1 00:00:12,640 --> 00:00:17,320 Well, good afternoon and welcome to another one of our security seminars. 2 00:00:17,740 --> 00:00:21,600 Our speaker today is difficult to introduce. 3 00:00:21,680 --> 00:00:25,100 I've known him for years, I've read many of the things he's done. 4 00:00:25,500 --> 00:00:30,000 And he's actually written and spoken about so many different topics. 5 00:00:30,560 --> 00:00:42,840 Sort of the state of computing and human consciousness, religion, the changing impact of technology on society and a number of other areas that are absolutely fascinating. 6 00:00:42,840 --> 00:00:50,480 And he also brings this to bear on how security and privacy are being changed by the things we do. 7 00:00:50,620 --> 00:01:00,640 So we have a title for the talk, Security, Soft Boundaries, and Oh-So-Subtle Strategies, which may or may not have bearing on the content of the talk. 8 00:01:02,040 --> 00:01:04,920 Without further ado, I'd like to introduce my friend Richard Thieme. 9 00:01:04,920 --> 00:01:05,860 Thank you, Richard. 10 00:01:05,860 --> 00:01:07,040 Thank you very much. 11 00:01:08,760 --> 00:01:13,100 I'm going to move out from here just because that feels like a huge barrier. 12 00:01:13,100 --> 00:01:17,240 I'll go back to it to pick up some things from time to time. 13 00:01:17,240 --> 00:01:19,440 So forgive me for carrying notes. 14 00:01:20,480 --> 00:01:22,060 It's great to be here. 15 00:01:22,200 --> 00:01:29,720 And I'm going to tell you a little bit of my story too in the course of this conversation because it's relevant to what we're talking about. 16 00:01:30,300 --> 00:01:33,160 I started life in English literature. 17 00:01:33,160 --> 00:01:37,380 I taught literature at the University of Illinois in my 20s. 18 00:01:37,380 --> 00:01:38,720 I went back to school. 19 00:01:38,720 --> 00:01:40,380 Some people can't help it. 20 00:01:40,660 --> 00:01:43,560 And keep going back and did a Masters of Divinity. 21 00:01:43,560 --> 00:01:44,820 Became an Episcopal priest. 22 00:01:44,820 --> 00:01:46,580 I did that for 16 years. 23 00:01:46,880 --> 00:01:50,500 And I bought my son an apple too when he was 12 years old. 24 00:01:50,500 --> 00:01:52,400 And we started playing with the apple. 25 00:01:52,900 --> 00:02:16,980 And because I knew how literature worked, and I knew how text worked, in a book, in the technology of book, and I knew how people interacted with the book, and then how in the ministry you use the technology of the word as mediated through the printing press to create community and create structures of social and cultural and emotional feeling for people in which they lived unconsciously, 26 00:02:16,980 --> 00:02:18,820 not noticing that they were in them. 27 00:02:18,980 --> 00:02:25,140 So that when I interacted with that apple too, playing a text adventure game, I mean, you guys are all into graphic games, right? 28 00:02:25,160 --> 00:02:34,720 But in the golden day, Infocom created text adventure games of which probably the greatest is Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. 29 00:02:34,720 --> 00:02:36,020 Any of you played that? 30 00:02:36,160 --> 00:02:37,260 Thank you. 31 00:02:37,680 --> 00:02:44,480 And it's wonderful, especially played in all green caps, blocky letters on a small dark screen. 32 00:02:44,480 --> 00:02:48,440 And while I was playing that game with him, I had a little epiphany. 33 00:02:48,440 --> 00:02:53,080 I realized that not only was I being changed in how I thought, I was being changed in how I was. 34 00:02:53,280 --> 00:03:04,120 That the psychic structure that I thought of as me was being subtly altered by interacting with text through the mediating symbol manipulating machine called a computer. 35 00:03:04,320 --> 00:03:18,060 And I suddenly flashed on the fact that if everybody sat in front of one of these or began to embed them in all the structures of our lives, it would be a transformation as big as speech, writing, and the printing press. 36 00:03:18,200 --> 00:03:19,000 And indeed it was. 37 00:03:19,000 --> 00:03:26,960 So I began writing about the transformation of religious experiences and the transformation of spirituality, the transformation of religion per se. 38 00:03:26,960 --> 00:03:52,220 And I'll talk about that a little bit because it's relevant to evolving ethical norms for working on computers because you're talking about trying to think about ethics at the same time that the framework or foundation of your ethical systems which are embedded in or rooted in those religious systems are also in the process of fundamental transformation on their way to becoming something else for which we really do not yet have names. 39 00:03:52,480 --> 00:04:00,300 So as a result of that, I wrote a piece called Computer Applications for Spirituality, the Transformation of Religious Experience. 40 00:04:00,400 --> 00:04:04,780 I sent it to the foremost Episcopalian Anglican Theological Review. 41 00:04:05,340 --> 00:04:09,880 Predictably, I got it back with notes in the margin that said, he must be crazy. 42 00:04:10,080 --> 00:04:11,520 God forbid! 43 00:04:11,920 --> 00:04:14,900 And who does he think he is? 44 00:04:15,320 --> 00:04:19,700 So you know you're on the right track, right, when you get that kind of response. 45 00:04:20,140 --> 00:04:21,360 Put the thing away. 46 00:04:21,360 --> 00:04:22,420 There was nowhere else to publish it. 47 00:04:22,420 --> 00:04:23,960 No one would publish it. 48 00:04:23,960 --> 00:04:29,420 Five years later, seven years later, I don't remember exactly, a new editor went to that same journal. 49 00:04:29,420 --> 00:04:30,380 I didn't change a word. 50 00:04:30,380 --> 00:04:31,700 I just sent it back. 51 00:04:31,700 --> 00:04:35,240 And I have a second letter from them saying, this is so cutting edge. 52 00:04:35,240 --> 00:04:36,680 This is so far-seeing. 53 00:04:36,680 --> 00:04:39,500 And they published it to no comment whatsoever. 54 00:04:39,960 --> 00:04:45,400 Now, the simple truth is, I was working in church structures, all churches. 55 00:04:45,400 --> 00:04:46,000 Excuse me. 56 00:04:46,000 --> 00:04:46,500 Hi, Victor. 57 00:04:46,500 --> 00:04:47,600 How are you? 58 00:04:47,760 --> 00:04:50,420 Would you like to say a few words to the television land? 59 00:04:50,420 --> 00:04:51,600 No. 60 00:04:54,640 --> 00:04:55,960 No problem. 61 00:05:00,040 --> 00:05:02,220 This is what happens when you're middle-aged. 62 00:05:02,320 --> 00:05:17,880 You pause, you go off on a cul-de-sac, and then you return, ah, I was talking about my essay and how it was no longer timely because my references to Moos and Mushes and the kinds of AI I referenced were no longer relevant. 63 00:05:17,880 --> 00:05:31,880 And I was about to say that all religious structures, it doesn't matter what they are or what religion, are a little slow on the uptake because their structures require fixity and persistence in order to make the claims that they make. 64 00:05:32,340 --> 00:05:36,600 I believe the Catholic Church recently apologized to Galileo. 65 00:05:36,720 --> 00:05:39,940 That's 400-plus years after the fact. 66 00:05:40,300 --> 00:05:42,880 I'm not going to be able to wait that long. 67 00:05:42,880 --> 00:05:51,060 So, in a nutshell, I left the ministry to speak and write full-time about these issues and found my insights into how religion was transforming. 68 00:05:51,080 --> 00:06:02,780 Luckily, the timing being right, the early 90s, people were just beginning to interact with computers in a way that made the social, economic, political implications of this interaction relevant to them in their lives. 69 00:06:02,780 --> 00:06:10,380 So I could get jobs, and I could help people understand that if they didn't get with this new program, they were going to be in deep trouble. 70 00:06:11,000 --> 00:06:16,040 What I was fundamentally really hammering at was, to me, axiomatic. 71 00:06:16,040 --> 00:06:23,740 It was about the cultural and the social and the psychological framework in which we habitually live without thinking about it. 72 00:06:23,740 --> 00:06:29,540 The unconscious presuppositions that our cultures and our frameworks give to us. 73 00:06:29,700 --> 00:06:35,840 But you have to become conscious, during times of radical transformation, of what the context is. 74 00:06:35,840 --> 00:06:38,680 You have to turn the context into content. 75 00:06:38,680 --> 00:06:40,920 That's a theme that I'll probably repeat a few times. 76 00:06:40,920 --> 00:06:48,840 You have to turn the context into content in order to see it, because then it can become an object of manipulation, thought, and leverage. 77 00:06:49,080 --> 00:06:53,660 Whereas if you don't, it affects you, but you don't affect it in the same way. 78 00:06:53,660 --> 00:07:06,020 And this is why Marshall McLuhan said one of the things he meant, I think, by there is absolutely no inevitability to anything, as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening. 79 00:07:06,380 --> 00:07:18,860 In other words, if you're willing to step back and see the big picture, and take a really clear look at what is going on, nothing is inevitable, because it renders it all plastic and even liquid in your hands. 80 00:07:19,000 --> 00:07:22,000 And you can master it in significant ways. 81 00:07:22,140 --> 00:07:31,420 So, all of our systems, our human systems, are means, one way or another, built on, I believe, means of exchanging knowledge, information, and energy. 82 00:07:31,700 --> 00:07:35,420 And I think information and energy are essentially the same things. 83 00:07:35,420 --> 00:07:40,060 Information is energy that has become conscious of itself in a form that we call matter. 84 00:07:40,060 --> 00:07:44,120 And really, there's almost nothing else in the universe, once you look at it that way. 85 00:07:44,120 --> 00:07:48,620 So, with our systems of information, we're in a symbiotic relationship. 86 00:07:49,140 --> 00:07:53,640 I love the way Marvin Minsky looked at that. 87 00:07:53,680 --> 00:08:05,300 He looked at the fact that we are so interactively embedded in the systems that we use, that we build them, and then they build us. 88 00:08:05,300 --> 00:08:10,560 And then we inflect them again, and then they inflect us. 89 00:08:10,700 --> 00:08:28,580 But, he said, with prescience, I believe, that looking ahead at what computing was going to do to the world, that if you did not interact with a computer, you were essentially going to be incapable of thinking. 90 00:08:28,620 --> 00:08:31,220 He asked the question, what do we mean by thinking? 91 00:08:31,220 --> 00:08:45,900 And he said, thinking is the capacity to hold simultaneously in your mind a multiplicity of representations of reality, while you sift and sort them, and apply them here and there, now and again, to the various experiences your senses and state of your life brings to you, 92 00:08:45,900 --> 00:08:48,880 so you can say which of these is a good enough map for now. 93 00:08:48,880 --> 00:08:50,040 That's what we mean. 94 00:08:50,040 --> 00:08:55,100 You can't be fundamentalist or literalist about any of those representations of reality. 95 00:08:55,100 --> 00:08:58,240 You must hold them lightly in your mind. 96 00:08:58,240 --> 00:09:02,320 Where, then, he asked, is thinking taking place now, and where is it going to be taking place? 97 00:09:02,320 --> 00:09:04,820 It is going to be taking place on the web. 98 00:09:04,820 --> 00:09:06,860 It is going to be taking place in the net. 99 00:09:06,860 --> 00:09:08,520 It is going to be taking place in the matrix. 100 00:09:08,520 --> 00:09:14,140 Whatever you want to call the metaphorical attributes that we've come to accept. 101 00:09:14,280 --> 00:09:20,520 Now, you think nothing of doing what you're doing in front of laptops and with cell phones, and broadcasting this conversation. 102 00:09:20,920 --> 00:09:29,580 But only 10 or 15 or 20 years ago, it was a radical confrontation with people who had been contextualized by other technologies and didn't know it. 103 00:09:29,700 --> 00:09:37,260 And, therefore, their learning curve, unlike that of younger people for whom it is given, was very, very steep. 104 00:09:37,460 --> 00:09:48,520 And so Minsky concluded, anyone who is not connected to the network is literally going to be like a desktop computer on a corner table pushed into the corner of the room. 105 00:09:48,520 --> 00:09:51,560 They're going to be like a brain in a bottle. 106 00:09:51,560 --> 00:09:55,520 And, obviously, that was a pejorative way of saying that you better be linked up. 107 00:09:55,520 --> 00:09:57,320 You better be networked. 108 00:09:57,340 --> 00:10:00,520 Now, these were radical thoughts then. 109 00:10:00,600 --> 00:10:08,780 And some of the implications that I predicted, which is the great thing about being old enough to outlive your predictions, is they've come true. 110 00:10:09,020 --> 00:10:20,500 There is now, for this generation, even younger than you, the younger people who are being brought up without even given a thought to the ubiquity of their electronic communications. 111 00:10:20,500 --> 00:10:25,920 There is a change of identity that is, I believe, fundamental. 112 00:10:25,920 --> 00:10:40,800 There is a communal way of approaching work and thinking and the academic process that is different from the kind of independent thinking, bounded, that I was taught as a young person. 113 00:10:41,460 --> 00:10:43,440 And this is just my intuition. 114 00:10:43,460 --> 00:10:57,240 But the first time I went to a school to try to assist a group of teachers in a high school, to try to understand what was going on, they said they were getting good marks from the industries they were sending students to. 115 00:10:57,240 --> 00:11:01,100 Motorola, Baxter Labs, Abbott Labs were in the neighborhood, northern Illinois. 116 00:11:01,100 --> 00:11:09,900 They said the one thing we're not doing very well is training people for work teams, for learning how to function effectively on work teams. 117 00:11:10,240 --> 00:11:19,900 And when I asked them what they meant by functioning effectively on work teams, I realized that in my day, when I was in school, we called it cheating. 118 00:11:20,760 --> 00:11:27,680 Literally, if you looked at someone else's paper, you were doing something dishonest. 119 00:11:27,800 --> 00:11:29,980 Now, I'm a radical pioneer. 120 00:11:29,980 --> 00:11:34,640 I was a pioneer in collective work at exam time. 121 00:11:34,640 --> 00:11:40,500 And I would always engage Bruce Rockwell, who used to sit right there, where Spaff is sitting, in my exam taking. 122 00:11:40,500 --> 00:11:46,220 And I was usually caught and sent to room 127, because they didn't see that I was a pioneer and a far-seeing person. 123 00:11:46,220 --> 00:11:47,500 They called it cheating. 124 00:11:47,500 --> 00:11:58,420 But quite literally, what is taught today by example and precept, is that you must learn to function effectively as part of a group. 125 00:11:58,420 --> 00:12:07,800 And the social structures in which young people are brought up now, are fundamentally different in that they are all group activities which are heavily scheduled. 126 00:12:07,800 --> 00:12:11,200 It's an oversimplification, but there's something to it. 127 00:12:11,200 --> 00:12:19,160 So that the boundedness of the individual, I don't think it's an accident, is no longer as clear. 128 00:12:19,300 --> 00:12:22,260 And a boundary is where we get our identity. 129 00:12:22,260 --> 00:12:25,120 A boundary is what determines our identity. 130 00:12:25,280 --> 00:12:35,080 And boundaries around everything, from the individual self, all the way up to the geopolitical structures, are exactly what are morphing, or being transformed. 131 00:12:35,080 --> 00:12:49,580 And that is what's causing us to kind of stretch, to find new concepts, new names, new words, to give these emergent realities a palpable feel, so we can get a hold of them. 132 00:12:49,740 --> 00:12:57,460 Now, giving new names to things, Nietzsche said, originality, creativity, is nothing but seeing ten seconds earlier than everybody else. 133 00:12:57,460 --> 00:13:00,880 The emergent realities that are coming over the horizon, and giving it a name. 134 00:13:00,880 --> 00:13:03,800 And the names you choose make a big difference. 135 00:13:03,800 --> 00:13:09,320 It's branding, it's marketing, from one point of view, but it's the human project from another. 136 00:13:09,400 --> 00:13:18,160 A quick example, in the 1920s, mail was being carried on airplanes for the first time, after World War I. 137 00:13:18,580 --> 00:13:21,960 And periodically, people would hop on the airplane as well. 138 00:13:22,200 --> 00:13:28,660 And they were bold, and courageous, and adventuresome souls, and they had a name appropriate to that. 139 00:13:28,660 --> 00:13:30,700 They were called aeronauts. 140 00:13:30,940 --> 00:13:31,980 Aeronauts. 141 00:13:32,020 --> 00:13:40,840 Well, the government was subsidizing the mail planes, and wanted to reduce the subsidies, and increase fares that people would pay to ride on airplanes. 142 00:13:40,840 --> 00:13:42,500 It was a novel thing. 143 00:13:42,500 --> 00:13:57,160 But they knew if they called them aeronauts, like we call them astronauts, people would not be able to insert themselves into that category, see themselves in it, because an astronaut is a bold space walker, not us. 144 00:13:57,160 --> 00:14:00,740 So they needed a new name for aeronaut in the 1920s. 145 00:14:00,740 --> 00:14:04,060 What do you think they came up with that enabled people to get a hold of it? 146 00:14:04,080 --> 00:14:06,680 What was the creative genius that... 147 00:14:06,680 --> 00:14:08,120 What's the word? 148 00:14:08,780 --> 00:14:09,440 Passenger. 149 00:14:09,440 --> 00:14:10,220 Thank you. 150 00:14:10,300 --> 00:14:13,540 Yeah, they said, we'll call it airplane passengers. 151 00:14:14,100 --> 00:14:19,660 Now, ten years ago, I said, what you're going to watch for are space tourists, and that's exactly what we got. 152 00:14:19,660 --> 00:14:37,750 But you have to go next, beyond space tourists, because what we need is a category that will enable all of us to see ourselves becoming part of a transplanetary civilization, so that when we go where our telerobotic exploration has gone, which right now is limited to the solar system and a little beyond, 153 00:14:38,200 --> 00:14:41,740 we will be able to see ourselves doing that venturing. 154 00:14:41,740 --> 00:14:47,060 I was one of the first people, I was told, to apply for a survivor-type program. 155 00:14:47,060 --> 00:14:48,140 I was so excited. 156 00:14:48,140 --> 00:14:53,340 I heard about it, and I used the net to track down the NBC producers who were putting on the program. 157 00:14:53,340 --> 00:15:00,040 What they were going to do was send 12 people to Baikonur, Star City in Russia, and you were going to go through cosmonaut training. 158 00:15:00,040 --> 00:15:06,860 And every week, the Russians were going to eliminate one person, and the one who was still standing at the end could go to Mir for two weeks. 159 00:15:11,470 --> 00:15:25,330 Well, I did track them down, got my beautiful three-page Why I Should Go sent to them, called my congressman, Sensenbrenner, who I happen to know, and he was the head of the space committee, and I said, can you help me with this? 160 00:15:25,330 --> 00:15:28,170 He said, not you, not anybody's going on to Mir again. 161 00:15:28,170 --> 00:15:29,650 We're bringing that damn thing down. 162 00:15:29,650 --> 00:15:30,790 It's a fire trap. 163 00:15:30,910 --> 00:15:32,690 I said, well, the Russians are cool with that, right? 164 00:15:32,690 --> 00:15:36,210 They kludge stuff together with duct tape and bailing wire. 165 00:15:36,210 --> 00:15:38,750 They don't care if there's a fire, collision. 166 00:15:39,310 --> 00:15:41,070 You know, the thing is flying. 167 00:15:41,450 --> 00:15:46,630 No, but he had his way, and a couple months later, Mir came down, and my dream of going into space, I think, probably forever. 168 00:15:46,970 --> 00:15:49,830 And I say this seriously, because I've always wanted to go. 169 00:15:49,830 --> 00:15:56,250 Well, most people I find in conversation don't want to go, but you will go. 170 00:15:56,250 --> 00:15:57,990 You will go to Mars. 171 00:15:58,210 --> 00:15:59,850 Your children will go. 172 00:15:59,890 --> 00:16:09,970 Using propulsion systems, material science, things that are now being experimented with through black and white budget research, you are going to go. 173 00:16:10,030 --> 00:16:29,410 And the three major things that are going to impact identity going forward, not only religious but human in its fundamental forms, are information and communication technologies, biotechnologies of all kinds as we reinvent ourselves, and the attributes that fundamentally mean what it is to be a human being, 174 00:16:29,410 --> 00:16:32,570 and the advent of a transplanetary culture. 175 00:16:33,290 --> 00:16:34,910 Okay, but that's getting far afield. 176 00:16:34,910 --> 00:16:39,690 I'm still on page one, and we've got a lot to cover. 177 00:16:39,810 --> 00:16:41,990 Anybody have any questions at this point? 178 00:16:41,990 --> 00:16:58,070 This is just kind of trying to introduce the space into which I want us to walk as we deal with what all this is doing to security, to information security, to intelligence, and ultimately to the structures in which you are going to have to build some sanity. 179 00:16:58,190 --> 00:16:58,750 Yes. 180 00:17:03,620 --> 00:17:04,660 Yeah. 181 00:17:06,940 --> 00:17:11,460 One comment about what you term the emergence of a collectivist society. 182 00:17:11,500 --> 00:17:17,020 Do you think that's something new, or do you think that's actually a reversion to social models that have existed in the past? 183 00:17:17,020 --> 00:17:23,600 It can't be a reversion because it's something that hasn't existed before in this way or in this form. 184 00:17:23,600 --> 00:17:32,920 But what I think happens, and I admit that when you're doing a speech you sound like you know, it's just part of being glib, and it comes with the territory. 185 00:17:33,080 --> 00:17:40,560 But what I really think happens is that the content of every new technology is an old technology at first. 186 00:17:40,560 --> 00:17:44,340 In other words, it doesn't eliminate anything, it recontextualizes it. 187 00:17:44,340 --> 00:17:46,780 And at first people say, oh, it's just the same. 188 00:17:47,100 --> 00:17:55,440 The Duke Durbin, for example, hated the printing press because he thought a book printed by such a monster was cold and inhuman. 189 00:17:55,440 --> 00:18:01,140 And he only wanted to read books that were handwritten by monks because that was a real book. 190 00:18:01,300 --> 00:18:14,440 And yet periodically he would hear of a printed book that he wanted to read, and he would ask that it be delivered to the monastery in the area he controlled so they would recopy it by hand so that he could read it. 191 00:18:14,440 --> 00:18:27,000 Now, he felt like he was reading something that would have been, I believe, as you alluded, a reversion, but in fact he was reading something new because the printed text itself enabled new things to be said. 192 00:18:27,000 --> 00:18:29,100 It enabled new ways of expression. 193 00:18:29,100 --> 00:18:30,620 It enabled fixity. 194 00:18:30,620 --> 00:18:35,720 It enabled a fixity of thought as well as vocabulary and spelling and words. 195 00:18:35,720 --> 00:18:44,980 It enabled all sorts of things, including the explosion of the language because an oral culture prior to writing would have 25,000 to 50,000 words max. 196 00:18:44,980 --> 00:18:46,200 It couldn't have that many. 197 00:18:46,200 --> 00:18:50,560 But with the printing press you had an explosion in English, for example, to over a million words. 198 00:18:50,920 --> 00:18:56,500 And so with a million words you have a palette of a million colors instead of 25,000 colors. 199 00:18:56,540 --> 00:19:05,540 So even though it looks like you're painting the same landscape, in fact you are seeing differently, you are constructing a different reality, and then by agreement you're doing something different. 200 00:19:05,540 --> 00:19:14,960 So of course human society has been collective since tribal days and then the days of agriculture and husbandry 10,000, 12,000 years ago. 201 00:19:14,960 --> 00:19:17,240 That part is not new. 202 00:19:17,620 --> 00:19:38,880 What is new is the enabling technologies reduce boundaries between people in a way that has fundamentally not taken place before because the symbiotic relationship to which I alluded between us and our networks is so absolute that we don't see, subsequently we will not see another way of being. 203 00:19:38,880 --> 00:20:13,840 On the downside of the political scale it means that fascism is set in motion as a much more real possibility because people who cannot live without constant feedback from text messengers or IMers or other people in whom they live as a node in a network who literally cannot live without feedback and reinforcement from others who literally cannot run out and play and be alone without feeling lonely and at odds with the universe are ripe for a collectivization of their political will which to me is dangerous. 204 00:20:13,840 --> 00:20:35,140 Now when you combine that with what a friend of mine at the National Security Agency says, and he says it with anxiety in his voice he says, you know we have invented everything necessary for a police state and since 9-11 a lot of it has been implemented but we do not have the precipitating event e.g. 205 00:20:35,140 --> 00:20:38,380 Pakistan last week real or imaginary? 206 00:20:38,620 --> 00:20:41,600 Operation Northwoods, you know about Operation Northwoods? 207 00:20:43,880 --> 00:21:10,720 You should well know I'll tell you later Google Operation Northwoods as a possibility, a way some people in our political structures think about what should be done and you'll see why there are real dangers I think, one more quick thing to add to that I think that if you look at say the conceptions of shame in Roman and Greek society, 208 00:21:10,720 --> 00:21:36,140 you'll see people viewing themselves as a function of their perception in others' eyes much more than you would in a modern society in a sort of guilt structured society and so we might be reverting to that with new technology the existence though of a society in which its members view themselves as a function of others' perception of them is something that's very ancient Right, 209 00:21:36,140 --> 00:22:03,200 I won't argue with that but it is a new iteration and it is at a level of a different kind of complexity and if I am correct that whether it's speech or writing or printing press or electronic communication beginning with the telegraph around 1820 if each one of these is a true formative event because our technologies frame and shape our very way of perceiving being, 210 00:22:03,200 --> 00:22:39,660 behaving, thinking then while it will reiterate fundamental human nature at a new level, it will be at a new level so I think I am not an expert on all of the varieties of cultural expression of the dynamics we're talking about and so it could look like a reversion to that but I'm still trying to make the case that it's not a reversion to the way a Roman citizen conceived of him or herself that you can find antecedents for all these things in other cultures but that what is emerging is fundamentally different because of all the other inputs into human identity 211 00:22:43,260 --> 00:22:47,860 Hopefully a brief comment. 212 00:22:47,860 --> 00:22:56,780 I like very much what you said about the necessity to turn context into content. 213 00:22:56,780 --> 00:23:02,500 That is to realize the premises you bring into a situation. 214 00:23:02,500 --> 00:23:15,980 And in the same serious tone, I want to go to your deep-seated guilt complex about having cheated when you talked to Bruce or whoever. 215 00:23:15,980 --> 00:23:28,880 My view of the situation is that the examiners, the people who were running those quizzes or whatever, were cheating on you because they violated what we call the sincerity condition of a speech act. 216 00:23:28,880 --> 00:23:35,040 They asked you to answer a question to which they didn't need you to answer because they knew the answer. 217 00:23:35,600 --> 00:23:39,120 And you did the best you could. 218 00:23:39,120 --> 00:23:43,360 They cheated on you and you responded as if they were not cheating. 219 00:23:43,360 --> 00:23:43,400 You're right . 220 00:23:43,400 --> 00:23:44,100 You're right. 221 00:23:44,100 --> 00:23:45,540 What a fool I have been. 222 00:23:45,540 --> 00:24:09,720 I remember reading in the mid-1950s a mediocre novel by a mediocre American nuclear physicist turned mediocre novelist by the name of Mitchell Wilson, who wrote novels about physicists, which is a kind of a self-defeating idea to start with. 223 00:24:09,720 --> 00:24:12,200 But they had no emotional life. 224 00:24:12,200 --> 00:24:19,360 But there was something there that was a formative experience for me, and I have used it again and again. 225 00:24:19,360 --> 00:24:24,140 I have been subjected to it and used it again and again as an instructor. 226 00:24:24,260 --> 00:24:33,640 There were two talented brothers in physics at Princeton, and they needed to submit a senior bachelor thesis or something like that. 227 00:24:33,640 --> 00:24:39,440 And the instructor told them, take half a year, go and invent something. 228 00:24:39,560 --> 00:24:40,900 That is an exam. 229 00:24:41,380 --> 00:24:47,620 And the whole point was that they invented TV or something which led to the TV. 230 00:24:47,620 --> 00:24:55,940 So if you go back from the exam situation and rethink it, you see who the real cheater was. 231 00:24:55,940 --> 00:24:57,360 You are a mensch. 232 00:24:57,360 --> 00:24:58,980 You are a real mensch. 233 00:24:58,980 --> 00:25:02,840 Thank you. 234 00:25:02,840 --> 00:25:14,280 That alleviates my guilt, although it is embedded in such other behaviors of adolescence that I don't think we have the time or appropriately the opportunity here to explore that in depth. 235 00:25:14,280 --> 00:25:19,900 But you are pointing me towards some necessary therapy, and I appreciate that very much. 236 00:25:21,780 --> 00:25:31,200 I guess I am trying to make the point that the structure, all software, all hardware, all human beings are embedded in a single complex system. 237 00:25:31,340 --> 00:25:41,420 So that when we define security, which is kind of what we are talking about, where in that complex system is the point of departure for defining the entire system? 238 00:25:41,420 --> 00:25:44,140 How can you see the system from within itself? 239 00:25:44,140 --> 00:25:48,920 Human-machine symbiosis creates a unique set of interesting conundrums. 240 00:25:48,920 --> 00:25:56,200 The environment, said a friend, in which the logic is running is an unknown from a security standpoint. 241 00:25:56,340 --> 00:25:59,560 This means the environment needs to be audited too. 242 00:25:59,700 --> 00:26:04,520 It is not a good idea to use new environments for security-critical code. 243 00:26:04,520 --> 00:26:11,740 For example, when PHP came out, people rushed to it because it was easy to use, but look at all the problems that came down the road. 244 00:26:11,740 --> 00:26:23,220 In other words, the context, as Victor brought me back to center, must become content statement, is a necessity, not merely a good idea. 245 00:26:23,220 --> 00:26:34,760 Because during radical change, the newly emergent realities that are coming into the center of our consciousness from the edges are redefining management and human identity and everything. 246 00:26:34,760 --> 00:26:40,800 And it may sound crazy, and I want to introduce you to the thought that a lot of what I think sounds crazy. 247 00:26:40,800 --> 00:26:50,130 When I first sent that essay on the transformation of religious structures into that journal, it literally sounded crazy to them. 248 00:26:50,660 --> 00:26:52,200 And I understand that. 249 00:26:52,200 --> 00:26:56,170 I am now writing about new things that sound equally crazy. 250 00:26:57,040 --> 00:27:02,840 And I have to go back to other people to stabilize myself sometimes. 251 00:27:02,840 --> 00:27:12,220 One of them is Robert Galvin, who was the great man at Motorola, who built Motorola through its great formative years into the entity that it became. 252 00:27:12,220 --> 00:27:15,760 And he was there for real critical breakthroughs. 253 00:27:15,760 --> 00:27:27,900 And people sometimes asked him, breakthrough ideas, these incredible ideas you had there for the kind of chip you developed or handheld this or whatever, where do they come from? 254 00:27:27,900 --> 00:27:30,160 And he thought seriously about it. 255 00:27:30,160 --> 00:27:33,640 And this is a man who had remarkable success for 40 or more years. 256 00:27:33,640 --> 00:27:41,620 And he said, every idea that turned out to be a breakthrough idea began its life as an opinion of one. 257 00:27:42,440 --> 00:27:49,840 If someone said it aloud, first you think it, and then our own filter internally screens out anomalies. 258 00:27:49,840 --> 00:27:56,400 And because of appropriateness and social niceties, we don't allow ourselves, except I do, to say the unthinkable. 259 00:27:56,400 --> 00:27:58,000 We don't even say it. 260 00:27:58,000 --> 00:28:00,120 But if we say it, no one hears it. 261 00:28:00,320 --> 00:28:02,740 In other words, it just doesn't compute. 262 00:28:02,880 --> 00:28:08,000 It literally does not attach to any of the grabbers in our cognitive structure. 263 00:28:08,000 --> 00:28:11,760 But if someone says it again and again and people finally hear it, they laugh. 264 00:28:12,080 --> 00:28:13,700 Because it sounds funny. 265 00:28:13,700 --> 00:28:15,360 It sounds crazy. 266 00:28:17,280 --> 00:28:21,180 Wisdom and insanity are contextual. 267 00:28:21,180 --> 00:28:32,500 And when the context changes, what was insane under one set of conditions becomes eminently sane and creative and original and breakthrough under another. 268 00:28:32,880 --> 00:28:49,300 And so if the people keep saying it and endure the derision and the laughter and the hooting and the water fountain conversation about what an idiot they are that they hear coming around, if you can endure all that, then you finally live long enough to emerge where people not only say they thought it was a good idea, 269 00:28:49,300 --> 00:28:51,620 but they always thought so all along. 270 00:28:51,620 --> 00:28:54,480 Everybody agrees that it was a wonderful idea. 271 00:28:54,480 --> 00:28:57,180 And Galvin said the corollary was also true. 272 00:28:57,180 --> 00:29:00,080 This is important in an academic setting. 273 00:29:00,080 --> 00:29:16,420 He said that every time we had a problem that we confronted that was really challenging and we surfaced it in a very explicit way, if someone suggested a solution and everybody immediately agreed that that's what we should do, it was always wrong. 274 00:29:16,420 --> 00:29:18,000 Now he said always. 275 00:29:18,000 --> 00:29:19,080 He didn't say often. 276 00:29:19,080 --> 00:29:21,560 He said it was always wrong. 277 00:29:21,560 --> 00:29:35,260 Now if you think about what I'm saying, our ideation, our way of thinking about things, is in part a function of our technologies which frame and shape them and make available new possibilities, literally, for ourselves and for our world. 278 00:29:35,780 --> 00:29:46,060 Therefore, in the world of agreement of social structures in which human beings live, there is a constant flux, as I said, from the edge to the center. 279 00:29:46,060 --> 00:29:52,920 The truth begins at the edge, can't be heard, can't be seen, moves to the center and becomes the core of a new consensus. 280 00:29:52,920 --> 00:29:59,340 By the time it arrives at the center and a new consensus is building, a new truth is already emerging at the edge. 281 00:29:59,400 --> 00:30:07,120 Therefore, if everyone is in agreement immediately, it means of necessity, think of it temporally, that they are living in the past. 282 00:30:07,220 --> 00:30:18,140 Because they are allowing the frame or shape of the thoughts that prior technologies helped to create to determine what they think they see going forward and they are missing what is right in front of their eyes. 283 00:30:18,140 --> 00:30:19,560 You can get them from the internet. 284 00:30:19,560 --> 00:30:22,520 All those funny, funny quotes everybody tosses around. 285 00:30:22,680 --> 00:30:24,740 Like, space travel is utter bilge. 286 00:30:25,020 --> 00:30:28,360 1956, Royal Astronomer of England, a year before Sputnik. 287 00:30:28,380 --> 00:30:30,080 Heavier than air flight is impossible. 288 00:30:30,080 --> 00:30:32,340 I foresee a market for five computers. 289 00:30:32,340 --> 00:30:37,480 One day computers will weigh less than one and a half tons, said as a real breakthrough. 290 00:30:38,460 --> 00:30:45,280 1987, Bill Gates, no computer will ever destroy programs. 291 00:30:45,280 --> 00:30:46,800 That is absolutely true. 292 00:30:46,800 --> 00:30:47,720 He said that. 293 00:30:48,120 --> 00:30:48,840 One of them. 294 00:30:48,840 --> 00:30:51,800 And the context determines the content of your thinking. 295 00:30:52,980 --> 00:30:56,380 See, I'm sometimes introduced as a futurist, which is pretty funny. 296 00:30:56,480 --> 00:30:59,420 Because I don't even know what we're having for dinner tonight or where we're going. 297 00:30:59,440 --> 00:31:00,920 So I don't know the future. 298 00:31:00,960 --> 00:31:03,000 But I'm trying to describe the present. 299 00:31:03,080 --> 00:31:08,300 But so many people live in the past that I sound to them like a futurist when I describe the present. 300 00:31:08,300 --> 00:31:18,580 This is a way of saying the same thing, that there is a gradation of structures of reality in which people live, but which they deeply believe to be true. 301 00:31:18,940 --> 00:31:23,240 And the example from Galvin, he had strange ideas meetings at Motorola. 302 00:31:23,300 --> 00:31:27,200 And some of the ideas, when you look back at them, don't sound so strange. 303 00:31:27,200 --> 00:31:34,520 You remember the time someone suggested for the very first time in his memory, we could put a chip in someone's head. 304 00:31:35,060 --> 00:31:42,040 And it was so unthinkable, kind of like thinking of a huge mainframe weighing one and a half tons being on a desktop. 305 00:31:42,040 --> 00:31:46,040 It was so unthinkable in the categories of thinking that people had that everybody laughed. 306 00:31:46,140 --> 00:31:47,480 A chip in the head. 307 00:31:48,260 --> 00:31:59,060 And yet, incrementally, we are redefining what it means to be a physical human being through all sorts of new technological devices and engineering through chemicals. 308 00:31:59,060 --> 00:32:02,340 So when someone has a pacemaker, you don't think anything of it. 309 00:32:02,340 --> 00:32:06,840 But it was a radical introduction of a new electronic structure into the person. 310 00:32:06,900 --> 00:32:09,160 And now we are working with implants. 311 00:32:09,200 --> 00:32:17,040 And when it first became public that people were talking about implants in the brain, people are fearful, they don't want to hear about it. 312 00:32:17,040 --> 00:32:20,300 I see it on people's faces when we're talking all the time. 313 00:32:20,300 --> 00:32:24,380 A guy got up at a workshop the other day and he said, you're making me feel helpless. 314 00:32:24,860 --> 00:32:26,220 And I said, terrific. 315 00:32:26,580 --> 00:32:28,940 Because when you came in here, you were at minus two. 316 00:32:28,940 --> 00:32:30,600 You were helpless and you didn't know it. 317 00:32:31,140 --> 00:32:33,520 And now you've moved up to minus one. 318 00:32:33,520 --> 00:32:35,120 You're helpless and aware of it. 319 00:32:35,120 --> 00:32:36,660 Do you want to go up another notch? 320 00:32:36,660 --> 00:32:37,380 He said, to what? 321 00:32:37,380 --> 00:32:39,540 I said, doing something about it. 322 00:32:39,540 --> 00:32:47,480 In other words, the radical change introduced by the rate of change of technologies does not allow you to see cover anywhere. 323 00:32:48,020 --> 00:32:58,780 When this first started, I would talk to groups of people, and if it was white men over 50, which a lot of the groups of executives were, you could see in their eyes them calculating when they would die or retire. 324 00:32:58,780 --> 00:33:06,680 And could they sprint for that line without having to deal with any of the things the 90s and the 21st century were going to bring to them. 325 00:33:06,800 --> 00:33:12,600 So what Galvin is really encouraging you to do is build in an openness to heresy. 326 00:33:13,040 --> 00:33:14,680 An openness to heresy. 327 00:33:14,680 --> 00:33:19,580 Or as George Bernard Shaw said, all great truth begins as blasphemy. 328 00:33:19,840 --> 00:33:23,420 It's another way of saying it begins on the edge and moves to the center. 329 00:33:23,540 --> 00:33:24,680 Edge to the center. 330 00:33:24,680 --> 00:33:32,260 250 years ago, you go to England, go to the city of London, stand on the corner at the Bank of England and say, where is the center of the world? 331 00:33:32,260 --> 00:33:33,580 And they would say, right here. 332 00:33:33,580 --> 00:33:38,040 The city of London, the Bank of England is the economic engine of the world. 333 00:33:38,080 --> 00:33:49,660 And someone who was crazy would say, I think it's way out at the edges like the colonies where America and Australia and a sane person at the time would have said no in the consensus reality of the core. 334 00:33:49,660 --> 00:33:53,820 But already the new truth was emergent at the edges and moving in. 335 00:33:53,820 --> 00:33:56,300 Today, same situation. 336 00:33:56,300 --> 00:33:58,240 Where is the center of the universe? 337 00:33:58,240 --> 00:34:00,820 Most people would say Earth. 338 00:34:01,460 --> 00:34:16,020 But already we are being recontextualized by space war and our transplanetary adventure so that if you look out a little way, you can see that Earth is merely the bridge from which the bats will flock into the twilight at night. 339 00:34:16,020 --> 00:34:18,120 We are going everywhere. 340 00:34:18,120 --> 00:34:19,320 We are going everywhere. 341 00:34:19,320 --> 00:34:20,220 Question? 342 00:34:25,320 --> 00:34:28,480 A lot of what you say makes sense. 343 00:34:28,480 --> 00:34:37,260 But you're also sort of generalizing that people are not willing to look out and look at things in a larger perspective. 344 00:34:37,260 --> 00:34:41,100 Like you're using the galaxy and us being the center, you know. 345 00:34:41,100 --> 00:34:57,000 But I think anyone that has traveled or has more an aptitude towards science and exploring things and researching actually looks out and sees that they're, they're more open to things. 346 00:34:57,120 --> 00:35:04,420 And so what you're saying almost sounds like you're telling us that, no, that's not where all the tools almost define you. 347 00:35:04,420 --> 00:35:10,260 I see the tools as something you can use, but it doesn't determine how you view the world. 348 00:35:10,600 --> 00:35:13,140 Or the opportunities out there. 349 00:35:13,740 --> 00:35:17,540 I think I fundamentally disagree with that conclusion. 350 00:35:17,540 --> 00:35:18,800 I think they do. 351 00:35:18,800 --> 00:35:24,960 And they do in a way and to a degree that you don't see until, as I say, it is thrown into relief. 352 00:35:25,020 --> 00:35:26,100 Two things you said. 353 00:35:26,100 --> 00:35:29,300 One is that there are smart people like yourself and your colleagues and friends. 354 00:35:29,600 --> 00:35:31,380 And then there's other people. 355 00:35:31,520 --> 00:35:32,580 I live in Milwaukee. 356 00:35:32,580 --> 00:35:34,560 This is being broadcast, right? 357 00:35:34,980 --> 00:35:36,160 Scratch that. 358 00:35:38,340 --> 00:35:39,960 I've lived in a lot of places. 359 00:35:39,960 --> 00:35:43,660 Milwaukee, Hawaii, London, Madrid, Chicago, Salt Lake City. 360 00:35:43,660 --> 00:35:53,060 What I have found is that the people who grew up in those places and stayed there are much more like one another, regardless of where they grew up and what culture. 361 00:35:53,120 --> 00:36:00,680 And the people who go lots of places are more like one another than they are like the people, in fact, that they grew up with. 362 00:36:00,680 --> 00:36:04,420 So, yeah, there are different kinds of life experiences that bring people to different things. 363 00:36:04,420 --> 00:36:06,720 Let me give you an example. 364 00:36:07,040 --> 00:36:08,820 I mentioned that I wrote fiction. 365 00:36:08,820 --> 00:36:10,080 I wrote literature. 366 00:36:11,580 --> 00:36:13,820 Where did I conceive of the marketplace? 367 00:36:14,320 --> 00:36:17,840 I bought a book called Writer's Digest, a big, thick book, when I was a kid. 368 00:36:17,840 --> 00:36:19,740 I just got it off eBay. 369 00:36:19,740 --> 00:36:20,780 Somebody had the magazine. 370 00:36:20,780 --> 00:36:24,220 My first story was published in 1963. 371 00:36:24,820 --> 00:36:28,300 And so I paid $7 to get that magazine back. 372 00:36:28,300 --> 00:36:29,440 Analog Science Fiction. 373 00:36:29,440 --> 00:36:30,240 It's cool. 374 00:36:30,320 --> 00:36:32,200 How did I know about Analog Science Fiction? 375 00:36:32,200 --> 00:36:35,460 You look up in the Director of All Magazines. 376 00:36:35,460 --> 00:36:46,500 But also the whole context of your life tells you that the framework of publishing and it is unthinkable to be beyond it, literally, in the culture except for some strange person, is North America. 377 00:36:46,500 --> 00:36:49,160 In other words, the brackets were the East Coast and the West Coast. 378 00:36:49,480 --> 00:36:50,860 Canada and Mexico. 379 00:36:50,860 --> 00:36:53,320 I wrote in English for American magazines. 380 00:36:53,320 --> 00:36:58,220 It's just what you grow up thinking as the horizon of possibility discloses. 381 00:36:58,420 --> 00:37:03,700 I wrote a piece for Wired when it was a new magazine on what the Internet was going to bring to the world. 382 00:37:03,840 --> 00:37:04,780 5,000 words. 383 00:37:04,780 --> 00:37:06,220 They published 500. 384 00:37:06,300 --> 00:37:08,440 I said, I get to do what I want with the rest, right? 385 00:37:08,440 --> 00:37:09,520 And they said, yes. 386 00:37:09,520 --> 00:37:10,660 I sat there. 387 00:37:10,660 --> 00:37:13,540 This is how slowly it can percolate. 388 00:37:13,540 --> 00:37:20,700 In front of my computer, asking myself, where can I publish an article about how the Internet is going to change the world? 389 00:37:21,640 --> 00:37:22,540 Duh. 390 00:37:22,540 --> 00:37:24,100 The light flashed on. 391 00:37:24,100 --> 00:37:24,960 Stupid. 392 00:37:24,960 --> 00:37:26,040 Use the Internet. 393 00:37:26,040 --> 00:37:29,760 Now, this is long before easy searching, Googling, and so on. 394 00:37:29,760 --> 00:37:31,420 I think Gopher was around. 395 00:37:31,640 --> 00:37:35,080 There were very few websites in those days. 396 00:37:35,080 --> 00:37:40,020 By the way, my website was seized by USA Today as a website of the day. 397 00:37:40,120 --> 00:37:41,240 That's how few there were. 398 00:37:41,240 --> 00:37:44,480 They would identify five a week, and that was a big deal. 399 00:37:45,680 --> 00:37:53,780 So the light bulb went on that I could use the Internet to discover markets where I could publish. 400 00:37:54,880 --> 00:37:56,480 All over the world. 401 00:37:56,900 --> 00:38:02,300 Now, what happened as a result, within a week, literally, I had a contract for that article. 402 00:38:02,300 --> 00:38:05,140 The next month it appeared in England in a new magazine. 403 00:38:05,200 --> 00:38:09,220 I start writing for South Africa Computer Magazine every month for the next three years. 404 00:38:09,220 --> 00:38:10,580 I start writing in Australia. 405 00:38:10,580 --> 00:38:18,140 And I start writing a column, which I sent out by e-mail, which was a new technology, which within a couple of years was going to people in 60 countries. 406 00:38:18,540 --> 00:38:27,080 So I became a global presence because the technology disclosed to me, by virtue of my interaction with it, that that was a possibility. 407 00:38:27,080 --> 00:38:42,380 I guess I'm trying to say that before that moment of enlightenment, I literally could not see the possibility because interacting with the new technologies discloses them to you in a way that previously is impossible. 408 00:38:42,380 --> 00:38:47,280 In other words, it's impossible inside the old paradigm to think the new paradigm. 409 00:38:47,600 --> 00:38:49,960 The Jews were Jews and the Greeks were Greeks. 410 00:38:49,960 --> 00:38:53,180 And from neither Jewish nor Greek world could you see Christendom. 411 00:38:53,180 --> 00:39:04,820 But when they encountered one another and a new transformative emergent structure emerged hierarchically from that, the structure of Christendom, you could look back and see, oh, the antecedents, like you're saying, are Greek thought. 412 00:39:04,820 --> 00:39:05,980 They are Hebrew thought. 413 00:39:05,980 --> 00:39:11,840 We can identify all sorts of cultural antecedents for what has emerged, but it is truly a brand new thing. 414 00:39:12,580 --> 00:39:24,400 And to go back to the religious metaphor, what I saw was that the Word, the frame of the Word, is what determines your conception of God as well as self. 415 00:39:24,400 --> 00:39:28,460 And I'll try to say this briefly because I do want to get to security and intelligence. 416 00:39:29,740 --> 00:39:32,800 Oral cultures had gods and religions. 417 00:39:33,320 --> 00:39:34,760 What were their names? 418 00:39:34,860 --> 00:39:36,400 We don't know. 419 00:39:36,620 --> 00:39:37,940 We don't know. 420 00:39:37,940 --> 00:39:41,420 Because they all disappeared when writing emerged. 421 00:39:41,420 --> 00:39:44,420 Or they were transformed into writing. 422 00:39:44,520 --> 00:39:50,660 Now, we know from Plato's own witness that he thought writing was the end of civilization and meaningful culture. 423 00:39:50,660 --> 00:39:51,960 Read the Phaedrus. 424 00:39:52,020 --> 00:39:56,940 He thought this was it, because people wouldn't use memory and wouldn't think through things anymore. 425 00:39:56,940 --> 00:40:04,460 And he was right, that it was the end of culture as he constituted it, but not the end of a new emerging culture. 426 00:40:04,460 --> 00:40:05,940 What happened to religions? 427 00:40:05,940 --> 00:40:07,760 Well, something pretty significant. 428 00:40:07,960 --> 00:40:21,740 Beings who had a powerful impact on others, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Jesus, Buddha, Moses, you name it, Muhammad, were transformed into textual beings. 429 00:40:21,740 --> 00:40:27,260 In other words, they were flesh and blood beings, but they died and were transformed into text. 430 00:40:27,400 --> 00:40:37,080 And it is the interaction with the written text that enabled people to internalize a new concept of God and relationship to it. 431 00:40:37,360 --> 00:40:38,640 And I don't want to beat this to death. 432 00:40:38,640 --> 00:40:39,920 We could talk about it for an hour. 433 00:40:39,920 --> 00:40:42,240 But the printing press did the same thing. 434 00:40:42,480 --> 00:40:56,100 Lutheranism, Protestantism, and its million and one dicings and slicings of what had been a monolithic structure, more or less, was enabled by the printing press, which transformed Luther into a textual being. 435 00:40:56,100 --> 00:41:04,840 And I'm making the point that electronic communication, in all of its forms, are redefining images of God and religious structures as well. 436 00:41:04,840 --> 00:41:23,120 So that it's no accident that all the religions that people habitually, without thinking about it, think of as religions, all came into being, and then have pretty much stopped coming into being in that very narrow bandwidth of historical time, which coincided with a few thousand years, 437 00:41:23,120 --> 00:41:29,760 which was characterized by the emergence of writing and the transformation of human consciousness, which it occasioned. 438 00:41:29,760 --> 00:41:31,980 And therefore I'm saying, absolutely. 439 00:41:32,280 --> 00:41:38,680 The technology frames and shapes you in a way that you can't know until you do. 440 00:41:39,080 --> 00:41:42,360 And then when you see it, it's like the Terminator on the moon. 441 00:41:42,380 --> 00:41:49,220 You look at the moon through a telescope, you see light and dark, and you see the mountains where the line of light hits the line of dark. 442 00:41:49,220 --> 00:41:51,760 You can't see it. 443 00:41:51,760 --> 00:41:54,760 Over here it's all washed out in light, over here it's all dark. 444 00:41:54,820 --> 00:42:09,400 But at the Terminator, which is what it is to be gifted with living in a transitional time, if you can stand it, is that as you are recontextualized, you are creatively reorganized yourself as a possibility for the future. 445 00:42:09,400 --> 00:42:13,040 And that's what the definition of human identity is. 446 00:42:13,120 --> 00:42:14,780 So when you get... yes? 447 00:42:15,760 --> 00:42:27,720 Just to briefly expand on what you're saying about written word being important in religion, if you look at what Heraclitus wrote and you look at what John wrote, they're both literally calling word God. 448 00:42:27,860 --> 00:42:30,180 They have a direct correlation of the word is God. 449 00:42:30,180 --> 00:42:30,880 Right. 450 00:42:31,020 --> 00:42:44,100 And someone who, in the 16 or 1700s, was enabled by Luther to walk into, like the churches I served, Episcopal, and take a book and read silently to oneself, was not aware that that was a transforming event. 451 00:42:44,100 --> 00:42:47,380 But today, when you tell people, you don't need to have a book. 452 00:42:47,380 --> 00:42:48,520 We can have it on a screen. 453 00:42:48,520 --> 00:42:50,980 I remember when I first started writing that as suggestions. 454 00:42:51,120 --> 00:42:54,420 To have a screen, no books, just plug it in. 455 00:42:54,420 --> 00:42:57,120 I saw a monitor in every pew, like on an airline seat. 456 00:42:57,120 --> 00:43:03,220 But you walk into a lot of churches these days and you just have a huge projection monitor and they just plug in the program for the Sunday. 457 00:43:03,380 --> 00:43:11,520 And people are being changed by the kind of, quote, worship, unquote, that is collective experience they have in relationship to that technology. 458 00:43:11,520 --> 00:43:14,000 And therefore their ideas about themselves. 459 00:43:14,000 --> 00:43:30,360 And so it's ironic that fundamentalism, literalism in a Protestant context, thinks it is going back to the original text, but it was literally unthinkable until the 1900s in the form in which it has come to bedevil us. 460 00:43:31,760 --> 00:43:35,760 So anyway, short answer is yeah, absolutely. 461 00:43:36,280 --> 00:43:38,060 Ten minutes to go? 462 00:43:38,060 --> 00:43:38,800 Oh boy. 463 00:43:40,700 --> 00:43:42,060 Okay, security. 464 00:43:42,060 --> 00:43:43,760 Identity is a function of boundaries. 465 00:43:43,880 --> 00:43:45,440 We've talked about that. 466 00:43:45,480 --> 00:43:47,860 The boundaries are morphing, the boundaries are changing. 467 00:43:47,860 --> 00:43:55,220 We like to talk about the insider threat these days being one of the biggest threats, but how do you define an insider if the boundaries themselves are like a Mobius strip? 468 00:43:55,740 --> 00:43:57,800 What is it you're trying to defend? 469 00:43:59,100 --> 00:44:05,460 You can try to defend the perimeter, but anybody with any sense has given that up as a singular task. 470 00:44:05,460 --> 00:44:08,840 We will be in a truly dangerous stance, said my friend Brian Snow. 471 00:44:09,540 --> 00:44:13,080 We will think we are secure and act accordingly when in fact we are not secure. 472 00:44:13,080 --> 00:44:22,580 In other words, we are okay, we have a firewall, no need to worry about internal authentication and authorization models, except for the 65 exceptions in our firewall rule set. 473 00:44:22,820 --> 00:44:25,040 That's the real problem, he said, with the perimeter model. 474 00:44:25,040 --> 00:44:30,860 It has potentially ugly failure modes because once you're beyond perimeter protection, you are owned. 475 00:44:31,620 --> 00:44:33,440 You are owned indeed. 476 00:44:33,440 --> 00:44:46,540 And what he says with great poignancy, as a senior guy at NSA, a very wonderful, wise guy, is that actionable intelligence saves lives. 477 00:44:46,820 --> 00:45:00,000 And we had developed, he said at NSA, a definition of true and beautiful, which was based on the coherence of the algorithm, its efficiency, its pristine mathematical beauty, and that didn't save lives. 478 00:45:00,000 --> 00:45:17,380 And when you hold people, as I have, in the intelligence community who are sobbing because they did not think that many people needed to die on a particular mission and it was their responsibility, then you cannot, as Brian says, do this work unless you see the face of evil. 479 00:45:17,400 --> 00:45:26,660 You cannot do this work unless you have seen the face of evil in a visceral kind of way and it confronts you with, I am not that, I am opposed to that. 480 00:45:26,660 --> 00:45:29,420 But, let's go back to the religious thing briefly. 481 00:45:29,640 --> 00:45:31,600 The notion of who is the enemy. 482 00:45:31,600 --> 00:45:37,740 When you are doing security, you are trying to protect and defend and you are trying to oppose the enemy. 483 00:45:37,740 --> 00:45:38,760 But who is the enemy? 484 00:45:38,760 --> 00:45:44,720 Up until the time of Christendom, the enemy was defined pretty much universally as a member of the other tribe. 485 00:45:44,720 --> 00:45:45,620 The other. 486 00:45:45,720 --> 00:45:46,560 Them. 487 00:45:46,900 --> 00:45:53,780 And then it was redefined in Christendom as that in myself which frustrates and gets in the way. 488 00:45:54,060 --> 00:45:56,240 Pogo didn't say the enemy is us. 489 00:45:56,460 --> 00:45:57,340 Jesus did. 490 00:45:57,340 --> 00:46:02,760 And a lot of other people, contemporaneous, like Rabbi Hillel with Jesus at the time saw that. 491 00:46:02,760 --> 00:46:07,780 That the enemy was that in us which frustrates the coherence of the system. 492 00:46:07,860 --> 00:46:09,640 And there is no other. 493 00:46:09,720 --> 00:46:19,200 Because human consciousness, in part through writing and other emergent structures, was distributing itself in a new self-conception, a new way. 494 00:46:19,500 --> 00:46:21,700 And the enemy was no longer defined as the other. 495 00:46:21,700 --> 00:46:29,340 And yet, if you look at most of the models of computer security, you are trying to screen someone out and you are trying to hold someone in. 496 00:46:29,340 --> 00:46:33,200 You still can't shake the notion that there is a perimeter around something. 497 00:46:33,220 --> 00:46:37,600 And yet what has happened in the information state is that boundaries are now functional. 498 00:46:37,620 --> 00:46:39,060 An example is ports. 499 00:46:39,060 --> 00:46:43,240 We say we can't have things coming in container ships that might be explosive. 500 00:46:43,240 --> 00:46:47,100 So we have to stop them at the port of origin. 501 00:46:47,100 --> 00:46:47,860 What does that mean? 502 00:46:47,860 --> 00:46:51,900 It means the boundaries of the United States are no longer geographically defined. 503 00:46:52,020 --> 00:46:55,140 And that throws us back to where did geographical boundaries come from? 504 00:46:55,140 --> 00:47:13,400 Well, you just look back historically to the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries and you see the emergence of a boundary around what we call a nation-state as that level of organizational structure appropriate to the complexity political, economic, and social of emergent civilized structures. 505 00:47:13,460 --> 00:47:24,680 And therefore the boundaries of larger nation-states, the complexity and the way of organizing themselves in relationship to each other found itself so that you believe you are citizens of countries. 506 00:47:24,680 --> 00:47:29,880 Because we have been trained to believe a primary function of our identity is a citizen of a country. 507 00:47:30,160 --> 00:47:32,480 And yet who are we opposed to? 508 00:47:32,520 --> 00:47:34,080 Who are we opposed to? 509 00:47:34,080 --> 00:47:43,040 We have defined let me quote myself because I like me and periodically I say something worth saying. 510 00:47:43,540 --> 00:47:53,420 If I can find it well, I've done that too, but the way I talk you know, no one knows knows that I'm doing that. 511 00:48:00,240 --> 00:48:02,040 In the U.S. 512 00:48:02,040 --> 00:48:09,760 intelligence community, mission and charter of the intelligence community sanctions breaking foreign laws while prohibiting similar activities in American soil. 513 00:48:09,760 --> 00:48:14,460 But because of the technologies, distinctions of foreign and domestic no longer hold. 514 00:48:14,460 --> 00:48:40,460 The convergence of enabling technologies of intrusion, interception, and panoptic reach combined with a sense of urgency about a counter-terror imperative and a mandate from our leaders to do everything possible to define to defeat an amorphous, non-state entity who is defined by terroristic behaviors rather than by boundaries, 515 00:48:40,460 --> 00:48:53,440 borders, or even a clear ideological allegiance has created an ominous but invisible set of conditions that undermine the cornerstones of law, ethics, human identity, and even religious traditions. 516 00:48:53,560 --> 00:49:02,440 In other words, there is a challenge because of the technologies themselves to our fundamental definitions of who we are and who we are defending. 517 00:49:02,440 --> 00:49:10,220 And I have lots of examples which I don't have time to give, but people often wait when I'm talking to organizational structures where they adhere. 518 00:49:10,220 --> 00:49:11,900 I'll give you a quick example. 519 00:49:12,260 --> 00:49:16,080 This is a guy who was sent to Haiti with Army counterintelligence. 520 00:49:16,080 --> 00:49:19,140 He was very gung-ho and very much believing in the mission. 521 00:49:19,180 --> 00:49:29,600 And the mission was to interdict, shut down some avenues the cartels were using to move cocaine and other drugs through Haiti into the United States. 522 00:49:29,960 --> 00:49:40,720 And after he arrived, shortly after he arrived, there was a regime change or some political chaos not uncommon in Haiti, and he became very anxious about whether they would be able to do what they went there to do. 523 00:49:40,720 --> 00:49:53,180 And then he heard that someone was coming down, actually someone from Arkansas as it happened, who was close to someone else from Arkansas, and he felt relieved because he thought what was going to happen was that the mission was going to be shorn up. 524 00:49:53,220 --> 00:50:01,800 And yet what the person did primarily was make sure the route stayed open because it was important that the stuff continued to get through because he had a stake in it. 525 00:50:02,120 --> 00:50:11,000 Now, I have lots of examples of what's happening politically that makes it kind of a Mobius strip when you try to think about against whom we are defending ourselves. 526 00:50:11,280 --> 00:50:16,000 New structures have emerged geopolitically for which we do not have names. 527 00:50:16,000 --> 00:50:21,720 The passenger-aeronaut example would apply except we don't know who the passengers are. 528 00:50:21,720 --> 00:50:39,400 We do know that clouds of power have emerged which make simple concepts of allegiance and patriotism literally obsolete when we think in a focused granular way about who we are trying to oppose and who we are trying to defend. 529 00:50:39,400 --> 00:50:42,040 Because the boundaries no longer hold. 530 00:50:42,040 --> 00:50:45,520 They are dissolving into clouds of power. 531 00:50:45,920 --> 00:50:54,920 And when you do the work, when you do the investigative work, you can follow the money and you can see the contours and you can see the new emergent structures. 532 00:50:55,020 --> 00:51:03,660 But they're not simple and they do not align in any meaningful way with the kind of political rhetoric that we are hearing and there's a great deal at stake. 533 00:51:04,060 --> 00:51:16,160 So in the intelligence community, because at the moment of action you are a node in a network , but we are all nodes in the multiplicity of networks. 534 00:51:16,160 --> 00:51:24,000 And we define our allegiance not by what we say or how we self-conceive, but by what we do in that moment of action. 535 00:51:24,120 --> 00:51:28,960 And that is the moment in which our allegiance and therefore identity is determined. 536 00:51:28,960 --> 00:51:35,920 And that is very, very difficult to circumscribe with all the checks and balances we're trying to do. 537 00:51:35,980 --> 00:51:43,080 And that's why it's so much easier when you're doing information security to at least focus on the machine side of the symbiotic relationship. 538 00:51:43,280 --> 00:51:49,880 Because it can be more binary sometimes, although complexity bedevils that simple statement. 539 00:51:49,900 --> 00:51:56,960 But the human side is where it has meaning, where it has value, and where it even makes sense if you're going to do it at all. 540 00:51:57,040 --> 00:51:58,300 Who are you defending? 541 00:51:58,340 --> 00:51:59,740 What are you protecting? 542 00:51:59,800 --> 00:52:01,020 Who is the enemy? 543 00:52:01,340 --> 00:52:08,380 And if those questions aren't asked, then you're simply drinking the Kool-Aid and joining the corporation and doing what you're told to do. 544 00:52:08,520 --> 00:52:11,020 And the corporation can be any corporate structure. 545 00:52:11,600 --> 00:52:17,660 I mean, the world really is a film noir novel, and it doesn't have easy or happy resolutions. 546 00:52:18,060 --> 00:52:20,060 Now, I have to get in just a couple of things. 547 00:52:20,060 --> 00:52:22,340 I said I'd go back here, so I will now. 548 00:52:25,440 --> 00:52:27,020 Bring all these out. 549 00:52:28,560 --> 00:52:30,320 See, we're a couple of minutes over? 550 00:52:30,320 --> 00:52:31,460 Okay. 551 00:52:32,140 --> 00:52:34,960 First of all, I really have just gotten started. 552 00:52:34,960 --> 00:52:37,080 Obviously, I can crank myself up. 553 00:52:38,340 --> 00:52:43,740 These are cards, and they have my website on it, ThemeWorks, T-H-I-E-M-E-W-O-R-K-S. 554 00:52:43,840 --> 00:52:47,080 A lot of what I write goes there, and it's all free. 555 00:52:47,620 --> 00:52:51,500 If you want to access it, take a card. 556 00:52:51,720 --> 00:52:55,260 Second, if you like, this is archaic. 557 00:52:55,260 --> 00:53:01,720 This is a book, and this is what a publisher did to his profit and not to mine. 558 00:53:02,240 --> 00:53:03,140 Believe me. 559 00:53:03,140 --> 00:53:13,140 When he collected a lot of my fiction non-fiction that I was sending out, he very kindly allowed me to sell them at a cheap discounted price. 560 00:53:13,140 --> 00:53:17,100 Not as cheap as you'll get on the web, which I think is down to 44 cents on Amazon. 561 00:53:17,620 --> 00:53:23,440 But, if somebody wants to buy a book and have it signed, they're 20 bucks. 562 00:53:23,440 --> 00:53:27,520 Or, someone can think about it and then email me and pay through PayPal. 563 00:53:27,520 --> 00:53:30,880 I said I would say that with taste and discretion, and that's the end of that. 564 00:53:31,020 --> 00:53:32,320 These are free. 565 00:53:32,380 --> 00:53:39,280 This is entitled The Changing Context of Intelligence and Ethics, Enabling Technologies as Transformational Engines. 566 00:53:39,540 --> 00:53:42,540 Lori has copies of this in the office. 567 00:53:42,540 --> 00:53:44,360 All you have to do is ask for one. 568 00:53:44,360 --> 00:53:48,080 She can't make it public because it was just accepted for a conference. 569 00:53:48,600 --> 00:54:00,220 But I don't mind you having one, and if you want it in a computerized form, give me your email address or take mine and send me your email address and I'll send you the document. 570 00:54:00,220 --> 00:54:02,160 This was written a few years ago. 571 00:54:02,160 --> 00:54:05,440 Bill Moyers convened some of us to talk about technology and religion. 572 00:54:05,500 --> 00:54:09,400 It takes the pieces that I've talked about here in a much more coherent way. 573 00:54:09,500 --> 00:54:25,940 Entering sacred digital space, seeking to distinguish the dreamer and the dream, really is looking forward to say what kinds of religious expectations do we have in a world as a result of electronic communication, biotechnology, and a transplanetary culture? 574 00:54:25,940 --> 00:54:29,560 What is likely to be some of the interaction? 575 00:54:29,680 --> 00:54:32,400 What kind of human being is it going to produce? 576 00:54:32,520 --> 00:54:35,020 So, that you can have. 577 00:54:35,020 --> 00:54:40,160 She'll make copies of that for everybody, and I will also send you that one too, if you want it. 578 00:54:41,320 --> 00:54:43,740 Any further questions? 579 00:54:43,920 --> 00:54:45,880 Whether it's televised or not. 580 00:54:46,940 --> 00:54:49,800 I'll turn this on and scoot back here. 581 00:54:50,580 --> 00:55:09,760 As an illustration of one of the things you were talking about, in terms of boundaries changing with time, it's interesting to note the boundaries of some countries where we're having activities that are being resisted by those trying to enforce old national boundaries. 582 00:55:09,760 --> 00:55:16,100 For example, the Kurdish population, which stretches across four different, or five different countries. 583 00:55:16,100 --> 00:55:19,720 And one example that, as you noted in the news, Pakistan. 584 00:55:19,720 --> 00:55:22,480 Pakistan never was really a country . 585 00:55:22,940 --> 00:55:26,360 In fact, the name was made up from the groups, the tribes. 586 00:55:26,780 --> 00:55:35,360 And I was reading an analysis where somebody was saying that the Indian Raj, actually, was set up by the British. 587 00:55:35,360 --> 00:55:37,940 The boundaries were set from what they could defend. 588 00:55:38,020 --> 00:55:44,600 So , they went far enough into the mountains that that was as far as they could send their troops , all the way around the northern boundary of India. 589 00:55:44,600 --> 00:55:47,240 And that defined where India was. 590 00:55:48,360 --> 00:55:51,240 Countries in Africa, there's a whole number of these. 591 00:55:51,240 --> 00:56:12,220 But, as time has gone on, and transportation and communication have become more available to the people living in the remote regions that constitute some of the border areas, or the remote areas of these countries, they become aware of their differences from their peers within the country, 592 00:56:12,220 --> 00:56:19,520 and their similarities to ancient tribal colleagues across what would otherwise be the border. 593 00:56:19,520 --> 00:56:26,720 And this has led to unrest, seek for separatism, and other kinds of behavior in many of these places around the world. 594 00:56:26,720 --> 00:56:44,320 And so, the communication has brought a change in that it has enabled them to understand where actually their effective alliance or kinship actually existed across what would otherwise be a geopolitical border that was established for other purposes hundreds of years ago. 595 00:56:44,320 --> 00:56:44,680 Right. 596 00:56:44,680 --> 00:56:48,360 And another thing that the technologies have made available is that you have options. 597 00:56:48,360 --> 00:56:50,100 And I saw that in religion too. 598 00:56:50,320 --> 00:56:54,960 It's become a shop till you drop kind of world in America for religions. 599 00:56:54,960 --> 00:57:00,540 They're brands, they sell services, and they identify themselves through complex marketing techniques . 600 00:57:00,540 --> 00:57:09,980 But what you're saying is , and think about this for yourselves , one of the things I realized the technology was doing was making things like itself modular and fluid . 601 00:57:09,980 --> 00:57:11,940 Modular and fluid. 602 00:57:11,940 --> 00:57:22,640 Modular means that when I grew up, and people in my era often grew up thinking they would have a job, an occupation, a vocation . 603 00:57:22,640 --> 00:57:25,380 They were born to a religion and they would be in it. 604 00:57:25,380 --> 00:57:31,680 It was literally unthinkable that they would not be whatever they were given as their water to fish. 605 00:57:32,380 --> 00:57:38,040 They would get married and while something might happen, they would probably stay married. 606 00:57:38,660 --> 00:57:52,960 In other words, there was a single linear structure to your life, and you literally didn't think you had options until the technologies enabled the economic and social realities that gave you those options, and identity is one of them. 607 00:57:52,960 --> 00:57:55,660 So that I have reinvented myself three times. 608 00:57:55,660 --> 00:57:59,360 I say it like it's, oh I did this, I did this, but it wasn't doing. 609 00:57:59,420 --> 00:58:01,100 I was a teacher of literature. 610 00:58:01,260 --> 00:58:05,420 Then I was a priest , and now I'm kind of a whatever . 611 00:58:06,560 --> 00:58:09,220 Speaker, writer , I mean it doesn't really have a name. 612 00:58:09,700 --> 00:58:11,140 People say, how do I define you? 613 00:58:11,140 --> 00:58:13,040 What do I say about what you speak about? 614 00:58:13,040 --> 00:58:15,800 Someone said, I was telling my husband, I really like your speeches. 615 00:58:15,800 --> 00:58:16,900 He said, what does he talk about? 616 00:58:16,900 --> 00:58:18,600 She said, I don't know. 617 00:58:19,120 --> 00:58:20,180 I don't know. 618 00:58:20,700 --> 00:58:32,700 What she was really saying is that making the context content, making the invisible visible, brings things into focus, but we fall back into our habitual structures of thinking. 619 00:58:32,760 --> 00:58:35,320 So when you ask, what is the content of the context? 620 00:58:35,320 --> 00:58:38,200 It's like the mind observing itself. 621 00:58:38,200 --> 00:58:39,580 It can catch it for a minute. 622 00:58:39,580 --> 00:58:41,080 Buddhists call it enlightenment. 623 00:58:41,160 --> 00:58:43,540 But then it falls back into itself again. 624 00:58:44,060 --> 00:58:49,340 But identity is a choice, and it's the enabling technologies that let us know. 625 00:58:50,420 --> 00:58:55,860 Do we realize that Pakistan is living the American dream right now? 626 00:58:55,860 --> 00:59:01,800 The lawyers are demonstrating and the police is picking them up and putting them away. 627 00:59:03,240 --> 00:59:04,820 Maybe not the lawyers' dream. 628 00:59:05,540 --> 00:59:06,900 Anything else? 629 00:59:08,780 --> 00:59:12,840 Well, let's express our thanks, and I'm sure you'll all find some peace. 630 00:59:12,900 --> 00:59:13,820 Thanks.