AltSci Cell

by Javantea
July 4, 2009

An incredible anniversary is upon us and we celebrate here in the desert with plans and ideas of incredible creative and motive forces. Whether those forces are for good or evil depends on us. We will choose the ends to which these means bring us. Toorcamp is a very Mad Max post apocalyptic scene. Hackers (cyberpunks) fight to survive in the desert of Eastern Washington. This society where money is not nearly as valuable as what you have and what people need is sometimes backwards but almost always logical when thought of as a semi-stable chaos. But the words that I chose above are far different from the actuality of the camp. The mood is festive. People are happy, generous, interested in one another, caring, and very responsible. But wait! How could a hacker con not be complete mayhem? Put 300 poorly adjusted hackers into a barb-wire fenced area with strict rules against freedom, deny them their bare essentials and watch them destroy everything in the world. But wait, we have electricity, internet for 80% of the conference, audio, visual, shelter for 99% of the participants, and the freedom to permanently remove yourself from the enclosed area. These things turn this enraged mob into a passive, meditative, contemplative, beautiful group of people.

But wait, where are the women at? Alas the gender ratio is fairly bleak. The first girl I met at Toorcamp was a reporter who didn't understand the differences between the various shades of hackers to even ask something complex. Oh, she's good and smart, but what I'm saying is that reporters cannot change the gender balance. Perhaps smallish hacker conferences can only ever attract a small subset of everyone which further dissuades women to participate? Anyway, I am in the barn right now at a table with 5 guys. In the room there are 3-4 women (some people I can't tell due to angle) and 18 guys. All women are currently meditating in the meditation workshop. If gender doesn't matter to hackers, why does gender disparity matter to hackers? A group of guys that cannot talk to women about the subject of their passion will find all kinds of incredibly difficult conversations. I know this from experience. I can say UDP to girls in the hacker scene but when I say that to anyone outside the technology loop, I might as well be talking Greek. Should I care whether people understand wtf I'm talking about? Every group that cannot communicate is doomed to fail at passing their memes to the general populous.

Ok, so do we need a PR agency or something? Do we need to deploy software far and wide that teaches people (A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer aka Wikipedia) about stuff they are going to need to know? I'd say that Wikipedia does a great job toward closing the gap. What's the next level? The next level in communicating ideals is software that uses the ideas that we value: bittorrent (freedom of information), tor (privacy and liberty), linux (free/open source software), nmap (simple understanding of network security), ssh (cryptography, protection), GPG (crypto, protection, mistrust authority) and everything else. Every piece of software we right is very important to communicating our ideals and values. But developing software doesn't require a hacker. What really requires a true hacker is the fulfillment of this software. Debian fucked up ssh and ssl a while back. DNS was fucked up last year. Firefox is in a permanent process of fuckups and fixes. Asterisk is in the process of becoming fixed slowly at the same time they are adding more bugs. Software does not exist the way that we want it if it isn't done right. If you're making mistakes when you write software, you're not seeing all the code you write. Seeing the code that you right in the way that it needs to be seen can be achieved. I am working on writing up a new method that can be followed that will help developers become what they would very much like to be. Keep posted.

It's obvious that the caffeine and the culture of Toorcon is getting to me. I'm feeling so incredibly good that I can write a blog and feel elated and euphoric about the choices I have ahead.

Ten.

Next up I have to say something that means a lot to me: coercion is absolutely unacceptable. Those who practice coercion are making a huge mistake and they will pay for it. I'm going to name names. Levitate sucks, Visqueen are tools, and Amber Pacific are sellouts. Why can I name these names? We have proof. We have pics. People in orange hard hats make for great evidence of corruption, gross misconduct, and fraud. Although both of the bands I name above are perfectly decent in sound and idea, their method of marketing is no better than McDonalds or Cosmo, the very organizations that non-conformist indie rock stars try to mock. Ah the irony of mass marketing non-conformity.

Look forward to totally unexpected releases of exploit code on AltSci Concepts.

Javantea Out