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I'm sorry, this is bonkers. I have presented at more than one Blackhat conference and since then I have seen the hacker scene reduced to nothing but a farm tea

I'm sorry, this is bonkers. I have presented at more than one Blackhat conference and since then I have seen the hacker scene reduced to nothing but a farm team for surveillance companies, domestic spy agencies, and totalitarian movements in academia because they think merely being against-bad is sufficient to be good. Hacking was always about individual competence as a check on technological dominion and absolute political power. Today, it's something you do to get noticed by people who rent you out for dog and pony shows to sell surveillance technologies. Security is no longer about protecting innovation and enabling a perimeter for safe creativity and exploration, it is about inserting a governance layer over the competent and other technologists, to ensure their subordination to a layer of interchangeable compromised sycophants. The movement to change these things has nothing to do with the content of "blackhat/whitehat." It is only about whether the people militating for the change have the power to cow others into submission. It is a test of whether the we will submit to the histrionic bullying by people in this movement. This is the same mechanism as the myth of Kim Jong Il hitting 11 consecutive holes in one, which was patently ridiculous, but designed to identify people who still have enough individual identity to recognize and resist the dominating absurdity of the movement behind it, who can't help but out themselves, so that they may be targeted by the movement for liquidation. What's worse, is people like this researcher aren't insane, they are calculated and cynical. This entire playbook is described by Hannah Arendt in her essay "Ideology and Terror," which was appended to her book, "The Origins of Totalitarianism." If this makes me the first to stop clapping, so be it. The stakes are high enough that bearing the risk of being honest is a greater service to others than anything else I will likely achieve. Good riddance.

neididipp 6y ago
So humans are being humans. It’s vanity to think we’re encountering some yet unknown human experience here. It’s new to us individually, but the historical record is littered with exactly your account of “what’s happening.” Administrative state wraps itself around the rubes brainstems to moderate agency. Obviously it’s fine when it comes to real harm to others. The problem is when a successful person believes that success for them is guaranteed. As much of mainstream America, it’s ridiculous billionaire class has come to believe. We’ve given them a monopoly on capital, fools. Capital = options. We have none. We’re stupid and must simply enter into debt agreements to exist as a member of an elitists flock. Or at least that’s the sound forms they might have used when the church owned everything. Just because the central authority doesn’t “legally” own things doesn’t mean we haven’t ended up right back in the same spot of being controlled by a spiteful hierarchy of self-aggrandizing but otherwise normal men. Less literally violent spot, of course, but still destructive of innate biological rhythms. People used to go about their day building shit. Now they need to coddle grandpas agreements. Pretty ironic for a country with a founding principle of “fuck gramps and his bullshit agreements.” Paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson, the dead should not rule the living. But here we are being guilted into servicing their debts, their opinion on hierarchy, their old demands for wars over what really could have been mental illness back in the day. Somehow if it’s on paper it’s a force of reality, like gravity itself!
BoiledCabbage 6y ago
Slow your horses. I happen to agree, and feel that this isn't the most impactful/helpful place to affect change. But we all agree that symbols have meanings. Confederate emblems on state flags have meaning. The fact that you feel this case isn't worthwhile is fine, and you're entitled to your view and sharing it. But that doesn't magically change the concept of symbols into some plot of Kim Jong Il totalitarianistic mythology. You disagree with the changing of that symbol as an effective method for improving things. That's fine. Instead of just the symbolic, are you just as fired up about addressing the structural issues of discrimination that people of color in your field experience? Is the extent of your ire just the terminology change? Because many people feel they don't have the luxury of that being the largest issues they are facing in tech. That's just one small pebble of many issues out there. Are you helping out in those efforts? Are you only willing to get upset about a name change but none of the other issues present in our field?
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  I can't speak for the original commenter, but I'm fired up about this issue because of my fire for addressing structural issues in my field. Do you remember the controversy last year about the manager who said "I won't hire anyone who doesn't send a thank-you email"? Language policing is another manifestation of the same problem. It's a minor hurdle for those of us who follow the latest trends in upper-middle-class professional culture, and a huge structural barrier for anyone who can't or doesn't.
- motohagiography 6y ago
  Slow this. It's not the changing of the symbol, it's the legitimacy and standing of the people who wish to change it, the means they are using to do so, and the sincerity of their motives. This is the forum we have. I reject the standing of the critical theory underlying the problematizing of what it perceives as symbols in my field, because the ideology itself is designed to manufacture and inject conflict, as means to leverage itself into being an arbiter of purity, and its endgame has a lot of historical precedents. Dialectical materialism is an intellectual cancer. This is where change happens. It's in the culture, and we respond in the culture. This forum is public discourse. If you are concerned because it sounds "angry," I would recommend revisiting how that reflects as a style of argument. While this probably isn't the forum to re-litigate it, it is the forum to state unambiguously that the effort to hijack, co-opt, and subordinate Blackhat and the community it served to an ideology using an implied threat of political cancellation ( or "atomization" in the literature) has not gone unnoticed.

neididipp 6y ago

So humans are being humans. It’s vanity to think we’re encountering some yet unknown human experience here. It’s new to us individually, but the historical record is littered with exactly your account of “what’s happening.” Administrative state wraps itself around the rubes brainstems to moderate agency. Obviously it’s fine when it comes to real harm to others. The problem is when a successful person believes that success for them is guaranteed. As much of mainstream America, it’s ridiculous billionaire class has come to believe. We’ve given them a monopoly on capital, fools. Capital = options. We have none. We’re stupid and must simply enter into debt agreements to exist as a member of an elitists flock. Or at least that’s the sound forms they might have used when the church owned everything. Just because the central authority doesn’t “legally” own things doesn’t mean we haven’t ended up right back in the same spot of being controlled by a spiteful hierarchy of self-aggrandizing but otherwise normal men. Less literally violent spot, of course, but still destructive of innate biological rhythms. People used to go about their day building shit. Now they need to coddle grandpas agreements. Pretty ironic for a country with a founding principle of “fuck gramps and his bullshit agreements.” Paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson, the dead should not rule the living. But here we are being guilted into servicing their debts, their opinion on hierarchy, their old demands for wars over what really could have been mental illness back in the day. Somehow if it’s on paper it’s a force of reality, like gravity itself!

BoiledCabbage 6y ago

Slow your horses. I happen to agree, and feel that this isn't the most impactful/helpful place to affect change. But we all agree that symbols have meanings. Confederate emblems on state flags have meaning. The fact that you feel this case isn't worthwhile is fine, and you're entitled to your view and sharing it. But that doesn't magically change the concept of symbols into some plot of Kim Jong Il totalitarianistic mythology. You disagree with the changing of that symbol as an effective method for improving things. That's fine. Instead of just the symbolic, are you just as fired up about addressing the structural issues of discrimination that people of color in your field experience? Is the extent of your ire just the terminology change? Because many people feel they don't have the luxury of that being the largest issues they are facing in tech. That's just one small pebble of many issues out there. Are you helping out in those efforts? Are you only willing to get upset about a name change but none of the other issues present in our field?

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
I can't speak for the original commenter, but I'm fired up about this issue because of my fire for addressing structural issues in my field. Do you remember the controversy last year about the manager who said "I won't hire anyone who doesn't send a thank-you email"? Language policing is another manifestation of the same problem. It's a minor hurdle for those of us who follow the latest trends in upper-middle-class professional culture, and a huge structural barrier for anyone who can't or doesn't.
motohagiography 6y ago
Slow this. It's not the changing of the symbol, it's the legitimacy and standing of the people who wish to change it, the means they are using to do so, and the sincerity of their motives. This is the forum we have. I reject the standing of the critical theory underlying the problematizing of what it perceives as symbols in my field, because the ideology itself is designed to manufacture and inject conflict, as means to leverage itself into being an arbiter of purity, and its endgame has a lot of historical precedents. Dialectical materialism is an intellectual cancer. This is where change happens. It's in the culture, and we respond in the culture. This forum is public discourse. If you are concerned because it sounds "angry," I would recommend revisiting how that reflects as a style of argument. While this probably isn't the forum to re-litigate it, it is the forum to state unambiguously that the effort to hijack, co-opt, and subordinate Blackhat and the community it served to an ideology using an implied threat of political cancellation ( or "atomization" in the literature) has not gone unnoticed.