior technologies as if they define our lives\u2013think \u201chorseless carriages\u201d before \u201cautomobiles.\u201d Think “automobiles” before “driverless cars.” Think “astronauts” before “space tourists.” Even as the frames of the 20th century dissolve, we live in them as if they persist.<\/p>\n
To have a clue as to what\u2019s real these days, we need to do counter intelligence, and most don\u2019t have the time or the skills. The critical thinking with which CI begins is a lost art for many. So we live in digital cages large enough to let us flap our wings and have the illusion of freedom and flight, but the cage keeps turning and takes us with it.<\/p>\n
Richard Thieme invented the phrase, \u201creal birds in digital cages,\u201d a quarter of a century ago. He has worked with colleagues to clarify ways to escape those cages. The task is not trivial but it IS necessary if we are to remain capable of rational decisions as a digital tsunami washes away the structures of a prior society, taking all of our “cognitive artifacts” with it. This presentation illuminates the nature of the cage and how to pick the lock.[\/et_pb_accordion_item][et_pb_accordion_item title=”Playing Through the Pain – The Impact of Secrecy and Dark Knowledge on Security and Intelligence Professionals” _builder_version=”4.9.4″ _module_preset=”default” open=”off”]Dismissing or laughing off concerns about what it does to a person to know critical secrets does not lessen the impact of the most dire of those secrets on life, work, and relationships. The need to build and live in a different world, mapped to a different reality, can wear a body down. One has to calibrate narratives to what others believe, to the consensual reality” they inhabit, one has to live defensively, warily. This at the least causes cognitive dissonance which some manage by denial. But refusing to feel the pain does not make it go away. It intensifies the consequences when they erupt. <\/p>\n
Philip K. Dick said, reality is that which, when you no longer believe in it, does not go away. When cognitive dissonance evolves into symptoms of traumatic stress, one ignores those symptoms at one’s peril. But the very constraints of one’s work often make it impossible to speak aloud about those symptoms, because that might threaten one’s clearances, work, and career. And whistle blower protection is often non-existent. <\/p>\n
The real cost of security work and professional intelligence goes beyond dollars. It is measured in family life, relationships, and mental and physical well-being. The divorce rate is as high among intelligence professionals as it is among medical professionals, for good reason–how can relationships be based on openness and trust when one’s primary commitments make truth-telling and disclosure impossible? <\/p>\n
One CIA veteran wrote: \u201cI was for a while an observer to the Personnel Management working group in the DO. I noted they\/we were obscenely proud of having the highest rates of alcoholism, adultery, divorce, and suicide in the US Government. I personally have 23 professional suicides in my mental logbook, the first was an instructor that blew his brains out with a shotgun when I was in training. The latest have tended to be senior figures who could not live with what they knew.”<\/p>\n
Richard Thieme has been around that space for a long time. He has listened to people in pain because of the compelling necessities of their work, the consequences of their actions, the misfiring of imperfect plans, and the burdens of soul-wrenching experiences. <\/p>\n
The bottom line is, trauma and secondary trauma have identifiable symptoms and they are everywhere in the \u201cindustry.\u201d The \u201chyper-real\u201d space which the national security state creates by its very nature extends to everyone too, now, but it’s more intense for professionals. Living as \u201csocial engineers,\u201d always trying to understand the other’s POV so one can manipulate and exploit it, erodes the core self. The existential challenge constitutes an assault on authenticity and integrity. Sometimes sanity is at stake, too, and sometimes, life itself. <\/p>\n
This talk discusses the real facts of the matter and strategies needed for effective life-serving responses to manage the paradoxical imperatives and identity-threatening pressures of our lives and work. [\/et_pb_accordion_item][et_pb_accordion_item title=”The Road to Resilience: Redeeming the Dark Side of Security and Intelligence Work (A Sequel)” _builder_version=”4.9.4″ _module_preset=”default” open=”off”]Richard Thieme spoke on \u201cPlaying Through the Pain: The Impact of Dark Knowledge on Security and Intelligence Professionals\u201d for Def Con. He relied on dozens of experiences provided by colleagues over a quarter-century, colleagues from NSA, CIA, corporate, and military. Responses to the presentation have often been emotional and have corroborated his thesis:. The real impact of this work on people over the long term often has to be mitigated by counter-measures and strategies so scars can be endured or, even better, incorporated as marks of bravery and courage.<\/p>\n
In this presentation, Thieme elaborates on those strategies and counter-measures in detail. It\u2019s not about leaving the profession: it\u2019s about what we can do to survive, and thrive, and transcend the challenges.<\/p>\n
It is so much easier to focus on exploits, cool tools, zero days, and the games we play in the space. It is not so easy to know how to play through the pain successfully. As we know from professional football, sucking it up, injecting drugs, and going back onto the field does not prevent long-term damage. The damage to us is also to our heads, but it does not show up in scans. It shows up in our families, our relationships, and our lives.<\/p>\n
A lot of overcomers are called \u201csupernormals,\u201d which means they discovered resilient responses to deprivation, abuse, profound loss \u2026 or the daily challenges of work that demands that they look on the face of evil. Supernormals are driven, never quit, fight through adversity. It pays to know how to do that and know that we know so we can respond with resilience whatever comes our way.<\/p>\n
One way or another, our choices bring consequences, and intervening in the cycle consciously and proactively is a lot better than letting everything take its course. That\u2019s the assumption baked into this talk: we have the tools to do this right. [\/et_pb_accordion_item][et_pb_accordion_item title=”When Privacy Goes Poof! – Why It’s Gone and Never Coming Back” _builder_version=”4.9.4″ _module_preset=”default” open=”off”]\u201cGet over it!\u201d as Scott McNeeley said years ago about the end of privacy is not the best advice. By understanding why it is gone and never coming back, we can we have a shot at rethinking what privacy means in the context of our evolving technologies.<\/p>\n
Richard Thieme provides a historical and social context for some of that rethinking. He goes both deep and wide and challenges contemporary discussions of privacy that still use outmoded 20th century frameworks for thinking about privacy. His advice is basic: let’s get real.<\/p>\n
Our technologies have changed us. We humans are systems of energy and information. We interact with similar systems, both organic and inorganic, “natural” and “artificial.” These \u201cdifferently sentient systems\u201d all consist of nodes in intersecting networks extending into several dimensions. We can’t think of ourselves as “flatlanders” living in two dimensions.<\/p>\n
We have known we were similar to cells in a body, but we emphasized \u201ccell-ness.\u201d Now we have to emphasize \u201cbody-ness\u201d and re-imagine who we are. What we see depends on the level of abstraction at which we choose to look. Patterns extracted from data are either meta-data or just more data, depending on the level of scrutiny. The boundaries we like to imagine around our identities, our psyches, our “private internal spaces,” are violated in both directions, in and out, by data that, when aggregated, constitutes \u201cus.\u201dIt is reconstituted like orange juice by others who know us more deeply than we know ourselves. Just like “orange juice,” parts are separated and recombined in a new way. “They” see the patterns of that new way, how it behaves, and we do not.<\/p>\n
Privacy is honored in lip service, but not in the marketplace, where it is violated or taken away or eroded every day. To confront the challenges generated by technological change, we have to know what is happening so we can rethink what we mean by privacy and identity. We can’t say what we can’t think. We need new language to articulate our experience and grasp the context in which we now live. Then we can understand the abstractions of data analytics and Big Data at a level that makes sense.<\/p>\n
The weakest link in discussions of privacy is the definition of privacy, and the definition of privacy is not what we think. Clarity about all this is the goal of this presentation.[\/et_pb_accordion_item][et_pb_accordion_item title=”Staring into the Abyss: The Dark Side of Security and Professional Intelligence ” _builder_version=”4.9.4″ _module_preset=”default” open=”off”]Nothing is harder to see than things we believe so deeply we don’t even see them. This is certainly true in the “security space,” in which our narratives are self-referential, bounded by mutual self-interest, and characterized by a heavy dose of group-think. We become assimilated and cease to see the bigger picture. <\/p>\n
An analysis of deeper political and economic structures reveals that narrative and illuminates our mixed motivations and the yin yang of our lives, the simultaneity of licit and illicit structures in society at large and in all of our lives. <\/p>\n
This analysis will make you hesitate before uncritically using buzzwords and jargon–words like “security,” “defense,” and “cyberwar.” We have to stop thinking in a binary way about “good” and “evil.” By the end of this presentation, simplistic distinctions between foreign and domestic, natural and artificial, us and them, will go liquid while the complexities of information security as we call it will remain … and continue to challenge us personally and professionally. [\/et_pb_accordion_item][et_pb_accordion_item title=”The Only Way to Tell the Truth is in Fiction: The Dynamics of Life in the National Security State ” _builder_version=”4.9.4″ _module_preset=”default” open=”off”]Over a decade ago, a friend at the National Security Agency told Richard Thieme that he could address the core issues they discussed only if he wrote fiction. “It’s the only way you can tell the truth,” he said. <\/p>\n
Thirty seven published short stories and two novels later, Thieme’s work illuminates \u201cnon-consensual realities:\u201d the worlds above all of hackers and intelligence professionals.<\/p>\n
Thieme’s most recent novel, Mobius: A Memoir, powerfully presents a vision of the twisted threads of our lives. One reviewer said, \u201cRichard Thieme, a legendary guru of young hackers everywhere, is excruciatingly well-versed in life in the bowels of governmental secrecy and manages a raw and at times even tender, deep dive into a world of secrecy and nigh capricious bureaucracy that extracts a great human price. Read it at your peril, but in doing so emerge ready to better
\ntreasure your simple and honest pleasures. Thieme writes Mobius with all
\n the tragic beauty of a fallen Angel.\u201d
\nAnd a veteran of NSA wrote: “Thieme\u2019s level of consciousness and storytelling is spellbinding. A hall of mirrors, instead of hiding what\u2019s true, the mirrored kaleidoscope becomes the truth. An old Jewish proverb has it that \u2018story is truer than truth\u2019, here the turning and twisting story becomes the truth. Here lies our unseen contemporary history, told from the inside about the people who make history.”<\/p>\n
A scholarly study of \u201cThe Covert Sphere\u201d by Timothy Melley documents the way the growth and influence of the intelligence community since World War 2 has created precisely the reality to which that NSA veteran pointed. The source of much of what \u201coutsiders\u201d believe is communicated through novels, movies, and television programs. But even IC \u201cinsiders\u201d rely on those sources, as compartmentalization prevents the big picture from coming together because few inside have a \u201cneed to know.\u201d <\/p>\n
Thieme asked a historian at the NSA what historical events they could discuss with a reasonable expectation that their words denoted the same details. \u201cAnything up to 1945,\u201d the historian said with a laugh \u2013 but he wasn\u2019t kidding. <\/p>\n
Point taken. <\/p>\n
This fascinating presentation illuminates the mobius strip on which all of us walk as we make our way through the labyrinth of security and intelligence worlds we inhabit of necessity, all of us some of the time and some all of the time. It discloses why \u201cpost-modernism\u201d is not an affectation but necessary to understand our lives. <\/p>\n
As Mobius says–and as Thieme says–nothing is what it seem. [\/et_pb_accordion_item][et_pb_accordion_item title=”UFOs and Government: a Case Study in Disinformation, Deception, and Perception Management ” _builder_version=”4.9.4″ _module_preset=”default” open=”off”]There is no one “government.” There are many components of government that interact and respond to challenging events, often contending with one another and leaving their disputes on record. <\/p>\n
UFOs were challenging since the 1940s, when “foo fighters” trailed planes on bombing runs over Germany and Japan. But strange flying vehicles did not go away when the war ended. In the 1950s, the CIA advocated training observers “inside” to learn what they could about the vehicles while publicly dismissing reports to manage the potential of distress.<\/p>\n
UFOs were anomalous, well-documented, and challenging because, as Major General John Samford said, \u201ccredible people have seen incredible things.\u201d This talk is about how governments manage these challenges from “incredible things.”.An NSA veteran thinks that Thieme’s talk is “perfect timing – it’s about how the government deals with serious yet largely unknown or not understood potential threats, while trying desperately to keep the public from knowing what they are doing. What better way to discuss the current situation at a meta level, without ever getting into the knee-jerk muddle of response to current events? You can’t ask for a better context for this talk.” <\/p>\n
Richard Thieme was privileged to be invited to join the UFO History Group which includes the best researchers in the field. After 5 years of work, they produced \u201cUFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry,\u201d an outstanding work of historical scholarship that reads like a fascinating detective story. In almost 600 pages and with nearly 1000 citations, the work illuminates the response of the government since the early 1940s. how and why policies were set, and how they were executed. Reviewers say, “this is the best book about the UFO phenomena that was ever written” and “UFOs and Government is a triumph of sober, conscientious scholarship unlikely to be equaled for years to come.” <\/p>\n
Don Quixote said, \u201cInsanity is seeing things as they really are.” This speech uses UFO phenomena as dye in the arteries of “how things really are” and how governments carry out cover and deception with all of the best intentions in the world.[\/et_pb_accordion_item][et_pb_accordion_item title=”Creativity and Leadership: Thinking in a Little Bit Bigger Box” _builder_version=”4.9.4″ _module_preset=”default” open=”off”]The edges of our thinking, the edges of the structures of our lives–that’s where new ideas show up. We call those people “geniuses” who see them first. But all of us can be geniuses because all of us have the powers of creativity. But we don’t always know that we have it, and then we don’t use it.<\/p>\n
Using insights from the best and the brightest in the worlds of information and communications technology, security, and professional intelligence, this presentation demonstrates how we often neglect our innate creativity to capture and use the creative insights we do have. You will learn that you cannot control creativity, but you can tend it and nurture it and capture its results. And as a leader, you can create a culture that does all that too. And you will learn that creativity, properly used and understood, is the real road to genuine freedom.[\/et_pb_accordion_item][et_pb_accordion_item title=”How to Reinvent Yourself in a Time of Radical Change” _builder_version=”4.9.4″ _module_preset=”default” open=”off”]Hard times are getting harder. People, businesses, organizations of all kinds, need to reinvent themselves. And while we need to reinvent how we do things, reinventing how we think is even more important. Then we can always find the reins of our lives when we drop them. <\/p>\n
Richard Thieme is in the fourth career-chapter of his life. He has reinvented himself, his work, his way of thinking, even his identity or persona successfully when it became time to shed the skin that became too tight. His life is testimony to his success. After this presentation, you\u2019ll have the same tools at your disposal and the same ability to break through habit and fear to forge new paths.[\/et_pb_accordion_item][et_pb_accordion_item title=”Mutuality, Feedback and Accountability: Keys to Individual and Organizational Success” _builder_version=”4.9.4″ _module_preset=”default” open=”off”]Mutuality, feedback and accountability are attributes of successful organizations but also characterize successful individuals. This presentation illuminates how those three legs of the stool support successful organizations and individuals and why cultures skew in predictable ways when any one of the three is missing. The details will be simple to understand but difficult to execute. Hence the need for this presentation.[\/et_pb_accordion_item][et_pb_accordion_item title=”Blending Families … and Work Cultures” _builder_version=”4.9.4″ _module_preset=”default” open=”off”]The dynamics of mergers often have more to do with blending different cultures and leadership styles than with economies of scale. Using experience from a real “blended family,” this presentation illuminates those dynamics and what it takes to tough it out and make it through.[\/et_pb_accordion_item][et_pb_accordion_item title=”The Challenge to Identity, Freedom, Democracy and other 20th Century Words ” _builder_version=”4.9.4″ _module_preset=”default” open=”off”]The panopticon–that prison conceived by Jeremy Benthem in which prisoners internalize the knowledge that they can be watched so watch themselves on behalf of their keeper– was a 20th century concern. It\u2019s still an apt metaphor, but \u201cpanspectron\u201d is better. The panspectron invests power in the query, once the relevant data has been collected. That data is safeguarded by the policies and practices of both legitimate and criminal enterprises–i.e. it is not safeguarded at all. One click integrates our movements, conversations, plans and activities and shows them in meaningful patterns. “Pre-computing” out to the first ring of relationships begins but does not finish the ability to see everything we do, everywhere we go.<\/p>\n
\u201c[We] can get this god’s-eye view of human behavior,” we are told. \u201cPeople look like little particles that move in space that occasionally communicate with each other.”<\/p>\n
How do we reinvent ourselves – realistically – to live in this world and recontextualize words like \u201cfreedom, human identity, democracy\u201d so they have meaning?–so we are not flocks of real birds in moving digital cages? How do we live robustly in a world without walls? How, in short, do we free our minds \u2013 and ourselves?[\/et_pb_accordion_item][et_pb_accordion_item title=”Thinking About the Future” _builder_version=”4.9.4″ _module_preset=”default” open=”off”]A non-futurist uses tools available to any of us–children\u2019s games and toys, the research and development of vice industries, and military R&D–to suggest likely changes in the future. Biotechnology, nanotechnology, the advent of a trans-planetary society and the colonization of the solar system through telerobotic and human exploration, all play a part in suggesting that your children and their children will face some astonishing challenges. <\/p>\n
This talk sounds like science fiction but it isn\u2019t. A man with a proven track record of getting it mostly right illuminates what is likely to come.[\/et_pb_accordion_item][et_pb_accordion_item title=”Biohacking” _builder_version=”4.9.4″ _module_preset=”default” open=”off”]What is biohacking? Strictly speaking, it is altering organisms–including humans–to enhance abilities, increase power, provide an advantage. Some is fun like putting chips into our bodies. Some is more serious like growing new limbs, smarter children, and the ability to leap tall buildings at a single bound. Some–like weaponizing bacteria and viruses–is dangerous.<\/p>\n
What used to be done by scientists in labs because fodder for competitions in universities. Now it is in the hands of teenagers. The tools to reinvent ourselves by hacking the code that makes who we are are widely available. Some think it should not be done. Those who think it should be done are already doing it. Nation-states, non-state entities, children in collaboratories, all are pursuing holy grails without knowing what will result.<\/p>\n
This talk is not science fiction. The future is already here and we can be responsible for it only if we let ourselves know what\u2019s happening.<\/p>\n
Using discoveries from research and development originating in military and intelligence warrens, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and neuroscience, Thieme illuminates some of the challenges we face and how to meet them. [\/et_pb_accordion_item][et_pb_accordion_item title=”The Changing Context of Intelligence and Ethics: Enabling Technologies as Transformational Engines” _builder_version=”4.9.4″ _module_preset=”default” open=”off”]The intelligence community of the United States and the intelligence communities of the world, linked in cooperative anti-terror activity, are responsible for maintaining social and global order at a level of understanding beyond that formulated in the past by any one nation. The intelligence community in the aggregate, as is where is, is a global community of practitioners who share an ethos and modalities of operation not available to ordinary citizens; it has thereby created for itself an intrinsic vocation or calling to maintain global order. The issue of accountability, however, during this transition, has not been fully addressed. <\/p>\n
This presentations explores the deeper implications of identity-shift in the Intelligence Community and what it means for the rest of us.[\/et_pb_accordion_item][et_pb_accordion_item title=”Freeing the Mind: Security and Power in a World Without Walls ” _builder_version=”4.9.4″ _module_preset=”default” open=”off”]A veteran intelligence professional said:<\/p>\n
“We are asking the wrong questions. That’s why our answers do not address the real challenges we face.<\/p>\n
The real questions are: (1) How do we live vibrantly? (2) How do we free our minds? (3) How do we live in a world without walls? <\/p>\n
This presentation addresses those questions. It explores the relationship of context to content in a world transformed by new technologies. It challenges traditional thinking rooted in prior technologies and explores how new technologies do not merely extend our senses and cognitive abilities but change how we experience life itself–including identities from “individuals” up to geopolitical structures. These changes have profound implications for war fighting and for geopolitical thinking as they do for every aspect of our work and lives.<\/p>\n
Think of the search for a unified field theory in contemporary physics as a metaphor for what we are doing in security work too. That search for a unified theory stems from the inability to reconcile quantum physics and relativity theory and has pushed research toward mathematical models such as string theory in an effort to model a single way of looking at everything.<\/p>\n
The same can be said of the distribution of power in networks and hierarchies. The individual person looks like one kind of thing when viewed in the context of a network–a node defined by parameters that locate it in space and by attributes that characterize it–and another kind of thing when viewed in the context of filling a slot or box in a hierarchy. This is analogous to describing a photon as both a particle and a wave. The parameters of our inquiry determine what we see.<\/p>\n
We do not currently have a unified theory of computing and its consequences–or a universally agreed-on definition of what it means to be a human being. The notion of the “individual person” is central to debates about privacy, intellectual property, and the legality or illegality of network aggression (“black hat hacking”), but from the point of view of the distributed network, there is no individual person, there are only nodes in the network. There are only aggregated structures of information that transit the world and zoom through porous borders like neutrinos. Hierarchical structures like “nation states” are in fact a function of complexity and the speed of the flow of information. Those structures exist at multiple levels of abstraction, and the level at which one sees them and links them to levels above and below determines mastery of the battlespace. The mind of society is the battlespace in the 21st century. Soft power is hard power. War is peace and peace is war. Power is distributed unevenly (as William Gibson said of the future). An “individual” inhabits a niche in a hierarchical structure; a mathematical aggregation of points, data points, define one the way a locus is defined in space. A network consists of nodes in relationship to other nodes. The speed of the transfer of information about the contents or defining characteristics of the nodes can seem like “spooky action at a distance.” <\/p>\n
Traffic analysis can identify the contents of a discussion when one knows the participants, the duration of the discussions, the context of the conversation. The identities of the ones who are communicating are not known a priori but emerge from analysis of the dynamics of the conversation. The same can be said of analysis of the flow of information on a network, and we can infer “who” is talking and what they are talking about. We know the nodes by how the nodes behave. How the nodes behave defines their relationships. <\/p>\n
Relationships are primary; the objects or artifacts in relationship are secondary. Relationships define the “space” of the landscape we see.<\/p>\n
We all inhabit nodes in multiple networks simultaneously. We can field any network-determined identity we choose but we do not determine an individual identity until we choose a network identity. That choice is made in the moment in which we act, so paradoxically, while context determines content, choice is always prior to context and creates it. Until we choose, it is impossible to predict with certainty which choice will be made and therefore what identity will be asserted. Every “individual” is a collection of discrete possible “identities.” The attributes aggregated at the moment of choosing to act determine “who” is acting–a mole, for example, who entered a network by mimicking the attributes of allegiance, trustworthiness, and belonging, or a “loyal citizen” who never questioned their assimilation into a culture and its values and paradigms. <\/p>\n
Security based on perimeter defense or authentication is a failed model because there is no perimeter and there is no single authentic identity. Identity is a function of observation, not assertion; like the identity of a particle or a wave, it will be known only afterward. This is also why, for the ordinary human living in consensus reality–a reality or paradigm which always lags current realities–we are known by others using data mining and AI better than we know ourselves. Others see patterns of our behavior at abstract levels that enable them to know us and predict our behavior better than we can predict it ourselves because we imagine we are the identities we see at a lower level of abstraction. But those identities were formed in the context of a 20th century world with its lenses and frames and the resulting cognitive artifacts, dependent on that prior context, no longer exist. Yet we conduct political discussions, among others, as if they do, as if they define possibilities.<\/p>\n
They do not. They limit possibilities. We need to rethink how we think, especially about thinking. <\/p>\n
This analysis has implications for traditional notions of freedom, loyalty, citizenship, abstract rights like human rights, intellectual property rights, national identity, the ability to exercise power, and security. “Rights” were emergent properties of a society transformed by the printing press, objective scientific facts, and the values of the Renaissance. The consciousness and notion of a “self” which emerged from those revolutionary changes has been internalized so deeply we no longer see it, while we inhabit it unconsciously. It explains why a disciplined hierarchical structure like the military can use network centric warriors and fight networks with networks while maintaining a basic identity–for the moment–as the machinery of a nation state. But it also explains why that identity is morphing, why what it can think and do sometimes does not feel quite “right.” That dissonance is because it does not in fact quite “fit” the realities on the ground that we experience, the way life is fired at us every morning from the barrel of a gun. “Nation states” as collations of definable behaviors are being subsumed by trans-nation states and by non-state states.<\/p>\n
At higher abstract levels, identities are trans-national and shorn of twentieth-century national loyalties; those who act on that level have already created alternative global structures of power, economics, and law. The laws are not so much codified as understood as the appropriate rules of behavior and engagement for “we few, we powerful few.” Offshore islands–both real and metaphorical–are their ports of call. Those ports are linked in in a league or alliance based on the knowledge of what one can and must do to transcend the limits of the past and be powerful in the present. Their primary commitment is to not being seen and understood well enough to affect them, to fence in the rest of us with words, and pictures, and event-scenes, and the other intoxicants of the mind of society which we down, one after the other, like shots at the bar. We swallows their pills of disinformation to their advantage and our detriment. <\/p>\n
It will be necessary then to discuss cultures and how they inflect our perception and ability simply to think about things as well. Paradigms determine the questions we can ask and then the answers are predictable. Other questions, other answers, are not even thinkable. It is easy to talk about out of the box thinking but much harder to do it when the customs and habits of years militate against grasping the implications of a new bigger box and executing strategies based on them. Those who inhabit that bigger box look in on those in the smaller box with satisfaction and confidence. Those who live in three dimensions smile wryly at “flatlanders” who live in two. <\/p>\n
Of course, we never get out of a box; we simply get into a slightly bigger box. In transition from the one to the other, however, we can feel as if we see all of spacetime as prior frameworks dissolve before they are reconstituted at a higher level of abstraction, we can see all options, we feel omnipotent and omniscient. That illusion vanishes when the new, little bit bigger box comes into being. Thus we crawl forward again, inside our boxes like turtles in shells. <\/p>\n
In addition, it helps to identify the attributes of successive generations of hackers to understand how the management of perception has turned the mind of society itself into the battlespace of the 21st century. It helps to recall the evolution of a closed model of computer simulation which has become the de facto landscape that we share. We\u2019ll look at what happens when we forget that we built it in the first place and why our perceptions and beliefs can be manipulated based on that forgetfulness and used against us by adversaries. We\u2019ll discover that the essence of the struggle in and out of cyberspace is psychological and even spiritual and why perception, belief and ultimate intentions will determine the outcome. We’ll develop a dictionary of “newspeak” that redefines “individual,” “religion,” “democracy,” “military victory,” and much more. <\/p>\n
At the end of our discussion, we will understand that ALL media is social, everything is connected to everything else, and relationships define illusory “objects” which are in fact “cognitive artifacts” floating in the vast space of our minds. We will understand why verbs are more appropriate to our experience, not nouns, because all is flowing, as Heraclitus said, and we can’t step in the same river twice. So time is of the essence, navigating the OODA loop is crucial, but time, too, and its relationship to success in this brave new world is not what we think it is. Nothing, in fact, is what we think it is. Nothing is what it seems. So we had better think about our thinking, before it’s too late.[\/et_pb_accordion_item][\/et_pb_accordion][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Richard Thieme SpeakingAs a professional presenter, I speak to: challenges posed by new technologies and the future, including information technology, biohacking, and a burgeoning trans-planetary society. I focus on “the human in the machine,” the impact of transformational technologies as they come home to our humanity. the need to reinvent ourselves (as individuals or organizations) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":3,"menu_order":30,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"
Richard Thieme\u2019s work is always evolving so these topics are suggestive. Topics can be blended and integrated into keynotes, end-notes that wrap up a convention or conference, or a half-day seminar or workshop. Retreats from a half-day to two days are custom designed to meet needs of clients. All work, in fact, is customized for clients - I know, every speaker says that, but take a look at what clients say about customization.<\/p>