Due to a few people requesting this during Defcon, I'm posting up a full writeup of my talk from Skytalk from Defcon this year. The talk itself was truncated due to time constraints, so this version is expanded to accommodate all the material I didn't get to cover during the actual live talk.

For your further consideration, I present:

When the Going Gets Weird, The Weird Turn Pro

In the 1970's, there was one man whose name was tied to the myth of Las Vegas, not the bright lights, big dreams, glamour and glitz Vegas, the Vegas-as-beacon-of-our-weirdness Vegas. That man was Hunter S. Thompson, a man who saw into our dark, weird hearts and saw that the only way to escape our fate in this weird world we had created, was to embrace it whole-heartedly.

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

But what of that word.. weird ? we use that word plentifully and fancy-free in the modern day, but that word, I do not think it means what you think it means...

Wyrd is an Old-English word, you encountered it in it's true meaning in Shakespeare's *cough*The Scottish Play*cough*. From the Oxford English Dictionary (the only real Dictionary, thank you very much, *ahem*).

Weird: (Noun): the principle, power, or agency by which events are predetermined; fate, destiny
Weird: (Adjective): having the power to control the fate of human beings

Who here was a weird kid ?

One Kids' Descent Into weirdness

I was a weird kid; today I'm a weird adult. If any of you have seen one of Richard Thieme's talks, I hope you will find parallels to his work, and differences; one difference today is that I have more of a hangover...

But like Richard, I came into this society from the viewpoint of a deliberate outsider. When I first discovered the computer underground, I had been a computer enthusiast for almost a decade; as an engineering and electronics nerd however, they were just another tool to me. I grew up around other intellectually-driven kids, luckily enough, but they never struck me as the kind of people I wanted to be. I was the weird kid, and they just weren't weird enough for me... then I discovered the computer underground....

..and suddenly, computers were not just a tool, but a medium

Of course, I was an outsider at this time, an observer, I wrote articles for the school newspaper, and indie music `zines, but very quickly, like the anthropologist who goes to a field trip to live with the tribe, then goes native and never returns; I had found my people, the other weird kids

Twenty years later, I'm still trying to hold on to some of that external viewpoint I first came in with, it's fading with time though; y'all don't seem that weird to me now.

You see, growing up with other intellectual kids, they were never that weird; they were smart, for sure, but they always seemed to have plans that gelled with the dictates of the world around them. No kid should be planning their first doctorate when they're age 15.

But I found smart people in other areas too, people with intelligence unchained by standards of 'normality' (and often unchained by standards of 'sanity' as well), the music-fiend world was full of folks with smart (but mostly off-the-wall) ideas and opinions on things. These folks were no science majors, but within the scope of their world as they say it, they held dominion over the weird. Far from the beaten path of what was considered 'normal' and 'intelligent', I found people with insight, control, and self-awareness. Later on, thanks to Robert Anton Wilson, I would realize that these people were 'Lords of their own Reality Tunnel'

And so, in time, my world expanded from being a very weird kid, in a tiny milling town in the North of England, through being the cocreator and leader of a computer underground demoscene group that spanned members across Europe... and I set myself down a path that, in hindsight, would I have talked myself into doing something more...normal? less...weird?

When I was a child, I wanted to be James Bond when I grew up. Then I grew up, and realized I didn't want no stinking gov'mint job. And yet here I am, 20 years later, a salaried participant in a global 'Code War'.

The more I try to fit in and appear normal, the weirder people think I am.

A History Of Weirdness

We are the Weird Kids.

Some of us are now in our 30's, our 40's, our 50's.. some of us are already dead.

But we all have something in common, an attraction to all things that produce cognitive dissonance... that weird factor that engages that part of the brain that only the truly weird seem to possess. We are attracted to the things that should not be and more so, attracted to creating those things too.

If they give you ruled paper...write the other way
...Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

And we, the hackers, as our own little subcultural subspecies, *LOVE* these moment of cognitive dissonance, this is our meat and potatoes: to discover these moments, and create them in others.

Expect...the unexpected

A long time ago, I formulated my own variety of the 'hacker vs cracker' argument: for me it was:

A Cracker does something that should not be possible, yet is possible. A hacker does something that should be possible, yet is not

Cognitive Dissonance....

One of the first stories I learned from the rich history of our people, that even today still embodies that idea of how we search out cognitive dissonance to fire up our neurons, is the story of the 'More Magic' switch. The More Magic Story Goes Like This:


A computer scientist encounters a computer with a switch attached; not just any switch, mind you, but a switch with only one wire attached. Now as anyone with elementary electronics will tell you.. there is no such thing as a working switch, with only one wire; there's no circuit there; no circuit, no activity.



So watch what happens. The switch has two labels attached, for its two positions. "magic" and "more magic".



The switch is currently in the "more magic" setting. he flips it to the 'magic' setting. The System crashes. Well, that's interesting, a little cognitively dissonant perhaps.. the switch only has one wire.after all, it's not a complete circuit. It's just a little example of perceived synchronicity. he reboots the machine...



The machine comes back up..his curiosity still burns however. The switch-that-should-do-nothing is back in the 'more magic' position. It haunts him.. like a thing-that-should-not-be, pretending to be a thing-that-should-not-be.



He flips the switch back down to the 'magic' setting again, to prove it does nothing.....and the computer crashes.


Well, the story here is simple, one of those wonderful examples of the edge cases of electronic tolerances, potential energy across various grounding sources and the interruption of computational clock patterns in the transference.With enough analysis, the thing-that-should-not-be can be explained away; but without that first , full-frontal attack of the weird why would he have ever put the effort in? And let's not forget, there's still that person that discovered that weirdness, that cognitive dissonance in a discovered effect that he had to set up for someone else to discover... weird is as weird does..

People called us the weird kids because they didn't understand us, but we're the weird kids because we love chasing down the things that defy understanding.

The Mechanics of Weirdness

So if weirdness is really that valuable, we should have a better handle on it...in an ideal world, we should be able to measure it. Well of course, by definition, this is most likely impossible, weirdness exists in the edge cases, the scenarios that do no fit the Standard Model. We like living in this space purely, I think, because we are free from the a-priorri assumptions of what is possible. As I said earlier, I helped create and manage a Demo Scene group on the Commodore Amiga platform; one of the unifying aspects of that scene was that we were doing,by admission of the creators of that platform, things that the creators of the hardware thought were impossible to achieve.

And we've never been alone, there's always been that thread of the weird people in society; before computers there was the original Trenchcoat brigade, the early science fiction fans, then the Discordians, The Church of the Subgenius, the original Roleplaying Game nerds; I could spend this entire talk introducing you to the friends you've not met yet; but that's your job.

But one person *did* attempt to categorize, formulate and mechanize weirdness, or as he called it, Novelty. His name was Terrance McKenna, he died in 2000, I'd like to introduce you to some of his ideas now. I'll preface this all by stating strongly that I do not believe any of this, but I do find it absolutely fascinating.

Terrance McKenna was an anthropologist, his brother Derek is a botanist, and about three decades ago they came across a rather amusing set of cross-disciple theories between themselves. Y'see, to cut a very long talk short, these two brothers, by way of a few psychedelic experiences involving various naturally occurring psychedelic compounds beyond what's common in modern day america, came up with a hypothesis of early human development of the conscious mind, they dubbed the 'stoned ape', but y'all have to read about that one on your own, for the time being, we're going to look at their attempts to mathematically plot 'weirdness' in the scope of the whole human race.

So once again, to cut a long story short, Terrance spent a little bit of time with the King Wen sequence of the I Ching (the Chinese "book of changes*) and with the help of a real mathemetician, figured out a fractal transform that he dubbed 'Timewave Zero'.

So what's TimeWave Zero, and what's 'novelty' ? Tough call to describe in a short time, but here we go: Novelty, essentially, is a measure of the interconnectedness of things, and the level of deviation from the predictable path of what has been set. Fancy words aside, 'Novelty' is the measure of weird shit in the world.

Now, if we'd managed to get ourselves set up early enough today, to where our A/V setup was seamless and working, I'd be kicking into a retro-tastic DOSbox demo of a software app that allows you to explore this particular mathematical function, as it stands, you'll just have to take my word for it.

So Timewave Zero is an attempt to model and predict global shift in novelty across time, using a fractal transform that, like all fractals, demonstrates the same patterns in the macro as it does in the micro; drawn from an interpretation of the I Ching, the Chinese 'book of changes' (for those of you familiar with Chinese Hexagrams, we're talking about the same thing here).Now, increase in novelty is a representation off the increase of interconnected of ideas, a diversion from predictable patterns or as Robert Anton Wilson famously said "When it is Steam Engine Time, it Steam Engines!".

So the graph of the transform starts out in long broad strokes, and get more complex the closer to the present day we get, yet since we're running on his fractal transform, macro structures exist as micro structures. For those of you getting old enough to start realizing how history repeats itself, and the cycles of time keep coming faster and faster, in shorter and shorter loop, here's someone who attempted to give you pseudomathematical proof of this; according to timewave zero, we all experience the height of the Egyptian Empire shortly before waking, the diaspora of the fall of the Roman Empire shortly after breakfast.

Now here's the point where I emphatically state that I do not believe this, but I find it fascinating:

So the TimeWave Zero graph matches up nicely with several major events in human history, events where the expected nature of things has been thrown to the wayside, and people find themselves connected in new and unexpected ways. What is notable about the graph in the initial iteration, is that as the function of the wave moves down the Y axis of the graph, novelty increases, more specifically, large descents on the Y Axis represent world-changing traversals, events, of novelty. You're all familiar with the idea of the year 2012 being the next 'end of the world' stage of things, TimeWave Zero has an interesting corrolary, because on TimeWave Zero's plot point on December 21, 2012, the function's Y axis mapping takes an infinite plunge toward minus infinity. There is no further motion on the X axis. Novelty approaches infinity.

And, for what it's worth, there's a pretty large drop in the Y-Axis (a spike in novelty) right during the weekend of Defcon... an increase in the interconnectedness of people, a deviation from the predictable pattern of things.. I'm sure y'all will have fun with that

[Editor's note: The riots in the United Kingdom and the media frenzy over them, started a day after I gave this talk...right on the mark on Timewave Zero where the graph drops.. again.. I don't believe in it, I do find the human ability to find patterns, fascinating]

Our Weird Future

When we were young, and the world was young (to us at least), we had to be the agents of weird in the world. Then the world got older, and discovered its own weird.. weird we did not create.. the older we get, the more work it takes to be weird, it seems.. we started out as the weird kids, now we're fighting to stay ahead of the curve...

It would be easy to slow down, let the flow take us over, yet I don't think a single one of us feels that responsibility and linear thinking is helping any of us, least of all ourselves...perhaps after the fact, to box and categorize.

You ever feel like this business is just getting too dangerous for those of us that got into this, not because it mattered, but because it *MATTERED* to us? hell, some days I feel like the only career option I could go into that would be more dangerous than this is Stand-Up-Comedian.

You know, I've seen SNEAKERS, about a Hundred and Sixty-Seven times, AND IT KEEPS GETTING FUNNIER *EVERY SINGLE TIME I SEE IT?!*

And the world *is* dangerous for us weird kids now; we ran the 'be careful what you wish for' game and rolled snakeeyes, infosec really is important now, everyone takes it terribly seriously, in all the wrong ways. Have you noticed now that all the classic cyberpunk fiction authors have stopped writing cyberpunk now? There's no need for them to any more, that world arrived; when William Gibson started on his latest cyberpunk trilogy earlier this last decade, he actually set it in the past, Pattern Recognition was set two years before the publication date. This world is getting damn weird, I grew up with the rise of the home computer and the information revolution, I'm part of the last generation that will remember life before ubiquitous internet access, I've been a tech and science nerd my whole life, welcoming the oncoming world with each new advance we take, yet even I get futureshock from time to time; as things accelerate, things just keep getting weirder, it's getting to where it's taking some serious effort to stay ahead of the weirdness curve now.

But stay ahead we must, for as the world gets weirder, it's going to take the folks like us, with our brains that actively seek out and engage with the weird, to be able to really deal with it and guide people through it, if geeks have a superpower, then it must be our ability to take weirdness in our stride and run with it. There's plenty of people out there with a wonderful knack for unwittingly creating cognitive dissonance, doing things and creating laws that defy all rhyme or reason; we're the people with the brains adapted for grasping onto these things, deconstructing and reconstructing them into something sane.

A great example, is the show 'THE MIDDLE MAN', it got one season, a few years ago on ABC Kids; based on a comic book (of course!) the show set it's tone in the opening scene of the first episode, wherein a normal day at the office is disrupted by the arrival of a green, death-spewing tentacle monster. The Middle Man soon arrives to put things right, with the assistance of the one bystander to retain her sanity. He commends her afterward, pointing out that she kept her sanity and acted directly, when everyone else was losing their mind in the face of an entity that presented a direct denial of everything they took to be their reality. She points out that 'she reads a lot of comic book', and the Middleman, impressed with her brain's superpowered ability to deal with the weird, recruits her on the spot.

And we really are a weird bunch, what we do for a living is plain weird, in all senses of that word. Have any of you out there who write code, considered that what we're doing there fits the model of classical, Hermetic magick perfectly? That we have an idea, and we will something into being through thought and work, that then lives and acts outside of the attention of our own mind. Ever wondered why we call Unix experts 'Wizards' and 'Gurus', or why unix service processes are called 'Daemons', and why we 'BIND' human names to the true names of IP addresses? It's not accidental, none of it is.

So what's the future for us? well, as I said, the world seems to be getting weirder, it's tough to stay ahead of the curve. We're going to have to really work on this one, and that means doing things that fall outside our weirdness comfort zone, start doing things that are weird to us. We have to keep pursuing the weird, the edge cases, because that's where we find new things; for some of us, that's meant putting on a suit, hanging out with the business people and seeing what we can learn from them, and bring back to infosec. It's weird to us, but we've got to realize, that these guys aren't dumb, they just live in a different reality tunnel from us, and there's stuff we can learn from them by getting out there, embracing what's weird to us and looking at the world through their eyes.

Or as I always like to say you should never judge a man until you've walked a mile in his shoes, because by then, you're a mile away and you have his shoes

We were weird kids because we had such a wide range of unusual interests, we've got to keep that old habit up if we're going to survive and find new answers in the combinations of fields of knowledge and the spaces between.

Who knows? perhaps some of you are the future weird business leaders of tomorrow; the world has a few warped geniuses in power already, why not a few more of us? Now is a better time than ever for the weird to turn pro.

So get out there and get crazy, look for ideas in all the wrong places,

God knows they need us weirdos in return. I still laugh about the time I had to help with a forensic investigation of an employee's hard drive; the lead investigator (a former insurance fraud investigator turned internal corporate cop), had to turn to me and ask sheepishly "What's Hentai".

You never know when all their weirdness is gonna come in useful to other people....

So run with the insane world we have, just remember that it only looks crazier to you than it does to other people because you've got a brain wired for dismantling and coping with the insanity of it all, and your wyrdness is your best survival trait for dealing with it all and maintaining some level of power over it. Learn to harness the beast from within its mouth of madnass.

Hell, if you can't do that, at least you can go write compliance measures [Breathing and snorting in the microphone, in the style of Bill Hicks]

Thanks everyone, Welcome to Defcon, Welcome Home.