WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:08.000 Thank you very much. 22 years is a long time to watch this grow from what it was to what it is. 00:08.000 --> 00:13.000 We used to be able to say what it was, we don't know how to say what it is. 00:13.000 --> 00:19.000 Because there's so many minor cons going on. And the industry has exploded. 00:19.000 --> 00:24.000 And as long as we keep selling something that we don't deliver, it's going to just get bigger. 00:24.000 --> 00:30.000 So I think it's important to keep selling security to people who keep needing it. 00:30.000 --> 00:38.000 Kind of like self-help books. If they worked, there wouldn't be another one. 00:38.000 --> 00:42.000 But that's just an aside. It's great to be here. 00:42.000 --> 00:47.000 I do want to mention just briefly, the last year when I spoke, I addressed a pretty serious issue, 00:47.000 --> 00:53.000 which was the traumatic impact of security work and intelligence work on professionals who do it 00:53.000 --> 00:58.000 over a prolonged period of time. And it was the first time I heard people crying at DEF CON. 00:58.000 --> 01:06.000 Because it brought forth what some of you have experienced over many, many years. 01:06.000 --> 01:12.000 And I'm just sharing that to say, if you look at the YouTube video, it's online, and a lot of people looked at it. 01:12.000 --> 01:20.000 It's a serious subject that is seldom addressed directly and successfully inside the agencies, or often by corporate. 01:20.000 --> 01:24.000 And yet it gets bigger and bigger as the space gets bigger and bigger. 01:24.000 --> 01:31.000 So I invite you, if you have any insight or anything to share with me, to please follow up on that. 01:31.000 --> 01:33.000 It continues to plague people. 01:33.000 --> 01:42.000 I got an email just last week from a good friend, longtime friend at NSA, who said they were advised to be sure they watch each other's backs. 01:42.000 --> 01:48.000 Well, that's the kind of advice that's easy to give and impossible to take, because it's not very specific. 01:48.000 --> 01:56.000 But the reason he found out was because three people had committed suicide that week and one the week before. 01:56.000 --> 02:05.000 And I did quote a friend, well, a fellow at CIA, who said he bears through his life 23 suicides. 02:05.000 --> 02:11.000 And they were inordinately proud of having the highest rate of suicide, alcoholism, divorce, and adultery in the government. 02:11.000 --> 02:16.000 That was the DO, the Director of Operations. 02:16.000 --> 02:19.000 That's the sobering part of the talk. 02:19.000 --> 02:28.000 Keep in mind, it's an uphill climb to get people to look at it, including people who are suffering from it, because there are antidotes. 02:28.000 --> 02:34.000 We all bear scars, but there are ways we can live with them more successfully than some other ways. 02:34.000 --> 02:44.000 So that's what that's about, is looking at all the different things we can do to ameliorate the impact of what it does to us over time to do this work 02:44.000 --> 02:47.000 and to engage with people who are on the cutting edge. 02:47.000 --> 02:52.000 Well, what I want to do today, it's not a very sexy topic, privacy, why it's gone. 02:52.000 --> 02:54.000 Everybody knows it's gone. 02:54.000 --> 02:58.000 And you could do a very short speech on that. 02:58.000 --> 03:11.000 I was in Amsterdam not long ago, and I was talking to a friend who works at a pretty high level and asked if we will ever get back any semblance of protection or freedoms from intrusion and privacy. 03:11.000 --> 03:16.000 And she said in a tone that I'll never forget, oh, Richard, of course not. 03:16.000 --> 03:27.000 Of course not, because the technologies of intrusion and surveillance are so deeply embedded in all of our means of working, living, and communicating with one another today. 03:27.000 --> 03:35.000 And it is so profitable to have them and so unprofitable to remove them that we will never get back the freedoms that we thought we had. 03:35.000 --> 03:43.000 So she sounded kind of like Michael Corleone in The Godfather when Kay said, but Michael, senators don't kill people. 03:43.000 --> 03:52.000 And Corleone said, oh, Kay, who is being naive now implying that senators did indeed kill people? 03:52.000 --> 03:59.000 I should ask at this point, because of something that just happened to me, how many of you know what I mean when I say the Godfather? 03:59.000 --> 04:01.000 How many of you? 04:01.000 --> 04:03.000 Okay, good, good. 04:03.000 --> 04:08.000 Let me do a test, because if it happens here, then I know I've got to make some changes. 04:08.000 --> 04:13.000 I was doing a talk for a pretty sizable audience and in Montreal. 04:13.000 --> 04:22.000 And I referred to Chinatown, Jake Ittis, when they said, come on, it's Chinatown, Jake, it's Chinatown. 04:22.000 --> 04:24.000 And someone came up and said, nobody knows what you mean. 04:24.000 --> 04:27.000 How many of you have seen the movie Chinatown? 04:27.000 --> 04:30.000 Okay, that's pretty good. 04:30.000 --> 04:34.000 How many of you have seen the movie The Conversation? 04:34.000 --> 04:35.000 Fewer. 04:35.000 --> 04:39.000 Okay, I encourage you to see The Conversation, see what it's like. 04:39.000 --> 04:42.000 It's a terrific movie with Gene Hackman about surveillance. 04:42.000 --> 04:49.000 But the point is, I'd like to be able to refer to popular culture markers and signals that people recognize. 04:49.000 --> 04:55.000 And I learned my lesson when Adam Shostak got up after me and all he had were slides from Star Wars and Rogue One. 04:55.000 --> 05:00.000 And everybody knew exactly what he was talking about whenever he used them. 05:00.000 --> 05:02.000 We'll touch on that a little later. 05:02.000 --> 05:06.000 So everybody knows that privacy in the way I just referred to it is gone. 05:06.000 --> 05:07.000 But that's the view on the ground. 05:07.000 --> 05:15.000 And I want to take us up to maybe 30, 40, 50, 60,000 feet to look at what it really means the privacy is gone, 05:15.000 --> 05:21.000 because of what it means that our identity has so radically been altered by the digitalization 05:21.000 --> 05:28.000 and other factors in the world of the 21st century that privacy is literally non-existent. 05:28.000 --> 05:31.000 It's not whether we can recapture it or have it. 05:31.000 --> 05:35.000 It's that it doesn't exist in the same way that it existed. 05:35.000 --> 05:40.000 And I want to talk about why that is with a broad view over what's happened to society, 05:40.000 --> 05:45.000 including a look at a few things like words over the last few hundred years. 05:45.000 --> 05:52.000 Privacy is defined as freedom from damaging publicity, public scrutiny, secret surveillance, 05:52.000 --> 05:58.000 unauthorized disclosure of one's personal data or information as by a government corporation or individual, 05:58.000 --> 06:00.000 as if ordinary citizens have a right to privacy. 06:00.000 --> 06:05.000 When I read that definition, it's laughable, because all of that is gone. 06:05.000 --> 06:07.000 We do not have that freedom. 06:07.000 --> 06:10.000 We are not free from any of those things. 06:10.000 --> 06:11.000 And I don't think we will be. 06:11.000 --> 06:15.000 But what I want to do is try to get us to see that the 20th century framework 06:15.000 --> 06:20.000 within which we think about these things and our identity is effectively ending. 06:20.000 --> 06:28.000 And it's very important to know who you are so that you can determine what you do with effectiveness and some clarity. 06:28.000 --> 06:35.000 When the VGA cable comes, if it ever comes, I'll put a picture up or two. 06:35.000 --> 06:38.000 But let me get into the talk. 06:38.000 --> 06:41.000 I'm going to start with a quote from Nietzsche. 06:41.000 --> 06:45.000 You like to do that at DEF CON because everybody reads Nietzsche, right? 06:45.000 --> 06:48.000 He said, with the unknown, one is confronted with danger. 06:48.000 --> 06:52.000 In other words, somebody says something to you that's totally unknown, it's dangerous. 06:52.000 --> 06:54.000 It causes discomfort and great care. 06:54.000 --> 06:58.000 And the first instinct is to abolish the pain of being in those states. 06:58.000 --> 07:00.000 So this is his first principle. 07:00.000 --> 07:03.000 Any explanation is better than none. 07:03.000 --> 07:09.000 And since at bottom, what you really want to do is get rid of the oppressive information or representation. 07:09.000 --> 07:12.000 You're not too particular about the means of getting rid of them. 07:12.000 --> 07:18.000 So the first representation, the first idea, the first theory that explains everything, 07:18.000 --> 07:24.000 explains the unknown in a familiar way using the categories of the past. 07:24.000 --> 07:28.000 It feels so good that you call it true. 07:28.000 --> 07:30.000 You say, we consider that true. 07:30.000 --> 07:34.000 The proof of pleasure is the criterion of truth. 07:34.000 --> 07:36.000 In other words, does it alleviate your cognitive dissonance? 07:36.000 --> 07:38.000 Does it downplay your anxiety? 07:38.000 --> 07:44.000 Does it make you feel better in the face of the fearfulness of the unknown and the new? 07:44.000 --> 07:49.000 And so the fear is the real problem that confronts us. 07:49.000 --> 07:53.000 And therefore, we have to abolish that feeling. 07:53.000 --> 07:56.000 And the strange and the new and the hitherto unexperienced 07:56.000 --> 08:01.000 must disappear into habitual, comfortable, familiar explanations. 08:01.000 --> 08:05.000 And that's why he says, too, we must tell stories that are untimely, 08:05.000 --> 08:11.000 by which he means the consensus reality in which we live at any given moment is our time. 08:11.000 --> 08:17.000 But the truths that are coming at us faster and faster of the kind I'm speaking are untimely. 08:17.000 --> 08:23.000 We are speaking to a future state which is already here, but as Gibson said, unevenly distributed. 08:23.000 --> 08:28.000 In other words, truths, the deepest truths you believe about who you are and your identity, 08:28.000 --> 08:34.000 are illusions that we have comfortably and conveniently forgot were illusions in order to live with them. 08:34.000 --> 08:38.000 And truths held collectively by a group or organization have to be confronted 08:38.000 --> 08:45.000 on behalf of a future people that will not hold those truths naively. 08:45.000 --> 08:49.000 So we often embrace truths by which we live because they make us feel better 08:49.000 --> 08:53.000 and alleviate cognitive dissonance, but they're not true. 08:53.000 --> 08:55.000 What's true is what's real. 08:55.000 --> 09:00.000 And as Philip K. Dick said, reality is that which when we refuse to believe in it won't go away. 09:00.000 --> 09:03.000 And here we are living inside of Philip K. Dick. 09:03.000 --> 09:06.000 Now, how many of you know who Philip K. Dick is? 09:06.000 --> 09:10.000 Okay, pretty savvy crowd on edge thinkers. 09:10.000 --> 09:13.000 Now, I spoke in Canada about privacy about four years ago, 09:13.000 --> 09:16.000 and I thought I don't have to ever change the speech I give in Canada 09:16.000 --> 09:20.000 because it's the same issues year after year after year. 09:20.000 --> 09:27.000 And I spoke for the ministers of privacy not long ago, tried to give a different slant on it. 09:27.000 --> 09:32.000 And one of the ministers of privacy from British Columbia said that was very provocative keynote, 09:32.000 --> 09:37.000 but let us hope it's not true, and did not realize she was a proof of concept 09:37.000 --> 09:44.000 of that Nietzschean statement I just made, which is it's provocative, but I don't want it to be true. 09:44.000 --> 09:47.000 And therefore, because my job is to be the minister of privacy, 09:47.000 --> 09:55.000 I have to treat it as if it is not true, even though I know it is. 09:55.000 --> 10:01.000 Okay, man's plugging stuff in here. 10:01.000 --> 10:07.000 Let me make sure the soft porn is not. 10:07.000 --> 10:25.000 Okay, so that's going to be my image for the hour, that DEF CON image, I guess. 10:25.000 --> 10:30.000 Somebody's probably doing something to try to get the other image up. 10:30.000 --> 10:35.000 Okay, so one of the ministers of privacy got up and gave a very, very passionate speech 10:35.000 --> 10:40.000 about all the restrictions they have on the government and on society to try to save privacy. 10:40.000 --> 10:44.000 And I asked if they really work for the intelligence community. 10:44.000 --> 10:46.000 Do they really adhere to these things? 10:46.000 --> 10:49.000 And she said, well, in theory. 10:49.000 --> 10:55.000 And all you can say is in theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice they're not. 10:55.000 --> 10:57.000 Okay, so privacy and security. 10:57.000 --> 10:59.000 Matt Blaze once said a long time ago, 10:59.000 --> 11:03.000 the weakest link in the security chain is frequently the definition of the problem. 11:03.000 --> 11:06.000 And the definition of the problem is often not what we think. 11:06.000 --> 11:10.000 That applies to privacy too, and we're going to see how. 11:10.000 --> 11:16.000 Because these are difficult concepts I'm trying to advance because they, like the Zen Buddhist say, 11:16.000 --> 11:18.000 a nightmare is a nightmare in daylight. 11:18.000 --> 11:21.000 And when you grasp it, suddenly everything else explodes, 11:21.000 --> 11:25.000 and you have nothing but space to create new possibilities if you can stand it. 11:25.000 --> 11:28.000 And that's what we're talking about. 11:28.000 --> 11:31.000 We're living by 20th century concepts. 11:31.000 --> 11:37.000 And they don't fit anymore, and therefore we talk about privacy and security, actually. 11:37.000 --> 11:42.000 As if we know the definitions of the problems, but they're not what we think. 11:42.000 --> 11:48.000 A wise person under these conditions steers their course by the torchlight of doubt and chaos. 11:48.000 --> 11:50.000 And as Niels Bohr said of quantum physics, 11:50.000 --> 11:54.000 anybody who isn't confused doesn't understand what's going on. 11:54.000 --> 11:58.000 I think that's true about privacy and security as well. 11:58.000 --> 12:01.000 Okay, now let me provide some history. 12:01.000 --> 12:07.000 Printing press with movable type was introduced to Europe by Gutenberg in 1439. 12:07.000 --> 12:13.000 It played an unimaginably huge role in the development of the Renaissance, the Reformation, 12:13.000 --> 12:16.000 the Age of Enlightenment, and the whole Scientific Revolution, 12:16.000 --> 12:22.000 because you now could share standardized tables and data for the first time in history. 12:22.000 --> 12:27.000 It laid the material basis for our knowledge-based economy and the spread of learning to the masses. 12:27.000 --> 12:30.000 You cannot overstate the importance of the printing press. 12:30.000 --> 12:37.000 And it was revolutionary in England when William Caxton brought the printing press there in 1476. 12:37.000 --> 12:42.000 When something changes the world so radically, we exaggerate the impact. 12:42.000 --> 12:45.000 Think of what we said about the Internet when it first came. 12:45.000 --> 12:48.000 But in the long term, we always underestimate the impact. 12:48.000 --> 12:49.000 Again, think of the Internet. 12:49.000 --> 12:53.000 The printing press, like the Internet, like digital reality, 12:53.000 --> 12:58.000 is an engine of revolution that is now a catalyst for revolution in all the other areas as well, 12:58.000 --> 13:05.000 bio and nano and space technologies and material science. 13:05.000 --> 13:10.000 And the acceleration of change has made change happen faster and faster. 13:10.000 --> 13:14.000 So we usually respond to this the way Virginia Seypere said we do to grief, 13:14.000 --> 13:18.000 first by denying it, then we get angry about it, then we get depressed, 13:18.000 --> 13:23.000 and then we negotiate with it and finally we accept it. 13:23.000 --> 13:26.000 But remnants of past behaviors... 13:26.000 --> 13:28.000 No, you're not getting an image. Don't worry about it. 13:28.000 --> 13:31.000 Don't worry about it. 13:31.000 --> 13:37.000 It was beautiful and it was very important, but don't worry about it. 13:37.000 --> 13:38.000 I'll look at it. 13:38.000 --> 13:42.000 It's the cover of my...the third volume of my novel, Foam, and it says, 13:42.000 --> 13:48.000 Identity is Destiny, and it shows a man standing before the universe. It's a gorgeous picture. 13:48.000 --> 13:49.000 It really is a gorgeous picture. 13:49.000 --> 13:53.000 And I mention that only because I will be signing a few books that I brought after the talk 13:53.000 --> 13:56.000 at 2.30 and 3 in the vendor space. 13:56.000 --> 13:59.000 The other one was going to be just a picture of mind games, 13:59.000 --> 14:02.000 because those are the kind of games I'm playing with you. 14:02.000 --> 14:06.000 I was also going to show you a picture of the UFOs and government book, 14:06.000 --> 14:09.000 because I continue to get feedback from numerous sources 14:09.000 --> 14:13.000 about the accuracy of our historical analysis of how the government responded 14:13.000 --> 14:16.000 to that phenomena over 60 years. 14:16.000 --> 14:21.000 But I won't show you those pictures. We'll just leave that aside. 14:21.000 --> 14:27.000 The remnants of past behavior persist, and how prior technology socialized us 14:27.000 --> 14:32.000 and taught us to behave as they framed our lives, then they went in the background. 14:32.000 --> 14:34.000 But they're still there. We just don't see them. 14:34.000 --> 14:37.000 Like the electric grid, you didn't see the lights. 14:37.000 --> 14:39.000 You saw by the lights when you came in here. 14:39.000 --> 14:41.000 You see by virtue of the lights illuminating. 14:41.000 --> 14:44.000 But electric lights like these are only 125 years old. 14:44.000 --> 14:46.000 We're barely up from the swamp. 14:46.000 --> 14:51.000 We're new creatures in the galaxy, and so arrogant and proud like a toddler. 14:51.000 --> 14:54.000 But it's new. But you still don't see the power grid. 14:54.000 --> 14:59.000 You don't plug in all of your equipment and say, I'm going on the power grid now. 14:59.000 --> 15:01.000 So shh, quiet, I'm on the power grid. 15:01.000 --> 15:02.000 You don't even see the power grid. 15:02.000 --> 15:06.000 But if somebody came back here from the 19th century and looked at the landscape around us, 15:06.000 --> 15:11.000 probably the first thing they would notice is all the lines and dynamos that are emblems of a power grid 15:11.000 --> 15:13.000 that they never experienced. 15:13.000 --> 15:14.000 And it goes into the background. 15:14.000 --> 15:19.000 The first automobiles had sockets in the dashboard for buggy whips, 15:19.000 --> 15:26.000 because buggies drawn by horses had sockets in which to put the buggy whips. 15:26.000 --> 15:33.000 Then after a while, they stopped making cars with holes for buggy whips. 15:33.000 --> 15:44.000 A friend remembers this time ago, this historical statement, when they were firing cannons during World War I. 15:44.000 --> 15:47.000 That's how far back I go, right? 15:47.000 --> 15:51.000 And there were people standing there when they fired the cannons with their arms out like this. 15:51.000 --> 15:53.000 At attention, he said, what are they doing? 15:53.000 --> 15:58.000 He said, they're holding the horses, because the cannons spooked the horses, and they have to hold the bridle. 15:58.000 --> 16:00.000 And he said, but we don't have any horses anymore. 16:00.000 --> 16:01.000 It's all mechanized. 16:01.000 --> 16:05.000 And there was that dull look of, oh. 16:05.000 --> 16:09.000 So the people holding the horses stayed long after the horses were gone. 16:09.000 --> 16:11.000 That's what we do. 16:11.000 --> 16:14.000 And when Caxton brought the printing press to England, 16:14.000 --> 16:18.000 printing revolutionized the world and the social worlds in which people lived, 16:18.000 --> 16:21.000 the religious world, the scientific world, the cultural world, everything. 16:21.000 --> 16:24.000 They had to choose a dialect in which to print. 16:24.000 --> 16:28.000 And that became what we called standard English. 16:28.000 --> 16:31.000 And as standard English permeated a larger and larger group, 16:31.000 --> 16:38.000 it permeated what we later called England, which did not exist yet until the social institutions that supported it 16:38.000 --> 16:44.000 had been created by the technologies which people no longer saw as causal but were. 16:44.000 --> 16:48.000 So the language printing imposed homogenized the culture over time, 16:48.000 --> 16:52.000 and political and economic and social consequences followed. 16:52.000 --> 16:54.000 So it changed how we thought. 16:54.000 --> 16:58.000 It changed more fundamentally who we were. 16:58.000 --> 17:04.000 Now, we need the language to use to understand who we have become 17:04.000 --> 17:08.000 that we are in the process now of inventing. 17:08.000 --> 17:11.000 You can't think what you can't say. 17:11.000 --> 17:19.000 And the language of the past is inadequate to describe what a human being has become today by virtue of technologies. 17:19.000 --> 17:26.000 I'll give you an example of words that you use all the time that were invented during a very fecund period, 17:26.000 --> 17:33.000 a very fertile period, 1918 to 1923, after World War I when the flapper era had exploded 17:33.000 --> 17:38.000 and the good feeling era followed before the Depression. 17:38.000 --> 17:42.000 These are words which did not exist before then. 17:42.000 --> 17:43.000 Cool. 17:43.000 --> 17:45.000 Extrovert. 17:45.000 --> 17:46.000 Fascist. 17:46.000 --> 17:47.000 Mass media. 17:47.000 --> 17:48.000 Debunk. 17:48.000 --> 17:49.000 Encode. 17:49.000 --> 17:50.000 Hypermodern. 17:50.000 --> 17:51.000 Multi-purpose. 17:51.000 --> 17:52.000 Power play. 17:52.000 --> 17:53.000 Teenage. 17:53.000 --> 17:55.000 Which was invented as a stage of life at the same time. 17:55.000 --> 17:56.000 Post-feminist. 17:56.000 --> 17:57.000 Biracial. 17:57.000 --> 17:58.000 Slinky. 17:58.000 --> 17:59.000 Sadomasochistic. 17:59.000 --> 18:00.000 Homosexuality. 18:00.000 --> 18:01.000 Fundamentalism. 18:01.000 --> 18:02.000 Psyching. 18:02.000 --> 18:03.000 Devalue. 18:03.000 --> 18:09.000 One of my favorites, because I can't imagine a Samuel L. Jackson movie without it, 18:09.000 --> 18:14.000 the word motherfucker came into play in 1918 for the first time. 18:14.000 --> 18:19.000 One can only imagine the circumstances under which that took place. 18:19.000 --> 18:22.000 Right? 18:22.000 --> 18:23.000 French kiss. 18:23.000 --> 18:24.000 Fuck off. 18:24.000 --> 18:26.000 I'm not telling you to fuck off. 18:26.000 --> 18:28.000 I'm telling you that's a phrase. 18:28.000 --> 18:29.000 Deflationary. 18:29.000 --> 18:30.000 Merchant bank. 18:30.000 --> 18:31.000 Arbitrary. 18:31.000 --> 18:32.000 I can go on and on and on. 18:32.000 --> 18:38.000 These did not exist, but now we can say them and think them because the language emerged 18:38.000 --> 18:45.000 to describe new social and cultural realities that previously we had no way of identifying. 18:45.000 --> 18:46.000 It's like hacker. 18:46.000 --> 18:49.000 You know what's happened to the word hacker right over time. 18:49.000 --> 18:51.000 It used to mean a hacker. 18:51.000 --> 18:58.000 When I first started speaking at DEF CON, DEF CON 4, it was a convention of hackers. 18:58.000 --> 18:59.000 Now there are some. 18:59.000 --> 19:01.000 We used to play spot the fed here. 19:01.000 --> 19:04.000 Now you're all fed, so we play spot the hacker. 19:04.000 --> 19:09.000 It's a more appropriate game. 19:09.000 --> 19:11.000 Well, what is a hacker today? 19:11.000 --> 19:14.000 Well, you hear black hat hacker, gray hat hacker, and white hat hacker. 19:14.000 --> 19:16.000 I'll tell you the real definitions of those. 19:16.000 --> 19:18.000 A black hat hacker is a hacker. 19:18.000 --> 19:24.000 A gray hat hacker is a hacker who put the truth down somewhere but knows where he put it. 19:24.000 --> 19:29.000 A white hat hacker is someone who put the truth down somewhere and forgot where it is. 19:29.000 --> 19:35.000 In other words, I haven't met yet a white hat hacker who is only a white hat hacker. 19:35.000 --> 19:41.000 It's a definition of convenience because in the old days, at any rate, the only way you learned by hacking, 19:41.000 --> 19:45.000 the only way you learned to hack was by hacking. 19:45.000 --> 19:52.000 And it was a passionate commitment to doing anything you needed to do to look at things in a new way and learn from them. 19:52.000 --> 19:58.000 We need new language to articulate what we experience and grasp the nature of the context in which we live. 19:58.000 --> 20:04.000 We need new language today to discuss ethics, spirituality, and identity and privacy. 20:04.000 --> 20:11.000 The weakest link in discussions of privacy is the definition of privacy, and the definition of privacy is not what we think. 20:11.000 --> 20:16.000 Let us give true props to what this technology has done. 20:16.000 --> 20:20.000 When we invent a technology like this, Langdon Winner, a computer scientist, said, 20:20.000 --> 20:29.000 society also invents the kinds of people who will use it. Older practices, relationships, and ways of defining identities fall by the wayside. 20:29.000 --> 20:32.000 New practices, relationships, and identities take root. 20:32.000 --> 20:41.000 In case after case, the move to computerize and digitize means pre-existing cultural forms have suddenly gone liquid like an ice cube in your hand, 20:41.000 --> 20:45.000 losing their former shape as they are restructured for computerized expression. 20:45.000 --> 20:54.000 As these new patterns solidify, both useful artifacts and the texture of human relations that surround them will be much different than what existed previously. 20:54.000 --> 21:03.000 In other words, I'm trying to emphasize how big this really is, and yet our minds keep it small in order to let us live in it day by day. 21:03.000 --> 21:09.000 It wasn't long ago that people spoke of going on the Internet. I mean, really not long ago. 21:09.000 --> 21:17.000 But I talk to children today who don't know what it means to go on the Internet because they are always on the Internet. 21:17.000 --> 21:23.000 And I could show you a picture if they could get the technology to work. It's very complicated. 21:23.000 --> 21:33.000 Of a recent dinner. I moved to Minneapolis, which is a great city, and my wife and daughter and two grandchildren were sitting and eating. 21:33.000 --> 21:41.000 And every single person, except me, who had a digital camera to take the picture, was on an iPad or an iPhone in the booth. 21:41.000 --> 21:48.000 And I have to believe some of them were texting each other so that the communication among the family was not totally down. 21:48.000 --> 21:54.000 But from the bleeps and squeaks of the games that kids were playing, I don't think that's what was happening. 21:54.000 --> 21:59.000 So new technologies socialize as to their context. 21:59.000 --> 22:05.000 Telephone voices sounded weird back when the telephone was invented. They sounded unnatural. 22:05.000 --> 22:10.000 And yet when the Internet first came forward, somebody at a radio station wanted to interview me about all this. 22:10.000 --> 22:15.000 And she said, call me. Don't send me an email. I want to speak to a real person. 22:15.000 --> 22:22.000 And I had to explain how telephones work. It was electronic signal, blah, blah, blah. It wasn't a real person. 22:22.000 --> 22:27.000 And yet today you get an email or text from a real person. You assume it's real. 22:27.000 --> 22:33.000 Well, and then there's that whole other problem that it often isn't. But that's a totally different question. 22:33.000 --> 22:37.000 OK, so I talked about England briefly in order to introduce that subject. 22:37.000 --> 22:41.000 And when I used the words English and England, I bet you thought we had a common understanding of what we meant. 22:41.000 --> 22:47.000 But in fact, what we mean when we say the name of any nation state is no longer what it used to be. 22:47.000 --> 22:55.000 It isn't the same because the boundaries around nation states have become first semi-permeable and porous, and then they went down. 22:55.000 --> 23:02.000 In the 90s, when I was talking to people in the intelligence community about the impact this had on the work CIA and NSA and others were doing, 23:02.000 --> 23:07.000 because they've got to be well ahead of us. When I talk to people at CIA about scientific biological stuff, 23:07.000 --> 23:11.000 it's keep in mind that anything I tell you was 20 years ago. 23:11.000 --> 23:20.000 And anything anybody knows out there is going to be 20 years ago because we're working a little further ahead than that. 23:20.000 --> 23:33.000 And so how many of you have been to a Shakespeare play last year? Really? What a group. Honest to God. I mean, it's wonderful. 23:33.000 --> 23:40.000 How many of you have seen a Star Wars movie? Oh, more than went to a Shakespeare play. OK. 23:40.000 --> 23:46.000 When you're going to a Shakespeare play, we think we are understanding Elizabethan English, which is being spoken, 23:46.000 --> 23:55.000 unless it's been changed to make it more palatable. But at least 25 percent of the words being used mean something different than what you think they mean. 23:55.000 --> 24:01.000 In other words, language is a dynamic process in which meanings are constantly changing, adding, disappearing and morphing. 24:01.000 --> 24:08.000 And it's a matrix, a social cultural matrix that evolves evolutionarily as we do. 24:08.000 --> 24:14.000 And yet we think that what we say and what we see by virtue of what we say is what's real and what's always been. 24:14.000 --> 24:20.000 And I'm trying to make the point that it isn't. And the word I want to emphasize is individual. 24:20.000 --> 24:29.000 When you hear the word individual, as Shakespeare used it, it meant something, some quality that was unified or indivisible. 24:29.000 --> 24:36.000 Now, we're talking about the late fifteen hundreds, early sixteen hundreds. It did not mean an individual person. 24:36.000 --> 24:41.000 When you say I'm an individual, you think of yourself as an individual human being. 24:41.000 --> 24:49.000 That didn't show up for another couple of hundred years until the 17th century, 18th century. 24:49.000 --> 24:57.000 The definition of individuality meant, quote, the state or quality of being indivisible and inseparable. 24:57.000 --> 25:05.000 It didn't mean a human being. In other words, the notion and the appropriation of the notion of what it meant to be a human being, 25:05.000 --> 25:12.000 an individual human being, emerged as an emergent property for the cultural and social changes, the technologies of the time, 25:12.000 --> 25:16.000 and especially the printing press, which I'll get back to, were occasioning. 25:16.000 --> 25:25.000 So the change in the meaning of the word individuality is related to the breakup of the entire medieval social, economic, and religious order. 25:25.000 --> 25:33.000 We think that is a historical event, but at the time it was monumental and transformational, and so is our own. 25:33.000 --> 25:37.000 But if we look at it in too granular a way, we don't see what's happening. 25:37.000 --> 25:45.000 The new use of individual helped define a person's place in a society that was emerging into reality as well, 25:45.000 --> 25:51.000 because an individual human can live independently of society and make his or her own decisions. 25:51.000 --> 25:56.000 The person has enough knowledge to exist alone without clinging to society, 25:56.000 --> 26:04.000 and therefore what it meant to be human fundamentally changed from being just part of a whole to having a boundary around you, 26:04.000 --> 26:11.000 which defined your identity in the same way that the boundaries around nation states grew during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, 26:11.000 --> 26:20.000 and defined nation states up until Westphalia and the treaty that helped define them in a way that no longer holds. 26:20.000 --> 26:23.000 I got a good example of this when I was speaking for the FBI, 26:23.000 --> 26:31.000 and I was talking about how places, entities invented for this country, or to work in this country and to work abroad, 26:31.000 --> 26:38.000 used to be distinctive, but now foreign and domestic no longer have the same meanings. 26:38.000 --> 26:41.000 Any more than natural and artificial have the same meanings. 26:41.000 --> 26:43.000 We've blurred those lines so much. 26:43.000 --> 26:48.000 And the head of the office, the agent in charge of the Chicago office, the FBI, said, 26:48.000 --> 26:53.000 Bingo, that explains why I'm getting the reactions I am. 26:53.000 --> 26:57.000 What he was talking about was, now the FBI was set up as a police organization in this country. 26:57.000 --> 27:01.000 The CIA was set up to do espionage in every other country. 27:01.000 --> 27:05.000 That's why at that first talk I gave at DEF CON 4, I could say, you want to hack? 27:05.000 --> 27:08.000 Come on in. Come in under the umbrella. 27:08.000 --> 27:13.000 You get the best tools, the best techniques, and the best mentors in the business if you come into the agency, 27:13.000 --> 27:17.000 and you get a get out of jail free card as well. 27:17.000 --> 27:23.000 Because all of the hacking that you know is just part of the vast subset of hacking that we have developed, 27:23.000 --> 27:30.000 as many people now know more than they did in more detail, to hack other countries. 27:30.000 --> 27:37.000 We don't have any friends, someone said, Deputy Director of SIGINT actually at NSA. 27:37.000 --> 27:39.000 We have only targets. 27:39.000 --> 27:43.000 And he was trying to calm down the guy who said, the English are special friends. 27:43.000 --> 27:45.000 We have a special relationship. 27:45.000 --> 27:47.000 We have no friends. 27:47.000 --> 27:48.000 We have only targets. 27:48.000 --> 27:49.000 And it's everybody else. 27:49.000 --> 27:52.000 So CIA was set up to be that way in 1947. 27:52.000 --> 27:57.000 It's what our security world, our national security state has developed as a necessity. 27:57.000 --> 28:00.000 I'm not criticizing that. I'm just saying it's what's so. 28:00.000 --> 28:03.000 So the FBI was supposed to be here and the CIA was supposed to be there, 28:03.000 --> 28:05.000 but here and there no longer mean the same thing. 28:05.000 --> 28:08.000 So the FBI works all over the world now. 28:08.000 --> 28:14.000 And CIA is, of course, operating overtly now, as for example, with the New York Police Department 28:14.000 --> 28:16.000 by design. 28:16.000 --> 28:22.000 The statements are by design to make a point, but the CIA is all over the place inside as well 28:22.000 --> 28:26.000 because the boundaries are down and the nature of the information state that we inhabit 28:26.000 --> 28:31.000 means you have to go where the information goes and see where it comes from. 28:31.000 --> 28:33.000 And nation-state boundaries don't matter anymore. 28:33.000 --> 28:40.000 What the FBI man was saying is that the real sources of power and influence on us, on our lives, 28:40.000 --> 28:43.000 that which directs our behavior, are transnational. 28:43.000 --> 28:47.000 They are sometimes entities that, again, have no names, that don't have names, 28:47.000 --> 28:49.000 but they're not just nation-states. 28:49.000 --> 28:54.000 So we kind of coexist like a parallax view between seeing nation-state as operative 28:54.000 --> 28:57.000 and knowing that the real source of our behavior is something else. 28:57.000 --> 29:00.000 How much business does Microsoft or Apple do somewhere else? 29:00.000 --> 29:03.000 Much more than 50 percent. We think they're American companies. 29:03.000 --> 29:05.000 They're not. They're companies. 29:05.000 --> 29:08.000 And they have their own independence and their own operations, 29:08.000 --> 29:13.000 and their influence and power on us supersedes that which we think is patriotic. 29:13.000 --> 29:16.000 And that's what the FBI special agent was trying to say. 29:16.000 --> 29:19.000 I used to be able to invite people to cooperate with the FBI, 29:19.000 --> 29:23.000 and they always did out of patriotic motivation, he said. 29:23.000 --> 29:29.000 But now, more and more, I'll get the answer. I'd like to help you, but. 29:29.000 --> 29:36.000 And that but is the instantiation of they know that the true source of their power is not the country 29:36.000 --> 29:40.000 in the same way that it was, which is why the political rhetoric we're hearing today, 29:40.000 --> 29:44.000 which is so 20th century or before. 29:44.000 --> 29:47.000 The political rhetoric is a 20th century framework 29:47.000 --> 29:51.000 that's not describing any of the realities that are impacting people's lives. 29:51.000 --> 29:55.000 And that's why the solutions defined in 20th century terms can't work in the 21st century, 29:55.000 --> 30:00.000 because we're a totally different kind of economy and society. 30:00.000 --> 30:03.000 Well, why am I bothering going into all this? 30:03.000 --> 30:10.000 Well, because privacy, as we have used the word, has meaning only for an individual, 30:10.000 --> 30:15.000 which was an emergent property, I say, only for an individual. 30:15.000 --> 30:19.000 Privacy is something that an individual has. 30:19.000 --> 30:25.000 And this meaning of individual no longer applies to humans today, not in the same way. 30:25.000 --> 30:29.000 Not really. We always know we were cells in a body, 30:29.000 --> 30:33.000 but we used to emphasize the fact that we were cells, individuals. 30:33.000 --> 30:36.000 Now we have to see bodiness. 30:36.000 --> 30:42.000 And when digitalization took over, people experienced themselves more powerfully as nodes in a network, 30:42.000 --> 30:45.000 and it restructured how we had to work in teams. 30:45.000 --> 30:49.000 You never heard of work teams or in the same way, 30:49.000 --> 30:53.000 you never heard of teachers having to teach people how to work in teams. 30:53.000 --> 30:58.000 In my day, when we tried to work cooperatively, I was usually nailed for cheating, 30:58.000 --> 31:01.000 because that's what we called it then. 31:01.000 --> 31:04.000 You were told to do your work alone, individually. 31:04.000 --> 31:06.000 Don't look at anybody else's work. 31:06.000 --> 31:11.000 That's been totally transformed by the technology of learning and action. 31:11.000 --> 31:18.000 So what does privacy mean in this new world, and what is contingent on it, and why does it matter? 31:18.000 --> 31:22.000 Well, Andrew Grove, who's one of the founders of Intel, said long ago, almost 20 years ago, 31:22.000 --> 31:25.000 privacy is the big problem of the electronic age. 31:25.000 --> 31:29.000 At the heart of the internet culture is a force that wants to find out everything about you, 31:29.000 --> 31:34.000 and once it has found out everything about you and 200 million others, that's a pretty valuable asset. 31:34.000 --> 31:38.000 So people will be tempted. Isn't that naive? They'll be tempted. 31:38.000 --> 31:43.000 Today they do it all the time, to trade and do commerce with the asset, which is the information about you, 31:43.000 --> 31:48.000 that you have freely given them a la Facebook, etc., all unknowingly, 31:48.000 --> 31:53.000 given them the commodity that is yourself in terms of the data that you provide, 31:53.000 --> 31:57.000 simply by existing in that online world. 31:57.000 --> 32:03.000 That wasn't the information that people were thinking of, he said, when they called this the information age. 32:03.000 --> 32:07.000 Commentators said, we think of privacy as tremendously valuable. 32:07.000 --> 32:13.000 We call it a human right, but we live in the Facebook age, and the only thing more cherished than privacy is publicity. 32:13.000 --> 32:20.000 We share personal data in flagrant ways, but believe we have a right to privacy when we choose to keep things private, 32:20.000 --> 32:25.000 which we cannot do anymore. So privacy is a human right? 32:25.000 --> 32:30.000 Well, privacy became real around the same time that rights became real. 32:30.000 --> 32:35.000 You know the people before this transformation of society, you lived in one room. 32:35.000 --> 32:39.000 You didn't say, I'm going upstairs to have sex now. Everything took place. The animals lived with you. 32:39.000 --> 32:43.000 Look at the castle keep in the winter. Everybody lived in one place. 32:43.000 --> 32:50.000 The idea of we entitled Americans saying, I want a room of my own. Every child gets a room of their own. 32:50.000 --> 32:54.000 It was literally unthinkable because nobody did that. 32:54.000 --> 32:58.000 Well, privacy emerged at the same time that rights emerged. 32:58.000 --> 33:02.000 In other words, they became cognitive artifacts, what I call the structures we have internally 33:02.000 --> 33:08.000 that we believe in as if they are real, but which have emerged as a response to the changes in society 33:08.000 --> 33:13.000 and above all, the information flow which defines and limits them. 33:13.000 --> 33:21.000 So rights, we say rights came from the Magna Carta, but until they were conceived as we do recently, 33:21.000 --> 33:28.000 we didn't see the Magna Carta that way at all. The people doing the Magna Carta did not see it as an instantiation of rights. 33:28.000 --> 33:35.000 Intellectual property and intellectual property rights only became possible after the printing press 33:35.000 --> 33:41.000 externalized the products of our thinking as if they were artifacts with boundaries around them. 33:41.000 --> 33:47.000 And boundaries, as I keep saying, determine identity and boundaries around everything from individuals to nation states. 33:47.000 --> 33:53.000 And I suggest planetary culture are going down. Everybody knows we're not alone in the universe. 33:53.000 --> 33:59.000 But we don't know that we know it because the authoritative voice continues to refuse to validate 33:59.000 --> 34:05.000 the observations of thousands of people that suggest something else is going on. 34:05.000 --> 34:10.000 But that's a whole other talk. The fact is we are not alone in the universe. 34:10.000 --> 34:14.000 We are part of a sentient web of intelligence that spans galaxies. 34:14.000 --> 34:18.000 And we have been thinking we're the apple of God's eye and the product of a special intelligence 34:18.000 --> 34:23.000 that only wanted us on this earth to evolve the way we did. So vain. 34:23.000 --> 34:34.000 As the president would say, sad. Sad. Doesn't speak in paragraphs. Gets his point across though. 34:34.000 --> 34:39.000 Paragraphs are going the way of cursive writing, honestly. 34:39.000 --> 34:46.000 Richard Stallman, who many of you know, a great GNU guru, defending open source software, 34:46.000 --> 34:51.000 said there's no intrinsic right to intellectual property. The idea copyright did not exist before 34:51.000 --> 34:55.000 when authors copied everything from one another. And you know that. 34:55.000 --> 34:59.000 If you look at manuscripts made in monasteries, you see that people wrote in the margins all the time, 34:59.000 --> 35:02.000 copied each other, and there was no thought I'm stealing. 35:02.000 --> 35:06.000 And I tried to get some professors who I once consulted with to understand this. 35:06.000 --> 35:09.000 They were very upset about plagiarism, which their students were doing, 35:09.000 --> 35:13.000 but in a cut and paste world where pieces of information came and went without identity, 35:13.000 --> 35:20.000 without source, without retribution or attribution. 35:20.000 --> 35:26.000 Plagiarism was ceasing to mean what it did when things were defined in a textual environment. 35:26.000 --> 35:32.000 So substitute privacy for Stallman's statement copyright. There's no intrinsic right to privacy. 35:32.000 --> 35:37.000 Because the forces that made it viable, the social, economic, religious, legal forces, 35:37.000 --> 35:43.000 have been transformed and are blurring and disappearing. And so printing changed everything. 35:43.000 --> 35:47.000 That's my point. And so has the internet. And so are the other domains of advancement, 35:47.000 --> 35:50.000 to which I can only allude, like bio. 35:50.000 --> 35:53.000 The revolution in information and communication is the axis around which 35:53.000 --> 35:57.000 our 21st century world turns right now. 35:57.000 --> 36:00.000 Privacy is honored in lip service, but not in the marketplace, 36:00.000 --> 36:04.000 where it is violated or taken away every single day. 36:04.000 --> 36:09.000 It's not honored in intelligence operations, certainly. We all know that. 36:09.000 --> 36:14.000 It can't be. It can't be. 36:14.000 --> 36:18.000 And it's not honored in how computers and softwares are built. 36:18.000 --> 36:22.000 A rock star once said, if voting were important, they wouldn't let us do it. 36:22.000 --> 36:28.000 Well, if privacy was important, it would be honored, in fact. And it isn't. 36:28.000 --> 36:32.000 I mean, you have to take a good look sometimes. Look at the vendor space sometimes. 36:32.000 --> 36:36.000 A thing like Black Hat. A friend of mine who's been in the business a long time looked out 36:36.000 --> 36:40.000 and he said every single one of these people is selling something they cannot deliver. 36:40.000 --> 36:44.000 Because they guarantee they are going to ensure safety and security for the enterprise, 36:44.000 --> 36:52.000 and they cannot do that. But that's an aside. 36:52.000 --> 36:58.000 Someone said, well, I said that. Other things are much more important than privacy. 36:58.000 --> 37:01.000 Power is more important and money is more important. 37:01.000 --> 37:08.000 The Onion once ran an article saying, customers are our second most important factor. 37:08.000 --> 37:12.000 Of course, everybody says customers are the most important, but they mean after money. 37:12.000 --> 37:15.000 After money. The Internet of Things, you know what it's like. 37:15.000 --> 37:18.000 We've got a village dedicated to hacking all the aspects of it here. 37:18.000 --> 37:22.000 It ignores privacy, and software companies do in a rush to market. 37:22.000 --> 37:25.000 I remember Bill Gates saying years ago, show me something I can fix. 37:25.000 --> 37:29.000 I'll spend a million dollars to do it. Show me something that makes me two days late to market. 37:29.000 --> 37:34.000 Forget it. Time to get to market matters more. 37:34.000 --> 37:41.000 Privacy advocates, and they're all over here, well-meaning, righteous, and sincere, 37:41.000 --> 37:47.000 are fighting a rear-guard action with reality itself. 37:47.000 --> 37:50.000 And reality always wins. 37:50.000 --> 37:56.000 So children today are growing up without an expectation of privacy 37:56.000 --> 37:59.000 and without an understanding of what we mean by privacy, 37:59.000 --> 38:06.000 because their social world has taught them a different way of being, which is, it's all out there. 38:06.000 --> 38:11.000 Sure, you can have great movies about living off the grid, but try it. 38:11.000 --> 38:15.000 You wind up looking like the Unabomber, right? 38:15.000 --> 38:22.000 And even he had to use a bus to get his bombs to San Francisco so he could trust others to mail them. 38:22.000 --> 38:27.000 You can't really live off the grid unless you're living with wolves in a cave. 38:27.000 --> 38:32.000 I said in a forecast of security issues I was asked to identify 20 years ago 38:32.000 --> 38:37.000 that the only way to protect data is not to collect it in the first place. 38:37.000 --> 38:41.000 That was true. It's still true, and it's totally ignored. 38:41.000 --> 38:45.000 We give it away, or we allow it to be taken, as if it is of no account 38:45.000 --> 38:50.000 because we cannot see or feel the ends to which data analytics put our little biographical bits 38:50.000 --> 38:52.000 every daily choice that we make. 38:52.000 --> 38:55.000 And everyone who can collects data, and everyone who knows how to do it 38:55.000 --> 38:58.000 parses it together, not data, but information. 38:58.000 --> 39:03.000 Information, remember, Claude Shannon said, is the difference that makes a difference. 39:03.000 --> 39:05.000 Well, this information makes a huge difference. 39:05.000 --> 39:09.000 Not the noise, but the data that creates information, the signal, 39:09.000 --> 39:15.000 and it gives those who know how to extract it from the data leverage, power, and money. 39:15.000 --> 39:20.000 The bits of data that make up us, our gestalt, our identity, 39:20.000 --> 39:25.000 they now are combined at that level of abstraction in different ways. 39:25.000 --> 39:31.000 And they see something different when they look at us than we see ourselves. 39:31.000 --> 39:35.000 The point of this talk, if you want to take away, is that the level of abstraction 39:35.000 --> 39:41.000 at which you can view either an entity, an organization, or a human being 39:41.000 --> 39:44.000 determines what you believe is real. 39:44.000 --> 39:47.000 And people who do data analytics are looking at a level of abstraction 39:47.000 --> 39:51.000 which is so very real, as we all know. 39:51.000 --> 39:55.000 But we act as if we are still the 20th century selves 39:55.000 --> 39:58.000 that emerged when we were children or growing up. 39:58.000 --> 40:04.000 And we haven't really grasped that we are known better than we know ourselves. 40:04.000 --> 40:08.000 It's like the Zen statements about the illusion of the self. 40:08.000 --> 40:10.000 Well, we believe in ourselves. 40:10.000 --> 40:14.000 We believe ourselves are ourselves, and I'm trying to make the point. 40:14.000 --> 40:15.000 It's very hard to get. 40:15.000 --> 40:18.000 This is why it's a nightmare in daylight if you really grasp it, 40:18.000 --> 40:22.000 that the fundamental assumptions we make about damn near everything 40:22.000 --> 40:27.000 are no longer workable in the frame we have unknowingly created 40:27.000 --> 40:33.000 by participating, as all of us have in this room, in this new technological society. 40:33.000 --> 40:36.000 We are not the same people we once were. 40:36.000 --> 40:38.000 And so defining who we are and our prerogatives and needs 40:38.000 --> 40:41.000 has to be done in light of who we have become. 40:41.000 --> 40:45.000 We're talking about identity in Blade Runner. 40:45.000 --> 40:46.000 He's looking at the photographs. 40:46.000 --> 40:48.000 I know you know that movie. 40:48.000 --> 40:49.000 And he said, memories. 40:49.000 --> 40:50.000 You're talking about memories. 40:50.000 --> 40:53.000 Well, now we know we can create memories in different ways. 40:53.000 --> 40:55.000 And when I talk on biohacking, one of the things I looked at, 40:55.000 --> 40:58.000 which my friend at CIA helped me understand, 40:58.000 --> 41:02.000 was that we really are working seriously in implanting memories, 41:02.000 --> 41:06.000 implanting memories of someone else's experience, 41:06.000 --> 41:11.000 and not just using techniques to efface memory the way we have in the past, 41:11.000 --> 41:12.000 which is what media does. 41:12.000 --> 41:15.000 Media creates memory. 41:15.000 --> 41:17.000 And then we share a memory as if it's real. 41:17.000 --> 41:22.000 And if it comforts us, we become a voting block. 41:22.000 --> 41:25.000 So Walter Ong looked at all this some time ago, 41:25.000 --> 41:30.000 looking at orality and literacy and the technologizing of the word. 41:30.000 --> 41:33.000 And he said, the shift from orality to literacy and onto electronic processing 41:33.000 --> 41:36.000 engages social, economic, political, religious, and other structures 41:36.000 --> 41:40.000 and creates an entire difference in mentality, in who we think we are, he said, 41:40.000 --> 41:43.000 in who we experience ourselves to be. 41:43.000 --> 41:46.000 Writing restructured consciousness, you see. 41:46.000 --> 41:49.000 Writing transformed human consciousness. 41:49.000 --> 41:54.000 Oral cultures contained human beings who were not the same humans who began to write. 41:54.000 --> 41:56.000 And the printing press did it again. 41:56.000 --> 42:01.000 And engaging as we do immersively in the digital world is doing it one more time. 42:01.000 --> 42:07.000 Our consciousness is literally being restructured in a different way. 42:07.000 --> 42:11.000 So all the arguments against computerization were the same ones they used 42:11.000 --> 42:13.000 against the printing press and writing. 42:13.000 --> 42:15.000 Plato said the same things when the oral culture was ending. 42:15.000 --> 42:17.000 It's going to destroy humanity. 42:17.000 --> 42:19.000 No, it's going to transform humanity. 42:19.000 --> 42:24.000 And the humanity you thought you were a part of is no longer going to exist. 42:24.000 --> 42:29.000 Kids today are criticized because they can't multiply in their heads or write cursive. 42:29.000 --> 42:32.000 They use Google instead of remembering things. 42:32.000 --> 42:35.000 But they don't know any loss from their experience. 42:35.000 --> 42:37.000 They experience no loss. 42:37.000 --> 42:42.000 Why should I write cursive when I can tap with my thumb or make block letters? 42:42.000 --> 42:44.000 Why should I multiply? 42:44.000 --> 42:47.000 What I have to do is edit the data and it multiplies it for me. 42:47.000 --> 42:50.000 Why should I remember something which is so ready at hand? 42:50.000 --> 42:56.000 Why should I ask somebody how to get to grandma's house when all I have to do is point you to the clock, watch. 42:56.000 --> 42:59.000 Where are we? 42:59.000 --> 43:00.000 Wrap it up. 43:00.000 --> 43:05.000 You told me you were going to tell me when I had 10 minutes. 43:05.000 --> 43:07.000 You should have put it in my presentation. 43:07.000 --> 43:12.000 I would have seen it on the screen. 43:12.000 --> 43:15.000 Well, sorry. 43:15.000 --> 43:17.000 He's telling me to stop. 43:17.000 --> 43:20.000 I hate to stop because I love to talk. 43:20.000 --> 43:29.000 I'm just going to quote a couple of people and then I'm going to wrap it up. 43:29.000 --> 43:35.000 This is an old quote, but it still tells you how they were thinking at MIT some years ago. 43:35.000 --> 43:40.000 When we do the kind of data analysis I was talking about, we get a God's eye view of human behavior. 43:40.000 --> 43:42.000 We can tell how they're going to vote. 43:42.000 --> 43:44.000 We can tell when they're getting sick. 43:44.000 --> 43:48.000 We've turned society into a laboratory where behavior can be effectively followed, 43:48.000 --> 43:53.000 but also we're affecting and changing behavior and you think you have privacy. 43:53.000 --> 43:58.000 We're getting genetic sniffers that when you walk through the space you inhabit, 43:58.000 --> 44:02.000 someone will be able to pick up your DNA from the shed skin cells that you are fusing into the air, 44:02.000 --> 44:08.000 and they will be able to do a DNA analysis as we increase our ability to do that quickly and cheaply. 44:08.000 --> 44:10.000 There is no place to hide. 44:10.000 --> 44:16.000 So the good news that someone wanted is that it's real, 44:16.000 --> 44:22.000 and we can always deal with what's real, but we have to grasp who we really are in terms of what I've been describing. 44:22.000 --> 44:27.000 The world cannot be talked about as if it's a 20th century world. 44:27.000 --> 44:32.000 Not politics, not ethics, not religions, not anything. 44:32.000 --> 44:36.000 And the good news is we can become conscious of this as we have in the past, 44:36.000 --> 44:41.000 and then make reasonable, powerful decisions about who we are in light of it 44:41.000 --> 44:46.000 and rethink what it means to be ethical, rethink what it means to be human, 44:46.000 --> 44:51.000 because humans have always had a different definition of self-understanding in different cultures, 44:51.000 --> 44:53.000 and it's no different now. 44:53.000 --> 44:58.000 It's just a different kind of challenge because it continues to change so radically and so rapidly. 44:58.000 --> 45:04.000 So those who want to be on the cutting edge will at least know how to surf the waves of information 45:04.000 --> 45:09.000 that restore sanity and wholeness and health to the being who is doing this 45:09.000 --> 45:14.000 and that here more than anywhere else that I go is you men and women. 45:14.000 --> 45:16.000 Thank you for your attention. 45:16.000 --> 45:21.000 Thank you. 45:21.000 --> 45:43.000 Thanks.