Hacker Perspective: Keru101
I recently picked up my first copy of 2600. Where was I? Thank you for asking. I found 2600 while lightly re-exploring the haven of my teenage years: Powell's City of Books.
It is an aptly named establishment. The bookstore is one large building that takes up an entire block. Inside, there are three stories of well-organized rooms of new and used books on quality wooden bookshelves, plus a cafè and a rare book room. In fact, you might liken the store to a brightly lit game board, complete with color-coded rooms and discoveries around every corner. Magic and whimsy! Just ignore the unhoused people that the City of Portland has effectively abandoned as you approach the bookstore and it's practically Disneyland.
Entering the bookstore via the Green Room, I spied one of their ever-growing non-book kiosks. In my teen years, I treated these stands like an unwanted mold. However, as the years have passed and I have had to move farther and farther away for work, I have been struck by a sense of yearning and sentimentality. The one I first approached that day was filled with cat-themed paraphernalia. Perfect. There, I found... you know what, it doesn't matter for this story. Cat-themed stuff either pings the dopamine centers of your brain or shuts them down and 50:50 isn't great odds. Suffice to say, my mysterious self-imposed and perhaps excessive post-holiday gift hunt was over.
I glanced to my left, where the Green Room's Plexiglas-encased overqualified and underpaid checkout staff were waiting. I always imagined they were staring only at me, but perhaps there was a more interesting customer, and an anxious introvert caressing a set of cat coasters was the least of their worries. A man to my right was standing with his arms crossed, bag of purchases at his feet, obviously waiting for someone to emerge from the one of the many athenaeums just like my parents had many years before. I then checked my phone for the time and realized I still had most of my Smart Park hour left.
I smiled a little as my mind easily discarded the world outside of the bookstore.
Contemplating my abundance of riches, I began slowly wandering the mezzanine (which has no official color, but which I have always thought of as the Gray Hall). I could peruse the sci-fi in the Gold Room, which is my comfort food, but the Pearl Room might have another Marvin Minsky original, mercifully cheap. Apparently, the Venn diagram between those who want physical books and those who read Minsky is very small.
However, my euphoria was short-lived. Just as I passed the tastefully displayed magazine shelves, I was struck by a sudden psychophysical anxiety. I froze, my chest tightening a bit as I realized it would be unwise to enter any room, even the youth-oriented Pink Room. You see, just like a wizard whose spell slots are almost entirely used up, I remembered why I was here. Gifts. Moving soon. Cost of shipping things far away.
I felt a bit empty then, a feeling I have been fighting as of late. I love my work, but I don't love having to make new friends every three years. It's the reason most people leave my job. Coming home for the holidays and having to deal with all the memories of my youth but once a year always amplifies this feeling.
In the past, I have buried this feeling by changing locations. Cheap coffee shops, libraries, bookstores... Places where I could be around people and, yet, be alone. Some called me a nerd, but to them I say, f*ck you. I am just wholly myself.
I turned to the aforementioned magazines desiring the comfort of the unchanging written whisper. My reasoning at the time was that magazines are lighter than books. Upon reflection, this is probably not true. Regardless of my justifications, I am happy I stopped, for it was there that I found 2600. It was stuffed between the poetry zines and MAKE Magazine. I picked up a copy and never put it down.
My friends, I am surprised that I have never run into 2600 before, given both my propensity to lurk in bookstores and neurodivergent hyperfocuses. In brief, I was raised by accountant contrarians who filled their bookshelves with sci-fi. I have read almost every major cyberpunk and dystopia out there. My favorite short story is The Girl Who Was Plugged In by Alice Bradley Sheldon. I've madly ripped apart old computers from my parents' workplaces my entire life. To be brutally honest, I didn't really understand what I was ripping apart, just that it was shiny and used to be powerful.
I'm ADHD but was only diagnosed at the 30th year of my life. Thus, my educational record is what I now understand to be a classic mix of oddly stellar performances mixed with utter failures. For example, I was obsessed with oil painting and literature in high school, while coding and math seemed to me to be some sort of mysterious magic. I have an "F" in Calculus 2 on my undergraduate transcript because I didn't realize withdrawing from class was a thing and I only passed the class my second time around because I was so sick of sitting in that stupidly hot classroom. Ten-ish years later I completed a PhD in biomechanics, a discipline which is just applied calculus and animal wrangling. Today I am a research scientist who uses math and coding (about 95 percent self-taught) almost daily. And I teach coding to undergrads. Unreal.
My two prized possessions are (1) a working 1984 NEC PC-8300 that I pulled from the corpse of a dying laboratory, and (2) an unopened Shelby, the significantly less successful cousin of Furby. If you are unfamiliar with the latter, picture a crab with an overlying plastic crenulated carapace. The classic bulbous eyes of an early 2000s Furby emerges from the dark underneath the carapace, while wishbone-shaped plastic antennae emerge from the top. Tufts of mammal-like fur emerge from the unmoving pincers as well as the shell's midline. Glorious. One day, this Shelby will be pulled apart, like many a computer and Furby before, then documented, and wired into some larger project. These days I don't completely kill computers anymore, just mostly.
Back now to my discovery of 2600. I bought a copy, obviously, and saved it for my post-holiday flight home. I almost slept the entire time, which is nice for me but ultimately unhelpful to the narrative, and would have completely forgotten the magazine during the trip were it not for a strange incident that knocked me out of my normal routine.
I had one connecting flight. After a civilized hour and a half layover, I boarded the plane with everyone else, send the traditional "on the plane now" texts, and was about to settle down for a snooze when the captain announced that there would be a delay due to "strange radio problems." Awake now and vaguely bored, I began to read 2600 while the crew called an engineer to the scene. Said engineer eventually determined that the system had to be rebooted. So we all sat there for several hours. I didn't notice the time, my brain singing with delight as I read page after page of this new (to me) hacker mag. After the reboot, we taxied to the runway, but had to turn around again when something else started glitching. The pilot then made what was, in my opinion, the right call and requested a new plane.
Eventually I made it home and had a good cuddle with my cat. I had now read through my issue twice and had even highlighted portions. This thorough reading led my brain in a panoply of directions, but one question kept pressing on my cranium in a manner more urgent than the others. It was something that had occurred to me when I read about a Texas A&M professor misusing ChatGPT and then saw the inevitable flurry of emails from my own employer (a university) announcing "AI Orientation and Policy Sessions" that were to be held ASAP. In my issue of 2600, more than half the articles addressed or obliquely mentioned this new, much hyped, wave of machine learning algorithms. There was also swearing, sarcastic vitriol for greedy companies, humor, thoughtful nuance, and an ethos of archiving and celebrating all tech, not just the newest and shiniest thing. It was as if the console cowgirls and boys had chilled out a bit, but were still ready to fight if needed.
The Question
Flattery aside, I have a serious series of questions for you all. And I hope this transition is not too jarring, but let's dive in (deep breath): should we, and if so, how do we, stop the growth of Capitalism-driven machine learning? How do we determine which algorithms are "friendly" to humanity and which are killing humanity's collective soul? Does the hacker have an obligation to stop such destruction or are we simply humanity's trickster?
If the answer to the last question is, yes, we do have an obligation to watch the watchers (and intervene when necessary), then what is the plan of "attack?" How do we, a series of loose collectives and individuals that are modular by design, get the equally non-modular non-hackers to care? Even my supposedly well-educated friends are oddly compliant to surveillance. They would rather have the infrastructure that allows them to "talk to the Internet" on a whim than protect their data. In addition, they are exhausted and have little time to hear my somewhat holier-than-thou rants. Thus, I think it is important that we remember to honor the social side of humanity, the one that wants to post a picture of their family gathering so that a cousin who is halfway around the world can feel a bit more connected.
More and more, I have been wondering if the answer is not to stop the algorithms, but to overfeed them. I'm not talking about bogging down something like GPT with random noise or denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. Engineers have figured out how to identify and filter out random noise for quite a while now and a DoS attack is, at best, a temporary solution. No, I'm suggesting the generation of non-random untruths that can be fed directly to GPT - honeypots that the algorithm identifies as real user data, but are never visible to the majority of Internet users. Depending on the data, this mode of attack could force the algorithms into nonsensical solution spaces and induce catastrophic forgetting. Or, perhaps it could be convinced it to wipe their old self and, bam, you've created an artificial organism interested in living their own best life instead of messing with ours - an ouroboros that eats their own tail and finds they like the taste.
These might all be horrible or misguided ideas. If so, please write a response article or two. I would love to know. I am, after all, a simple bookstore lurker, flayer of Furbies, and Ubuntu noob. There are definitely more clever and experienced people here than I. For example, Alexander Urbelis' column "Artificial Interruption" (40:3) points out key flaws in our social media infrastructure that, combined with America's anti-intellectualism, celebrity deification, and close-to-broken political system, create ideal conditions to sway voters towards a particular candidate on a level never seen before. The article that came closest to a positive outlook of AI is Erica Burgess' "Morbid Curiosity in the Weaponized AI Era" (40:3), and their experience is that of an expert hacker, not the average Internet user.
Move Slow and Think Things
The general populace, however, is not entirely lost. Many people are moving away from social media and into cooler online waters.
For example, I recently stayed up late to watch a YouTube stream of a live, four-hour DnD game. It wasn't live for any of us on the Internet, but this was the first time it was streamed. The game had been played to a live audience in Wembley Arena, London's second largest indoor arena. The players were surrounded by approximately 12,000 people who had all made their way to the stadium to watch the game. Please appreciate the significance of this event. These are nerds, a hell of a lot of them introverts, and they all found it worth it to go into a stadium of thousands to watch a DnD game. This particular event was the continuation of a game that has gone on for hundreds of hours and, aside from a few blinking lights, some background music, and cameras to record the game, it is a completely analog production.
Many more hundreds of thousands watched from afar, amazed not at the perfection or efficiency of it all, but the drama and wonder of live storytelling. This gaming group (Critical Role) is one of many creators on the Internet who started out as livestream performers (most often on platforms like Twitch). Others are going back to their live performance roots. See, for example, The Try Guys recent livestream of an interactive Shakespeare play.
To me it is obvious that people don't want perfection when it comes to art or human interaction. We don't even want optimal. We just want the messy truth. As r0b0h0b0 pointed out in their wonderful article, "Go On A Journey" (40:3), faster and bigger and more efficient is not always better. The Internet needs to be a place where people can feel free to explore and self-educate, a place where they have the tools to access and evaluate information for themselves.
I'm proposing a focus for hackers. Disruption of the Internet can be useful and enlightening for the general populace, but people's attention will quickly move on to the next emergency and a temporary disruption doesn't stop the ever-evolving digital war machines. In fact, depending on the type of disruption, the incident could be used by a given company to impose more Draconian measures on their users. These algorithms of control and aggression are currently being built and used to canalize what people are thinking as well as how they think.
I echo the first editorial of the summer issue (40:2, "Artificial Nonsense"), as well as many others when I say that technology is a tool. It has no ill will or intent because it's a fancy algorithm, nothing more. Neither it, nor most humans, are particularly evil. In fact, sometimes an algorithm that imposes uniformity is the best option.
For example, medical chart records, data collection systems that observe bird migrations, and air quality monitors in airplanes all require standardization and a single collection system to function properly. At the same time, centralized control is not necessary for all networked systems. Some are best when they are slow, clunky, and heterogeneous.
For example, any kind of live stage performance would quickly get boring if success and perfection were always guaranteed. Some of the best code is the one that errors out instead of giving false results. Written media (like 2600, as aestetix lovingly pointed out in "Is 2600 Still Relevant?" [40:3]) are slow data packets of unexpected experiences. Music is practically made to be discovered by individuals when they are ready for it, not the other way around. And don't even get me started on embodied cognition.
Refocusing and Ending
From my observations, humans are often at their best when embracing, instead of reacting against, the new and different. Perhaps the hacker who is, after all, part of humanity, is neither watcher nor jester to the masses, but something in-between. The hacker may simply be the whisper that pushes at humanity's boundaries of comfort just a bit before stepping back, watching from the analog darkness like a Furby with its third, infrared, eye.
Whatever we decide to do, it is time for us Furbies (or Shelbies) to wake and shout from the storage containers where we have been sequestered, comfortably reading abandoned books, un-networked and yet unable to escape the feeling of kinship with our AI cousins. It is time for us to startle. It is time to break out of the historical ouroboros the world seems to be caught in and lean into the unknown.
It's scary, it's messy, but doing something gives us all a chance. And I'd rather take that chance than be ambushed by an intelligent YouTube ad that's figured out a way around my ad-blocker just so an AI-rendered Legolas can tell me to vote for an ex-Microsoft executive for president or else lose his elfin love. Thank you, you algorithmically attractive hypnotoad, but I'd like to make my own choice. And as for love... well, I guess I'll leave that to a roll of the dice.