okay Beyond the Fringe anomalies of
consciousness experience and scientific
research by Richard team if you have not
seen him speak he has my obscene gosh I
don't know how many talks he's done just
a few but I'm really amazing stuff so
listen up thank you thanks it's so great
to have a con like this in Milwaukee you
know we can always get the short end of
this straw the short straw you know I
mean I have had so many people you know
on the East Coast and they they say you
live in Milwaukee is it is that what
part of Minnesota is that in and and
again Minnesota and Wisconsin very
confused because they're just it's not
like it's not as bad as Utah and
Colorado and Wyoming which are just big
squares or are tagged hexagons but
people confuse us for for nothing and
there's really something here this is a
terrific place and I hand it to Mike and
his cohorts who developed this last year
and are growing it and it's going to be
the Midwestern con which will make
thought con green with envy it's just
terrific to be here and only drive 20
minutes instead of flight 24 hours to
Malaysia as I was just invited to do and
I'm getting too old to do that I said no
this wasn't worth 24 hours but 20
minutes is easy okay so let me tell you
a little bit about what I'm going to
talk about and who I am this is foam
foam is the title of a novel gets I'll
get the advertisements out of the way
it's a novel that I spent a lifetime
learning enough to write and it came out
a year ago and this poster is the cover
of the third volume it's three little
volumes are one big volume and what it
suggests is that information and energy
transfers in the universe it transits
and it looks like they're individual
entities the bubbles but there are Jason
see enables the possibility of the
transfer of information energy and I was
talking to Nicole about where an idea
like that comes from Joe mcmonagle was
one of the remote viewers for the NSA
Stargate program and he he liked some of
the other people in the remote viewing
program had some tremendous hits how
many of you didn't do not know what the
remote viewing program was about pretty
much familiar with okay guy named Ingo
Swann walked into sr I some years ago
and he said he could affect things
physically with his mind and they gave
him a series of tests and that caused
the gentleman who's doing the testing
his name was helper dog to blow his mind
because he actually affected things
physically and also he was able to
detect the information present at a
remote site and the bottom line to make
it short you can get one or two good
books on him some bad books are
available as well is as hell took that
program at NSA and the NSA instituted a
program in structured clairvoyance and
the premise of structured clairvoyance
they developed serious very highly
structured protocols for doing this work
it wasn't just going into a trance but a
trance-like state was also part of the
game but there were protocols to
determine the effectiveness and the
truthfulness of it and they worked well
and I've talked to both hell over the
years and I've talked to other people at
CIA who brought the program in there and
theoretically the program was ended
which is a cover story it's not the same
as it was but it's still going on in
some quarters of the intelligence
community to give you an example of what
you could detect with remote viewing Joe
mcmonagle detected what looks like a new
boomer a new big nuclear submarine
Argentinean Russians had had developed
and it's right brain left brain stuff
you have to get the impressions and use
drawing on the right side of the brain
to manifest the impressions without
interpretation or logical analysis and
you only now logically analyze them
after you've put some impressions in a
embodied form like a drawing and it was
a big thing and he threw the apparatus
surrounded me through the
context that he detected existed and
people said it couldn't exist because
while it was a very very large submarine
it was being built according to his his
remote viewing on the land and you never
built a submarine like that on the land
you built it near the water so you could
launch it and the wonderful end of the
story is that when that submarine was
completed they detected through
satellite imagery the building of a
canal from that site to the water and
the bringing of the submarine through
that canal into the water exactly as he
had postulated there are a few other
startling stories like that but the
point that it makes that joe said to me
he had learned after years of doing this
was that information is streaming
through the universe in a way that
enables sentient intelligent beings like
ourselves to capture depending on what
he called the first volume of foam lobes
and folds the complexity a number of the
loads and folds in your brain now it
wasn't long ago that we wondered are
there other planets out there now we've
detected with our primitive apparatus
thousands of extrasolar planets we know
we know that the universe is teeming
with life and that we are relatively
johnny-come-lately to the party just
barely up from the swamp which ought to
give us some humility with our
civilization the way it is only ten or
twelve thousand years old based on
agriculture and animal husbandry which
started in anatolia province of Greece
only only 10 to 12,000 years ago it's a
blink so the humility also attends the
fact that the astonishing things we
discover and know usually approach our
framework or our frame of knowledge as
an anomaly an anomaly is that which
doesn't fit and our brains have
developed ways just like our bodies with
very complex wonderful immune systems to
attack ideas to threaten the integrity
of the whole
and an anomaly that doesn't fit
threatens the integrity of the whole so
it must be at first rejected and yet as
we just heard from the keynote or thurs
terrific talk about how kids can be
taught or not even taught but innately
have the ability to look for new ways of
making things making things happen kids
have a propensity for innovation and
this is what hacking is this is also
what sciences scientists and hackers
share obsession and daring as as traits
that they have to have you have to be
obsessive you have to be daring you have
to be bold and you have to just not
click and the traits that you enumerated
persistence and so on fit that exactly
so so we are built not to be hackers and
that's why the hackers I've gotten to
know over many years are a niche smoking
to DEFCON 4 21 straight years now and I
often say that it's the home to which I
love to go the psychic home because it's
one of the only places that I can go
where you don't have to explain anything
where everybody gets where everybody
knows who we are and what it is we're
doing there a foam seemed to me an
appropriate image for the non-local
consciousness that exists in the
universe that is one of the sources of
the innovative and imaginative ideas
that simply seem to ping in in our minds
and that's why this little poster these
are available free downstairs if you
like them pick one up it's the cover of
the third volume of foam and to me the
the illustrator Duncan long captured my
stance before the universe and I think
some of yours we stand in awe and wonder
before the complexity of the universe
and in UFO lore which I don't want to
get into too much here
there are wonderful stories in UFO lore
and one of them is during an encounter a
person said he had with an alien being
and he said are you the watchman Bailey
and said are you the watchman over this
place to the policeman and he said yes
to it's the alien theoretically
responded watchman one day you will see
the universe now that is the way a
civilization that has been to so many
more places than we can dream or
imagined might communicate to us the
edge of wonder whether it's a true story
or not the edge of wonder that explores
our minds there are other sources of it
and I'm going to get the ad out of the
way what I was just talking to Nicole
about was the three books i'm showing
you our illustrations of how not only
the young but the old like myself can
continue to stay alive to the anomalies
that transform your understanding of
what's real and initiate the pursuit of
a different paradigm or model of reality
which subsequently comes to be mind
games his collection of short stories I
wrote and I returned the writing fiction
when I was working with people at NSA on
ethical issues after 911 we we had no
effectiveness whatsoever but we had
great conversations over three or four
years off-site about ways to implement
ethical constraints on some of the
things that were going down in the
intelligence community after after 911
and one of the one of the people a
deputy director of NSA said you know you
can't ever discuss Richard the things we
talked about here of course unless he
said well as you start writing fiction
fiction is not the only way you can tell
the truth and so since then I've written
35 short stories and a publisher chose
19 of them for collection of mind games
some are about hackers somewhere about
alien civilizations they're all about
anomalous situations that that we
encounter and I also done a talk at Def
Con called fiction is the only way you
can tell the truth in which i show how
the hyper real environment in which was
ever
ours discernment of the highest and most
subtle sort as we all know now post
Trump merely you know merely to
determine what it is is true and not
true last but not least this is a great
big book i'll show you how big it
thousand footnotes team of us five of us
worked on this for not five of us ten of
us worked on this for five years on top
of 50 years of research by people with
on earth more documents from the
government than you can imagine exist
barry greenwood his name is on there
currently has a collection of about
250,000 documents every footnote in this
book points to a government document
that we have unearthed over half a
century or two other primary sources so
there's nothing speculative in the book
and what we we illuminate with it is
simply how the government responded from
the 40s to the 80s to the anomalous
phenomena which it knew very much was
was real and how do you respond to a
phenomena that you know is real to
something anomalous well here's the way
general Nathan twining responded to in
1947 he said the phenomena is real it's
not visionary or fictional an
interactive of the size and operating
characteristics extreme rates of climb
maneuverability well particularly in
roll action which must considered
evasive when said it by friendly
aircraft and radar in other words
intelligent entities either remotely
robotically or presently believes the
possibility that they're controlled
manually automatically or remotely and
then you described what they look like
and how they fly in formation that's
what an open-minded human being does
with anomalies and Richard Fineman the
great physicist said that the important
thing in science is an anomaly that is
also a fact it has to be both it has to
be not illusory or fictitious it has to
be effect and it has to be anomalous
because if it challenges the model of
reality which you currently use to
understand what is happening around you
then if you pursue it as twining did and
as some others did before 1953
the CIA in the Air Force and Navy
adopted a different strategy to deal
with the phenomena which was to downplay
and ridicule and debunk which has been
very effective for many years and
continues to this day this is not
conspiracy theory we have in the go to
go to youtube and look at my talk on the
book UFOs a government and you'll see
the documentation for that we have the
documents but if you are open minded
then it leads to an entirely different
way of understanding what's real and of
course there's the possibility that one
of the subtext of the policies that were
enumerated in 1953 and then adopted was
so that reverse engineering as best we
could do it inference through inference
from the characteristics described by
general twining in 1947 might lead to
new breakthrough discoveries in
propulsion systems metal alloys material
science communications ie fiber optics
discrete forms of light which seemed
solid when they were integrated in a
different way something we understood
new things were possible on the simple
basis of what we observed was possible
but it was necessary to have a good
effective cover story to manage it
appropriately for a variety of national
security reasons which have persisted
through the years the FBI asked me to do
a talk on the book in order to
illuminate structures of cover and
deception and how effectively they can
be applied so this is not made up stuff
none of this is made up stuff so those
three books will be available of course
since I'm not being paid he said well
you can sell books that somebody wants
one and as an incentive if anybody buys
all three books the first person to do
so gets this def con 18 ninja badge kit
complete absolutely free as the Barkers
say i mean i will give you that as well
okay now now i'm going to try to talk
about two different domains in terms of
anomalies and how they challenges one is
the domain of scientific knowledge and
our understanding of what's real the
other is identity the other is identity
because you hear a lot about privacy and
I these days because it's being
challenged well it's not being
challenged is being totally wiped out
there is no such thing as privacy and
I'll say something more specific about
that in a few minutes I did a talk in
Victoria for the ministers of privacy
from Canada on called when privacy goes
poof why it's gone and never coming back
and the minister of privacy said one can
only hope that this challenging keynote
was of course wrong illustrating the
point i had made earlier in this in the
speech that Nietzsche said about new
ideas which is when something challenges
your understanding you feel fearful and
you will accept any explanation he said
which ameliorates the fear regardless of
its relevance to the truth but you will
call it the truth because you need to
have that ameliorating hypothesis to
recall the familiar and reinforce the
past rather than allow the facts of the
future pull you forward into the future
which the new anomaly that anomaly and
the new paradigm which it suggests and
which is going to be predicated upon it
suggests as possible so this is this is
about thinking that way and this is
serious stuff Alfred why North had said
major advances in civilization or
processes that all but wreck the
societies in which they occur this is
true of identity as well you see our
identities are being fundamentally
transformed first by the technical
revolution with which you are so
familiar but those of you who are young
don't live on the Terminator anymore
that you know the Terminator and the
moon was light in one side dark and the
other and where the light in the dark
hit you can see the mountains and the
rills and and the definition
but where it's white it's all whited out
and where it's dark it's all dark so
it's only when there's a transition from
one paradigm to another that we suddenly
can see clearly looking back what the
old paradigm used to be now in light of
in relation and related to what the new
paradigm is that is coming to be and
then when you are born into that new
paradigm it's simply reality it's what
you accept from the age of eight or ten
as the foundational reality on which you
build so much of your future life so
things that I heard as a child would
sound comical now my mother used to say
I'm going to make a long-distance call
because it was a very big deal to make a
long-distance call now there is no such
thing as a long-distance call there is
only a call but there's not even a call
anymore because it was only about 20
years ago I'd start doing this 23 years
ago that we spoke of what we called the
internet and young people now habituated
to and socialized by the new structures
of technology that pervade everything
don't speak of going on the internet
anymore than we speak of going on to the
phone system to make a long-distance
call or that we speak when we plug some
appliance into a socket of going on to
the grid we don't say when you plug in a
toaster I'm going onto the grid now
quiet well in the same way young people
do not say I'm going on to the internet
the Internet it's not that we change
paradigms the paradigm changes us
absorbs us in this case from a
hierarchical structure into a
distributed structure which means our
identity itself is like being a node in
a network where power is exercised
completely differently than in
hierarchical structures alone so young
people just get it the wonderful slides
we saw in the keynote maybe if I pound
on this long enough maybe if I do this
in the old days we had the first color
TV a first color TV on my block when I
was a kid my mother wanted in a raffle
it was about the size of a refrigerator
you know what refrigerator is right
it's I know it in the Internet of Things
is what it is and then it had a little
screen about 5 inch screen and I grew up
in an apartment building in Chicago and
Varian Sheridan 67 apartments there was
a whole community of kids and the first
you didn't have color TV all the time
you had like three programs a week and
when Sid Caesar show of shows was going
to be on in color we set up folding
chairs and all the kids in the building
came and SAT there and watched and as I
crouched it what we call tone and Hugh
these two dials that you use to get the
flesh looking less green and more pink
suddenly it flashed the yellow letters
of the show of shows and everybody burst
spontaneously into applause okay that's
how old I am that is how old I am so
these anomalies move from the edge to
the center they move from the edge to
the center what do I mean by that well
if you're in England in the late
seventeen hundreds a while ago and you
asked an Englishman a banker where is
the center of the world it's right here
the City of London the Bank of England
this is the center and you'd say where
where the outlying lands and said well
over there in the colonies you know
maybe Australia or the States or Canada
but he was wrong because the center had
already shifted to the edge the edge was
the colonies in the colonies with a new
center and that's what ushered in
subsequently the American Century today
new ideas new realities move from the
edge to the center faster and faster and
faster and so you have to be open you
have to build an openness to heresy into
your your very sacred paradigm because
heresy is the doorway or portal into the
new paradigm which is arriving faster
and faster as those anomalous facts move
from the edge to the center George
Bernard Shaw put it this way all great
truths begin as blasphemy so when you
believe a consensual reality you are
often going to be thought crazy I have
wonderful stories about how many times I
have been called crazy
and it turned out that I wasn't so crazy
after all when I first began writing
about the technical transformation of
society and religious structures
journals academic journals sent the
essays back and in the margins it said
he must be mad who does he think he is
this is nonsense the same journals
published at ten years later as cutting
edge bleeding edge because the
contextual understanding of who we were
and what was happening had so shifted
that now it began to make sense but at
first it didn't make sense so Robert
Galvin who founded who it was a big
mover at Motorola when it was in its
great hay day and doing extraordinary
breakthrough activities he was asked
what ideas were the real breakthrough
ideas that made the substantive
difference from time to time and
Motorola and he said every idea that was
a breakthrough idea began its journey as
a position of one person one person saw
it and they said it and no one else
heard it in other words it was as if you
said nothing at all it's as if I said
well you know I have had an encounter as
an extraterrestrial that's interesting
and what are you having for lunch it
goes by no one hears it but if it's
repeated again and again people hear it
but they laugh at it and reject it is
because it doesn't fit the model of
reality in which they live and move and
have their very being and so if it keeps
being repeated then you get angry at it
and then you reject it and try to
started oppose it and and try to attack
the person who's saying it and do
characters analysis of them in a
slanderous way and then it arrives as
you know at the last position which is
not only does everybody believe it but
everybody will insist that they've
always believed it all along he said the
corollary to that that a minority
opinion was the truth about every
breakthrough idea is it if they went
into a meeting and had a really
challenging perplexing problem presented
and everybody agreed on a solution it
was always wrong every time he said it
was always wrong and if you think about
how paradigms their models work
you can see why there would be if all of
you are living within the model or
paradigm of the past based on past
experience and the hypotheses and
consensual realities that have emerged
from it and a new ID and a challenge
comes in and you interpret it only in
light of the context of the past then
it's going to be wrong it's going to be
wrong because the new reality that you
can't see is already present in its
outlines and form so like that
Englishman who said this is the center
and missed the colonies if you ask
people not long ago how its moved so
fast in my own lifetime if you ask
people now long ago where is the center
of intellectual production where is the
center of economic production where is
the center of everything people would
say right here the earth the earth is
the center and already the earth is over
as a foundational reality of what's to
come we need new language to describe
the emergent properties of what we're
discovering space which sounds like
empty space isn't a good name for
everything besides us you know the
Greeks called barbarians everybody
wasn't a Greek and we call space
emptiness everything that isn't earth
but already we know in our primitive
ways that there are thousands of planets
and some of us suspect and and have even
been told that we know as a fact that
there are inhabited planets far beyond
ours and as I said if you think about
how the solar system evolved and how our
galaxy involved we're way out about
two-thirds the way out in the spiral arm
and other civilizations would have
evolved much earlier but if you can
think of where we were just 10,000 years
ago or a hundred years ago you take for
granted electric lights hundred fifty
years ago they didn't even exist that's
how new electricity and the wiring of
the grid has been for us so we're going
through a phase change of human identity
that one's free but actually they're all
free but that one's even more free we're
going through a phase change of human
identity mad blaze very brilliant guy
said the if he was talking about
security and he said the major problem
in security is the definition of the
problem and the definition the problem
is usually wrong the same is true for
identity the real problem in our
conversations about privacy and identity
is the definition of privacy and the
definition of identity and they're
generally wrong they're not who we have
already become but for which we do not
have the language to say clearly that we
are that what we think we are what we
can do therefore because how you hold
yourself as a possibility for action is
based on the reality which you believe
you inhabit and therefore is the
leverage your fulcrum which you will use
to try to manipulate the world the
scientific way we heard discussed in the
delightful keynote only by engaging
fully with the transformational
properties of technologies of
information communication and space
travel and robotics and biotech nanotech
in material science only then can we
begin to discover who we are and i was
told long ago that the amount of
information as a result of the
technological transformation of
information and communication the
production of knowledge was exceeding
the ability of anybody who ever however
expert they were in their domain of
mastering in other words nobody could
read everything being published in their
domain of expertise now that's not going
to be a situation that is going to be
tolerated very long and what is it
that's happening now just read for
example I got in the mail today the IBM
annual report and look at what they're
doing with Watson and what we are doing
not only at IBM and Watson but other
places with AI is developing systems of
AI not to take us over it and I
as a mother science fiction sort of way
but to parse information so fast that it
can then output new and innovative
solutions to problems we didn't even
know how to identify because we couldn't
see the patterns fast enough so
inevitably a response and emergent
property of human beings being unable to
think with mastery about their own
domains of expertise is now being
rebalanced by the evolution of AI which
gives us solutions to problems we hadn't
identified because the machines can read
thousands and thousands tens of
thousands of articles simultaneously and
look for patterns that suggest for
example as Watson did with a cancer cure
three different novel treatments that no
medical person had even been able to
formulate because they didn't think that
way see we need a new language to begin
to articulate what it is we're
experiencing grasp the nature of the
very context in which we live and this
is going to be a great divide this is
even greater divide than the economic
disparities between the rich and the
poor there are going to be the mentally
rich the mentally capable of hacking and
the poor who take refuge in consensual
realities that reassure them that the
past is the past and will always stay
this present and will be the future even
though drives us crazy to hear these
things articulated but you know you know
what people do they do choose as
Nietzsche said that which comforts them
and ameliorates fear and we instead have
to confront to fear fritz perls great
psychologist said excitement is anxiety
plus oxygen and watching hacker work or
being a hacker at work as you feel
yourself pumped up by the hint the
innovation that there's some new way to
approach this and it begins to emerge on
the edges of your thinking and then you
pursue it not knowing if it will work
like Edison said of every filament that
failed that's one I know now won't work
until he got to the hundredth filament
and we had light bulbs
hacking is is a absolute study an
aesthetic beauty to watch a human mind
locked in and in trance and one with the
machine or at least loving the machine I
have a DEFCON t-shirt that I love it
says in the back the woman is saying my
god I didn't know he was in love with a
machine and that was from a DEFCON long
ago so the weakest link in discussions
of security privacy identity is the
definition and the definition is not
what we think so this has created a
whole variety of new experiences I have
a son he's in his 40s now checking the
time he's in his 40s back when he was
graduating from Northwestern not far
away they announced the graduation they
major field of study of the people
coming up for their diploma and they
said all those in history and all those
literature and so on and then they said
we have one ad hoc major and everybody
laughed they laughed because ad hoc
major didn't make sense to them you had
two definite well defined category of
domain of understand excuse me yes we're
an office on they thought history was
history and that's all it was and math
was math and that's all it was but when
my son had done was take a look at the
things he loved to do I got him an apple
to when he was 12 and he opened it and
started programming and he never looked
back he'd combined studies from a math
and cognitive psych and philosophy and
AI and computer science and he
integrated them into a major he called
symbolic system studies which is now
major he was a prototype of what was
inevitably to come in other words as the
boundaries around not only countries and
nation states and individual entities go
down and become porous and amorphous but
the boundaries around everything are
going down including the
maine's of knowledge and understanding
and what he discovered was that only in
a cross-disciplinary way can I begin to
understand what these different areas of
expertise contribute to a new area of
expertise that is emerging in other
words originality again going back to
Nietzsche what is it to see something
that has no name is yet and hence cannot
be mentioned although it stares us in
the face the way human beings are it
takes a name to make something visible
those with originality have for the most
part been those who have also assigned
new names and then people get a hold of
the name is if they have a handle on
something real and then it becomes part
of their paradigm and we move forward
for example when in the 1920s after
world war one had demonstrated the power
of air power we begin flying here and
there and we were delivering mail by the
government and periodically people would
hop on the plane and ride with mail and
they were daring souls in this new
technology and they they call them era
knots Aaron aughts and the government
decided they needed more Aaron ought to
ride on planes and pay for it to defray
the cost to flying those expensive
machines from one place to another but
they needed a new name they couldn't
call them Aaron aughts but we have
astronauts right but most of us don't
think of ourselves yet as capable of
being an astronaut and going to space in
the same way most human beings in 1920s
couldn't think of themselves as writing
airplanes so they needed to give it a
name that people could recognize and put
themselves into that name and then take
it back as part of their identity and so
what was the name they changed Aaron
ought to anyone airplane passenger they
said let's call them passengers and how
many people are airplane passengers
everybody but the name is what made it
available so this is becoming a
phenomenon that's happening faster and
faster
new names need to be assigned in a
meaningful way that integrates with
enough of our other knowledge to be able
to be in across this one airy way
understood in a way that gives his power
night in 2004 the first president of MIT
who was not just a woman but had a
background in biology was hired as
president of MIT first time it wasn't an
engineer she gave a wonderful address
that's now over decade old on
cross-disciplinary learning and why it
was essential and necessary for all
students to mastered that discipline
more than any other and the fact that
she came from bio should have been a
signal that the technology of
information communication was now a
platform on which these other domains
were resting and also accelerating the
speed at which they worked and that's
why I start doing talk some years ago on
biohacking and did talk to people at CIA
who were doing extraordinary innovative
and sometimes scary things with
neuroscience because biohacking is the
name of the game hacking our identity
from the inside out and I don't have to
go into that another talk online that
I've done about that but you know what i
mean what crisper a wonderful new
technology enables us to deal with gene
manipulation that is going to enable us
to do all sorts of things so in this
country we have constraints ethical and
legal to prevent us from doing certain
kinds of studies in other parts of the
world they don't they don't so
everything that can be can be done is
going to be done give you an example
there are people not talking about head
transplants that's one monkey giving a
head to another what they mean it they
mean it now here is a mouse white mouse
Whitehead and here is what it looked
like after the head transplant it's real
picture real mouse which is the mouse
the head or the body now we have
advanced so much that we were able to
discern what you would call Mouse
thoughts I mean the neurological pattern
in the brain of this head when it
discovered it's
Elf on a new body would you like to see
what we found out this is what it was
thinking right okay so all right that's
not that's the only non true story in
the speech but it's but it's it's what a
lot of us are thinking a lot of the time
as a result of finding ourselves with
our head processing information that
seems to be coming from a different body
and that's why the proper attitude is
awe and Wonder rather than fear and
shrinking change causes fear because is
rigidity it causes isolation and it's
interesting to me over a lifetime to
notice that the antidotes to fear and
rigidity and isolation our mutuality
feedback and accountability and as I
start working with businesses 20 years
ago in a different way I realized that
every successful organizational
structure has all three things built-in
mutuality cooperative learning
structures accountability to agreed-upon
goals and envisions and a fluidity and
interactivity that is based on feedback
inside the system parts two parts and to
the other parts outside the system and
when you look at the human being you
realize we've we've always known we
ourselves in a body as I was suggesting
at the start but we emphasize the cell
pneus our individuality now we emphasize
body pneus we know we are part of a hole
in which information energy moves always
transforming the system once the systems
connect with other systems and the
ability to see that at the highest level
of abstraction is where your power lies
and what you are enabled to do with it
by virtue of your insight let me let me
give you some examples about that this
because this race to identity and
privacy you probably know that the
concept of privacy is a relatively late
comer on the human cultural scene back
in the day that is in 1400 when you
lived all winter with your animals in a
castle
which smelled really bad by the time
spring came here's a little thing a lot
of people don't know do you know why we
have June weddings seriously because
that's when the flowers were
insufficient bloom to cover the stench
of the people getting married and all
the attendant people with the wedding
you live with a cow at a donkey and a
horse inside one room for a winner and
see how you smell all right so but
that's not what I was talking about a
second about privacy is a new thing you
didn't have any privacy there it wasn't
even a thought that I need my own room
you know like an American child feels
like it it was going to call the social
worker right if you abuse it by not
letting it have the internet all the
time and I remember when my daughter
typical North Shore Milwaukee child
header own bedroom is filled with
appliances and appurtenances and lotions
potions and creams I mean God every
everything and she said the one thing
she wanted was a microwave so she could
cook for herself and leave the dishes
outside the door for us to take care of
so she would never have to come out and
interact with such a horrible family
those of you have teenagers recognize
the phase it passes but that's that's
the way it was okay so ended
individuality was not a new thing was a
new thing as the changes began to take
place in society and the major engine of
those changes was the printing press the
printing press was the transformational
engine of the day back in the 1400s late
1400s the same way what we call the
internet has been digital technologies
have been the transformation of our own
damn running through this to try to find
something I can quote accurately the
printing press was the foundation of the
Reformation the Scientific Revolution
religious transformation transformation
of knowledge transformation of nation
states in two entities with large enough
boundary around them to organize the
complexity
solving from the speed of the flow of
information into and out of and through
the system so you got that the boundary
you need around an organizational
structure or any entity has to be one
that is graspable and which manages the
complexity reached by the speed of the
flow of information into and out of that
system well simultaneously with the
emergence of the printing press came
things like rights there was no such
thing as intellectual property or
intellectual property rights there was
no such thing as human rights and there
was no such thing civil rights until
much later individuals were discovered
to have them but I want to stop for a
moment and look at the word individual
how many of you see the Shakespeare play
recently anybody here at figures okay
okay well shit how many of you know this
back up how many of you know Shakespeare
was okay that's good well I once
referred to hell in a speech at Def Con
and one of the youngsters came up and
said who is hell thinking everybody knew
the robotic hell and now long ago at
o'reilly security conference in New York
in the fall I caught a Chinatown one of
my favorite movies it's Chinatown Jake
it's Chinatown and one of the important
people putting on the conference said
you know most of those people has never
seen that movie well I love it she said
but a lot of people don't know what that
means and then you think yeah that was
the 70s that was many many decades ago
and a lot of people don't know the 70s
was the Golden Age of of real good
Hollywood films but that's a whole other
story why bring up Shakespeare because
there's about twenty five percent of the
words if you do go to a Shakespeare play
you think you will understand
Elizabethan English this is not Chaucer
in Middle English this is not bale
wolves and Old English this is
Elizabethan English and you think you
understand it pretty well but about
twenty-five percent of the words do not
mean what you think they mean their
meanings have changed language is fluid
and dynamic and and organic
and Shakespeare used the word individual
but what he meant by it was indivisible
it was a describing word of equality of
indivisibility of unitary pneus of unity
upon the part of an object or attribute
it wasn't for another couple of hundred
years using the OED to trace the meaning
of the word in a word study that we
discovered that the word individual
meant a human being an individual as we
think of ourselves as individuals in a
political and moral structure which
requires that individual to have a
status that's ontological that is real
that is very very recent and rights
accrued to individuals and only an
individual could have privacy which was
a boundary around the information being
radiated by the life of the human being
well obviously if you think about what
hacking has done what computers have
done what the digital world has done is
an individual in that sense no longer
exists in that way why is an ad-hoc
major replacing that domain why is trans
national economic and political power
replacing nation-states as the source of
power and influence in all of our lives
because the boundary around those
definitions of identity has morphed and
it no longer means what it means we are
corporate structures we ourselves in a
body but we feel the cell pneus in the
body pneus more than ever because we're
aware of all the systems as a body
hormones the biome which has more DNA in
it many of you know than our DNA and
therefore has more of a profound effect
on our health and well-being we are
we're just discovering then than we ever
knew so I talked about the level of
abstraction what is beta analytics what
is it but the extraction of points of
data from behave
entities including human beings and then
the integration of those points of data
in patterns of understanding which
previously did not exist and which the
individual entity radiating them did not
know existed and does not know existed
so those who study us at the level of
meta knowledge and metadata know us
better than we know ourselves now this
is something that has come to be as an
axiomatic truth about marketing and
advertising and political work and so on
that those who managed metadata in such
a way as to understand what our choices
have meant know us better and can
predict us better than we know ourselves
and can predict our own our own
behaviors so when they first start doing
this using just cellphones at Harvard
they discovered that you can tell when
two people were having a political
conversation on the basis of the pattern
of the relationship is as evidenced by
their communication not the content of
the communication mainu when people were
getting sick when epidemic was going
through the campus before anybody knew
they were sick or felt the symptoms
themselves the behavior was reflected in
the points of data which as one said
doing those studies they're not human
beings to us there are little dots on a
screen that move around and occasionally
touch one another so when you're looking
at that level of abstraction you see
that real identity based on the level of
distraction which you can see is another
one of these great gulf jumping points
because people who live here as if we
are who we thought we were in the 20th
century don't get that they're not and
they don't get that privacy of course is
over because the definition of privacy
itself has been torn asunder it can't
exist when we buy our participation in a
society that such as ours radiate data
points all the time which are captured
and now thanks to the executive decision
of the new regime it can be sold and
bought and sold and
gated and even more sophisticated and
clever in economically feasible ways for
the rich the level of abstraction
determines your identity really not just
theoretically but really and this may
sound abstract to some but not to people
who do analytics or who analyze metadata
so is privacy a human right well if
there was such a thing as a human right
it might be but the definition of Rights
is going down to boundaries have gone
down in meaningful ways you can speak
about the nation-state of America when I
do this talk in Canada you can speak
about the nation-state of Canada but you
cannot describe the economics or social
structures or entertainment media worlds
which frame the mind of American society
or the cognitive artifact called America
in which we live as if it can be
distinguished from those of the rest of
the world information transiting all
borders disappears the borders so
non-local consciousness is what we have
to confront as a metaphorical and
theoretical model for understanding what
the transit of information everywhere
and always that never quits is doing to
who we think we are an elementary
particle said a physicist Henry Pierce
Jeff is not an independently existing
and unanalyzable entity it is in essence
a set of relationships that reach out
and to other things I talked to Edgar
Mitchell before he died his power 14
astronaut walked on the moon he had a
life-changing experience coming back
from the moon he said for three days he
was in and out and in and out and in and
out of an altered state and when he was
in what he suddenly saw was the unity of
all things that everything was connected
to everything else including us of
course and that the illusory self was
just that an illusion as so many
religions have claimed and we are
not separate from one another we are
inseparable parts of a single universe
which has consciousness as its
structural foundation prior to and post
to a limited individual existence for
three days he went in and out of that
state he came back and he said my life
will never be the same again and he
spent the rest of his life trying to
communicate the people what he had seen
what he'd experienced what he had felt
coming back from the moon he's a
wonderful guy he came to conclusion that
the amazing thing is not that we see
ourselves periodically that way as
interrelated in that deep and
foundational way but that we ever see
ourselves as separate that we have
evolved so as to think of ourselves as
separate oh my god the girl says in the
back of the t-shirt he is in love with a
machine a hacker who fuses symbiotically
with the machine which becomes an
essential aspect of themselves is more
than in love with the machine there in a
symbiotic relationship with a cot not
conscious but intelligent entity that is
fueling and feeding their ability to go
farther and surpass all those who cannot
engage with the machine give you a
trivial example years ago I was writing
about this stuff wait way back a late
80s Early 90s and Wired magazine came
along and I proposed an article for them
in the early days I like where the
internet was going to lead society and
they took I guess it was a five thousand
word article they used 500 being wired
but that was good and I said can I use
these other 4500 words anywhere I'd said
yeah write another article or use them
any way you want now this is the thing I
used to teach English literature back in
my 20s they're cutting this literature
at the University of Illinois so I kind
of knew how text works and the world in
which you wrote stories and sent them
out and wrote articles and synth amount
was defined by text in other words there
was a book called writers market and it
contained North American markets and
literally that was the paradigm remodel
you could not but
live in because there was no other model
and here i am using text in that old
paradigm writing for Wired about where
the internet is going to lead people and
I'm thinking where can I send the rest
of these words to publish them so if
there was nothing like wired anywhere in
America and that's when the light bulb
went on thank God for light bulbs and I
said to myself duh don't just write
about the internet use the internet that
was brand-new then my website was one of
the ones USA Today called a website of
the week that's how few there were they
picked five a week to to spotlight and
so I got on the internet and found
magazines in England in south africa in
australia and canada and began writing
for those places all over the world and
suddenly by engaging with the technology
itself is my point i was shown that
which I could not see inside the old
paradigm because we can't and once I
could be drawn by the new paradigm into
it by having the courage and will to
engage with it then I became a global
figure it's not a hotshot thing
everybody these days is a global figure
I was just early and once your global
figure I began writing a column code
islands in the clickstream and it was
going to 60 countries in a couple years
into a lot of subscribers and suddenly
that created a platform of credibility
on which the speaking career could be
based if I had not been willing to use
the internet to expand my horizons
dramatically in the way that only the
technology itself could disclose then
that never would have happened so when
we have the courage to hack our bodies
or hack our minds or heck the economic
structure we are allowing ourselves to
be drawn it into a new paradigm once
upon a time I'd used to be let's see
what time it is I'm almost done i'll
make this a concluding story because
it's like many things it can conclude
ostensibly i used to be an Episcopal
clergyman that was a long time
gar was in the ministry for 16 years
loved it learned a lot was taught a lot
and I was invited to participate in a
hotshot conference called new paradigms
for clergy leadership was three-year
conference and they brought us together
for 10 days brought in Silicon Valley
people to talk about all the things they
were doing so that we could adapt those
structures for the paradigms the
Episcopal Church and rethink it so we're
going to come up with new paradigms
what's the people in that room were
white males most of them were in their
40s 50s typically you know and they were
sitting there second year buzzing about
how can we change the paradigm when a
light bulb went on and I said I just
realized what we have to do to change
the paradigm and they said what and I
said we have to leave look at real quiet
and then about 10 seconds later
everybody began talking again as if I
had never said anything and it took a
woman to come up at the break a woman
was a staff a staff be a woman to sit
there on the edge and watch what was
happening and say when you speak from
that depth of reality they cannot hear
you but I could not ever forget what I
heard myself say I had to prepare it
properly so that I left in the way I
wanted to but for 23 and a half years
after leading the ordained ministry
instead of taking the hotshot jobs they
were offering I've been able to explore
this world the way that never would have
been possible that I stayed within that
paradigm instead I've transcended the
structures well I don't need to go to
religious talk leaving the old paradigm
instantiates the new paradigm because
what I saw was that the hotshot leaders
were Gorbachev they were trying to both
preserve the revolution and lead a
revolution and you can't do both and
there was no way having reached
leadership positions in the church or
any organization that you cannot have
not internalized the structures by which
you have reached those levels and you
have become that as Timothy Leary said
you never get the truth from the company
memo never your invasion of the body
snatchers you open your mouth and people
think
to you but it's wah wah wah wah you are
articulating the organizational cultures
point if you're not your own and so
leaving the old paradigm with the
courage to know that you don't know what
the new paradigm is going to bring is
what a hacker does all the time it's
what a good hacker does it's really what
your kids are about which is great and
it's what this conference is about and
on that note I will say I do I have time
for one question or two and I'll be
downstairs with these magnificent books
discounted at an incredible rate but if
you oh how much the mind games is 20
instead of 30 the foam is in three
volumes or one is 25 instead of 30 the
UFO today's a UFO in government I have
to sell for what the publish requires 34
paperback 35 for hard and they're all
available of course in digital form much
cheaper in the race to the bottom of
pricing right so any questions prefer
cash any questions no questions all
right some of you saw that I'll just
tell you what it's from 1952 Washington
Post it's just another way the paradigm
is managed and it's fun to explore this
that's what the book is about there was
an episode over Washington DC where
there were so many UFOs over the Capitol
in the White House over two weekends and
so many jets scrambled from three nearby
air bases and so many headlines like
this across the country because it was
still treated as news which was part of
the paradigm of distributing truth in
those days and they decided soon the
agency and the Air Force and so on said
we can't have this we need to manage
this and the policies were instantiated
because it was so so harming so
concerning and above all because the
Soviets could manipulate the phenomenon
in several different ways to our
detriment in terms of national security
concerns that were genuine and real but
there were headlines like this we have
thousands of articles thousands of
headline
before the subject was so successfully
dabangg using media and entertainment
above all to show that only idiots were
interested in something as crazy as this
from the edge to the center from the
edge to the center that's what this
century is going to bring the awareness
that we are not alone everybody knows
that but you're going to know that you
know it and that's going to make all the
difference okay thank you