 Thanks for being here at 10 o'clock on Sunday morning. I know how late the parties go and appreciate your getting up. Biohacking sounds sexy. I will talk about some of the sexier aspects of it who cannot be intrigued by chimerical splices, geeps coming out of goats and sheep and more exotic sorts of duck humans being created in the lab. It's all very cool, but even deeper than that, what I really want to try to do, we'll try to hit all the pieces. But what I want to do is talk about hacking culture, where it evolved, how it evolved in the computer space, where it really came from, and some of the generational aspects of it as it has progressed until it is now about DEF CON 17. I think this is the 12th time that I've spoken for DEF CON. It came 14 years ago to DEF CON 4. And what I have observed changing about the hacker space and how elements of real hacking, real hacking, as we spoke of it then before the word was co-opted and criminalized, port very well in some ways, but not in every way to the space of biological experimentation, genetic splicing, synthetic biology, and the creation of artificial organisms or organisms with enhancements that will enable us to do all sorts of things that now sound novel, but will be no more novel for your children than people texting and talking simultaneously. People will be doing several things simultaneously on multi-levels of consciousness, and I'm going to talk a little bit about how it is that the human brain with its plasticity and extraordinary resiliency can allow itself to hook up in current ways, using current evolutionary pathways to adapt and integrate new kinds of senses which enable us literally to experience our humanity in a fundamentally different way, and this is just the beginning. So the pitch, there are going to be two pitches. One is do not get stuck in mechanical engineering or electrical engineering or any kind of just engineering as if this is the end of the road of scientific evolution. This domain is kind of getting standardized, isn't it? Those of you who have been DEF CON for more than a decade have noticed that, that things have become institutionalized and standardized, and we talk about things in a different sort of way. It's incremental now rather than revolutionary. It's new appliances, it's new exploits, but it's the same kinds of exploits and its appliances may be at a fractal level, just a different level of complexity and interaction, but it is the same kinds of problems. Whereas in biohacking, which needs your talents, it's really an open field and you are hacking at a deeper level because you are hacking the organism itself and how it is that it thinks of itself as an organism, how it be's in the world, how it is in the world at a ground of being kind of level, and then you build attributes on top of that which rapidly become unconscious and background noise and unnoticed. So you are the last generation to be merely born This is brave new world territory in which conditioning and genetic engineering and its associated sister sciences are literally jumping off into a new evolutionary mode. Now some of it is hype, some of it is exaggerated, but much of it really is not. So I also want to make a pitch for the politicization of the domain of biohacking because hackers in this space have long known we've had seers like Simple Nomad who has been a pioneer in illuminating the necessity for counterintelligence as a fact of life for anyone doing serious hacking in order to create a multiplicity of nodes that someone else can encounter and believe are real. For example, I remember that talk from a few years ago, how you do defense up front, anticipating who will come at you from multiple vectors of the compass and why and how, the biohacking community as it is currently instantiated does not have this consciousness and as I talked to biohacker after biohacker in different domains, I was surprised. They said, well, yeah, I know hackers, i.e. you guys are paranoid, but we're not paranoid yet. And yet if you know the Steve Kurtz case, which we'll talk about a little bit, which is analogous to the Steve Jackson gaming case of old when the Secret Service made fools of themselves because they didn't understand the domain that has happened recently with Steve Kurtz, but the human consequences to him and to the guy from whom he bought the line of bacteria that he used quite legitimately really, just a little around the corner, but it was just cutting a little red tape out. The punishment that these two people have received, just like Steve Jackson, Steve Kurtz said when he was finally exonerated after four years, how do I get my four years back? How do I get my life back? So I want you to be understanding of the political dimension post-patriot act, post-911, because despite the terrific face on the Obama administration, it has not changed anything about secrecy and surveillance, one jot or a tittle from the way it was exercised, executed by the Bush administration. It is America now. It is the way it is now. It is necessity perceived inside the intelligence community and the military community and the political community as what we must do to be safe. It is what so. So it is not going to go away. Once the tools are in place, the tools are left in place. The names may change from TIA to TIA or deep packet inspection to Hello, Dolly, but it doesn't matter. The tools are there. So you need to be aware of the political ramifications and do it very carefully and subtly, but you can do it. But you have to do it in a way that is clearly dual use so that you can always have plausible deniability of what in fact in your nefarious Larson's hearts you may really be doing. Okay. So what is hacking? I love this. This is from a brief exchange between Bruce Potter from Shmucan and Simple Nomad. I don't remember which one said it, but it was reported this way. For the system to work, it must never grow up and it should make us smile. Now that's hacking. It should never grow up. In other words, if you do not have a childlike playfulness in the way you come to even the deepest truths you encounter, and it doesn't make you smile anymore, you get serious. I mean, I love these guys. I know some of them for years, but I walked into the speaker room the other night when the Meet the Fed group was there and I just instinctively put up my hands. Nobody was smiling. Nobody was smiling and they had all clearly grown up. And the part of me that has never grown up threw up his hands and said, I give up. You know, cuff me. But they just said hi. So I had given away a guilty heart. Hacking never grows up. Another way to think of it is the way E. O. Wilson, brilliant sociobiologist, said in Consilience, what is the hallmark of a scientist? It is passion and obsessiveness and daring. And this is the hallmark of a hacker. Passion never stop. Never ever stop. Obsessiveness. Do you know one person who is interesting in any way who is not an obsessive compulsive? I don't. Because how else do you learn anything in a world of so many disciplines and so many domains? And of course, daring means, of course, thinking and acting differently, not moving after the herd, not buying after the sheep, even if you pretend to. But seeing clearly the context, being able to go beyond the content that people accept is the real givens of their life. And see the context with shapes and forms that creates it. And then hacking the context so that new content emerges. This takes a daring heart and a daring mind because it means you're willing to let even the deepest things you believe about yourself to be called into question and to go through a zone of annihilation on the way to a hierarchical restructuring of a new way of looking at things. Or hacking could be said to be, as a friend at NSA said to me, he said, people are asking all the wrong questions as you know. He said, these are the questions we should be asking. How do you live in a world that has no walls? How do you live vibrantly? And how do you free the mind to see all these new things? So we get to the context of things. Matt Blaise said, the weakest link in the security chain is always the definition of the problem. And the real definition of the problem is frequently not the definition that people work with. Now let me repeat that in a way to port it toward biohacking. The weakest link in the chain of identity is the definition of the problem. The real definition of our identities is not what people think they are. We are not who we thought we were. We have already been transformed by our interaction with new technologies that shape the social and psychological and cultural spaces of our lives. We have already become something different incrementally in this process that has been going on from the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s that only surfaces 10, 20, 30 years after the military applications that have been explored and examined in dual-use research suddenly start to pop into the social space like Madaffinil to keep you awake, originally developed to keep soldiers awake. And so many other forms of covert research which is always dual use because so much since World War II has been covertly funded one way or another for dual use. And that's why so much social science and science never quite reaches the bright light of peer-reviewed journals out here. So who we think we are is not who we in fact are becoming. And once we begin tinkering with our core organism identities, we will definitely not be who we thought we were. So how will you live fluently in the non-space of floating point identities knowing that your experience of space-time itself, your cognitive perception, the percepts that come to you, you think through your organism that you have thought as a given for so long are not what you think. Not the ones that people accept. It was long ago when an engineer talking about percepts rather than concepts. You know the difference, right? Concepts is what I'm talking about now. Percepts are what hit the eyeball or the skin. And the percepts are changed into concepts through a complex process of cognition. Manual Kant, philosopher, said concepts without percepts are empty. Percepts without concepts are blind. Well what the guy at Georgia Tech said is what people believe are the percepts coming both to them and their computers are now manufactured or altered or inflected to be something other than what we think they are. The CIA calls it inference attacks. They're very effective. You don't deal with the concept. You deal with the building blocks of logic that people think are facts or data. And you put false building blocks into the space of cognition so that people then reason falsely from the data to conclusions that are inevitably inflected away from where they want you to see. Illusion, misdirection, ridicule. The hallmarks of deception, programs of any kind, according to a friend of mine who lectures on that at the Cryptologic Museum, illusion and misdirection. You're looking here. The data will take you here. And you have to know how to decode the data to restore the original code. Well these are tricky problems. Who's going to think about these? If this was a normal audience, which I never get anymore, because by this point they'd be gone, they'd be rolling their eyes, or they'd be saying what the hell is he talking about? Or they'd be saying as a guy did in a workshop not too long ago, he said stop you're making me feel helpless. And I said great. When you came in you were at minus two. He said what's minus two? I said you were helpless. But you didn't know it. Now you're at minus one. You're helpless and becoming aware of it. So you can go to the next level if you so choose, which is what he said. Doing something about it. Taking responsibility for elevating your awareness and conception of what's real in the world. So you do not become a victim of it and become one of those Rush Limbaugh listeners, which is a vast mass of white victimized males who feel like everybody is doing something to them. Thank you. So it's important to enter a space where you can be challenged to have to change how you perceive the context. I did that when I moved to Maui. When I lived on Maui I found that the way as a holy, a holy is a white person, a ghost. They came off the ship in 1781. Captain Cook came into the bay and they said holy's a ghost. Well, not ghosts at all armed ghosts. And there went Hawaii for, but ghosts nevertheless. And I learned going there that I had been socialized on the mainland to think in a very structured, abstract, cognitive way. After one or two years of working in ministry, which meant with Koreans, Filipinos, Polynesians, Asians of all stripes, Japanese, Chinese. And being changed by every interaction with every other way of framing reality, which a culture brings. I began to listen back here. So when I would go for an important conversation with someone, I would not bring up the reason I was there, nor would they address it, but when I left I had the answer I had come to get. This is called high context. Instead of holy style, straight ahead, talk, talk, talk, they would just wait for us to get tired and stop talking and go away. And the one who waits wins. So you learn to listen with the back of your mind where things come and are abstracted in a different way back in this part of the brain. That's the kind of thinking that's required. When we start entertaining ideas of new, new notions of identity. For example, a wonderful article called Mixed Feelings talks about Udo Vachter who in 2004, he was a sysadmin at the University of Osnabruck in Germany. He put on a wide belt and it had 13 vibrating pads, like the things that make your cell phone vibrate. And on the outside he had a power supply and he had a sensor that detected the Earth's magnetic field. And whenever he was pointed north there would be a buzzer would go off and he would feel it and he would orient to it. He said, I realized that my perception had shifted. I developed some kind of internal map of the city in my head. I could always find my way home. Eventually I felt like I couldn't ever get lost even in a new place because he had adapted his body to channel the electromagnetic impulses that found true north into a part of his brain that could process those signals and add in effect a sense that some birds and other animals have sensitivity to the electromagnetic field like pigeons and he could become a human with that. He became intuitively aware, just kind of knowing, back of the brain, where is my home, where is my office? It's over there. He didn't have to even think about it anymore. He noticed he was conscious of the direction of his hometown wherever he was and in his dreams he began to feel these vibrations moving around his waist as when he was awake which tells us that he was internalizing and adapting this new way of sensing. It turns out that getting the senses in is not the hard part. Lots of gadgets detect things that humans were not evolved to experience but to change the sensory data, the electromagnetic field or the ultrasound, the infrared into something the brain is wired to accept, that's the trick. Turning it into touch or sight or a kind of feeling for which we have no name and the brain as it turns out has what we now call neuroplasticity. It is able to rewire itself in ways to channel what it does toward the intention you have to know. What you need to know is where the brain will grow the neurons and we know this from say Braille, someone who's recently blind, learning Braille, observed with neuroimetry the parts of the brain that pay attention to the fingertip sensations and they just grow miles and miles of new connections and synapses. What you intend to know is what your brain will respond to. It's why back in the days when I was in ministry we called it spiritual formation but it goes like this, a friend of mine studied karate for years and years until it was so internalized he did it automatically. And one night he came out of a theater around midnight, was walking to his car down a dark street and he felt a hand on his shoulder, didn't even have to think, turned around and broke the neck of a guy who turned out to be his friend trying to say hello and stop him from walking away before he could say hello. And his lesson he said to me, make sure that what you're doing is what you want to do, make sure that what you're practicing is what you don't want to do when you don't have time to think because whatever it is you practice is what you will wind up doing when you don't have time to think. He had practiced karate, so he did karate in a crisis moment. If you practice learning to listen with different aspects of your brain to different channels of sensory data, this is basic to biotechnology because you see it not only starts to tell you some of the things you can think about but it tells you more fundamentally the more you do this that the human organism and the way we are in the world is hackable. We didn't know that before, we didn't know that evolution itself could be tampered with in such a dramatic and intentional and definite way. So that's one of the things we are learning we can do. The brain is so much more flexible than anybody thought. It's like we had unused sensory ports like extra USB ports just waiting for the right plugins and one aspect of biohacking is the willingness, decision and obsessive execution of a plan to build those things so that we can use them. A wonderful guy named Paul Bacchireta who's dead now moved his team to the University of Wisconsin and they came up with a new device that kind of fit on your tongue. It was a mouthpiece with 144 tiny electrodes attached by a ribbon cable to a pulse generator that induced electric current against the tongue. You could turn it up to whatever level was comfortable for you. It's like licking a wire that has a low current in it. They start testing the device on people who had damaged inner ears and it restored their balance because it gave them a data feed that was much cleaner than the one coming from the semicircular canals and the effects lasted even after they removed the mouthpiece because the plasticity of the brain enabled them to build new channels to the sensory data coming in and they could kind of tell by the feel on their tongue when they were upright and they began to do it instinctively, intuitively and without having to think about it. This is pretty cool stuff. The tactical situational awareness system which was developed in the military, Navy Flight Surgeon. So you could tell where you were. Up, down, you know, one of the major causes of air crashes at night is people get confused by the darkness and can't really tell if they're upside down or not. Tactical situational awareness system lets someone in the dark. It's actually about a quarter of the crashes at night. Let's someone in the dark know if he's upright. And you know it. You know it the way you know you're looking up here, the way you're aware of light out there, the way you're aware unconsciously of all the things you've taken as inputs. When the original field space, that guy in Germany, when that experiment ended, Wachter, the system man who started dreaming in North, said he felt lost. He felt lost as someone does becoming blind or deaf. His brain had remapped itself in expectation of the new input. He bought himself a GPS unit which he glances at now obsessively. Like a UFO witness always looking up at the sky as if an anomaly is a repeatable event. My living space shrank quickly, he said. The world appeared smaller and much more chaotic. That's the way you are going to look to your children and to your grandchildren. The way for those of you who text and iPhone and do all the forms of connectivity that have become ubiquitous and unconscious and assumed. Those of you who do that look at old people, not quite like me, but old people who haven't got even have less of a clue than I do. And the gender gap, I mean the generation gap is going to increase dramatically. It's already increased dramatically. You know, you look at those people who can't use computers and can't text and talk and drive. So what if you crash 23 times more often than somebody else? No one said life was secure. It's worth the risk of finding out who's tweeting what, right? But that gap, once we begin enhancing ourselves in some of these bold new ways, you see it's really a dividing line. You guys are already old. You are already so born. You're helpless in this new world of self-generated, self-defined unless you get on board and port your hacking skills into that domain. And at the very least, mentor and train and assist the younger people who increasingly you might begin to notice think a lot faster than you do, you can't stop that. No amount of neuroplasticity can make you young again, but it can sure slow down the aging process. It sure can. So success in this is still a long way off. Our current sensory prosthetics are pretty bulky and low resolution like those old four color monitors we used to get so excited about or pong monitors. But what we're looking for and we'll find because we are human is something transparent that you can forget you are wearing. I used to use this as a definition of technology. When you're invented, when it's invented and you put it on for the first time, it's miraculous to see technology altered experience channeled to your brain through lenses that are artificial. That's what technology is. But after a while you forget you're wearing glasses and some of us have had the experience of looking around the house for our glasses while wearing them because you so completely forget that you have a technologically assisted optical system going on because it's not that anymore. It's transparent. You forget you have it, but it's not sensory technology. It's to understand more and more how the brain processes information and can learn to see the world with many different kinds of eyes. So when I go back to the talk I did in 1996, when I first came here, DEF CON 4, 375 people. It was called Hacking as Practice for Transplanatory Life in the 21st Century. It was pretty ballsy, you know? But one of the glorious things about becoming older is you have a track record. And a lot of the things I predicted were right, not because I was that smart, but because I looked at what was true in the present and what inevitably would occur if the technologies were reshaping me would reshape everything in the same way. It was really that simple to have that intuitive ability. And what I said then was hacking was about power. It is about your identity as an individual taking responsibility for transforming the perceptual apparatus of the world through their connectivity in information and communication systems. The rate of change then began to change exponentially and it is even more so now. The rate of change itself is changing even faster. So the kind of paradigm shift I'm talking about is going to happen exactly the way Hemingway said bankruptcy happened when he was asked, well how do you go bankrupt? He said, two ways, gradually and suddenly. Well, that's the way it happens. Gradually, not noticed, drop a rain. Is it raining? No, it's San Francisco. It's fog, pretty soon you're wet, pretty soon you're soaked, pretty soon your umbrella is tattered, pretty soon you're all floating along in the flood and there's some Noah's Ark of a new generational instantiation of humanity floating away waving to you with the other animals that have gotten on board and you're going glub, glub, glub. And he said, well that was sudden. Well, not really. So the generation gap is going to be profound. It's which side of it do you want to be on? You guys, by which I mean all of you collectively, DEF CON has been the greatest gift of my life. Well, no, Shirley has been the greatest gift of my life. This is being videoed, right? And those of you who know, you know the first marriage is practice. Find out what works, what doesn't work. Second marriage is the charm. But aside from that great gift and all the other great gifts, come into DEF CON where young people were willing to give me sufficient tuturage and mentoring. And I would try to tell people who are middle ages, I was then, 49 then, had in hand go to the people who are inventing this new world and ask questions and do it with humility because you don't have a fucking clue what they're doing and allow them to teach you and go on to their spaces online and don't ask dumb questions. Do the same thing hackers do. Stay up all night learning what you can learn and go early and stay late and just be a learner again. Well, ad hoc learning is now the name of the educational trajectory for everyone. When my son declared an ad hoc major, everybody laughed at Northwestern. He was 19, then he's 39 now. But the ad hoc major was because he wanted to create symbolic system studies and they didn't have one. So he took some courses from AI and some computer science, some math, some philosophy, some psychology and he put the different courses together and called it that and they approved it. And so what he really was was instantiating the way everybody must learn now. Everybody, whether you're in an academic community or not, you must create your own system of education, ad hoc, progressively through life because the information and the data and the recontextualization of everything else connected to it is happening faster and faster. And so people are afraid. People are anxious and the trick is what Fritz Perl's great gestalt psychologist said, he said, excitement is nothing but anxiety plus oxygen. So we're all afraid. Sure, we're all anxious in the face of radical change that threatens our very worldview. So what do you do? You pump it up. You use jolt and cola and amphetamines or whatever you can use, but you also use the excitement of passion and obsessive knowledge seeking in order to dominate some space and have control at least over the other people who do not have much of a clue in your space. And then we have the joy of superiority, the joy of smiling smugly. We have the joy of smirking. We have the joy of swaggering around. We have the joy of looking down at them as if they're morons. This is not bought cheaply. It's joy. You have to get good. But everybody I mentioned biohacking to says, God, that's scary. What if, what if this? Well, evolution has been generating weird organisms for billions of years. That's scary to me that we're not here by anything other than randomness and that we happen to happen and that something else while we are talking is happening to happen that may make our species an interim passageway like certain hominids when we do Australopithecus or look at Lucy's bones or go back thousands and thousands of years and say, well, when did this shift and where did that get lost? And why are there no Neanderthals? They were so recently. Well, visit a family reunion. You'll find some. But the species is gone. And we are probably, as Homo sapiens, gone. But like every roadrunner off the cliff, we haven't looked down so we don't know it yet. We can manage our own fear and anxiety and ramp it up by mastering the domain of change and taking the reins in our own hands. The difference, as I said in the UFO space, everybody knows about UFOs. But people don't know that they know. There has not been an official instantiation of reality or knowledge by the powers that be. So even though everybody knew what I was talking about in that talk, everybody knows what they are. They've seen Larry King or UFO hunters or whatever. Even on a simplistic level with lots of distortion and misinformation in it, everybody knows what it is. But they don't know that they know. While ago, Melissa Mall, who had just left CIA, a great agent, but something happened and she left the agency. She was going to do a talk for a conference I helped organize on ethics and intelligence. And she was going to talk about rendition before it was popular in a movie. And she was going to talk about torture. And she was going to talk about our aircraft and what we did and so on. And then I remember sitting there glumly while she said, they gutted my talk. See, I wouldn't let me give the talk. Showed me. It's just all blacked out. You know what it looks like. And it wasn't that she was going to say anything new. Everything she was going to say had already been in The New York Times, Washington Post, et cetera. But if she said it, then it was real, officially real. So it was all right to let everybody know the stuff as long as they didn't know that they know it. And that official instantiation of knowing that imprimatur of good housekeeping seal of reality approval is what enables people to take the reins in their own hands. And that's what I'm talking about, hacking enables you to do. Well, when you look at biohacking and I... When you look at... I've got a rush. I know I've been talking a little fast for some, but it's nothing compared to what's coming now. When you look at biohacking, you'll see that there's a... They have hacker bots. They're collaboratories. And you look it up online. Make a note of it. Hacker bot. Look up hacker bot. See what kind of collaborative biolabs or fabs they are building in order to do this work together in a collaborative way. I'm going to skip ahead to, well, Freeman Dyson. You know Freeman Dyson. You can look him up online. I'm not going to repeat all the wonderful pithy quotes he has about how biotechnology is going to transform things. But one of the keys to him was... I mean, you remember when the president of MIT was from a biological background rather than an engineering background. That was a sign of the tipping point coming because it meant that bioengineering, which is what it has now become, engineering the organism, not just the systems of communication, bioengineering by the size of budgets, the size of the workforce, and the output of major discoveries, this is where you want to be. And even if it comes hard to you as everything comes to me, if you immerse yourself in it, you will be able to port your current skills toward biological understanding because you'll be amazed at how well they fit, but you're going to have to do a lot of work to ramp up as everybody did when they came into the hacking space. The learning curve is steep at first and requires a commitment, that passion and obsessiveness. But Dyson predicted the domestication of biotechnology will dominate our lives during the next 50 years. Well, you know when we say 50 years, we mean whatever because nobody knows what's coming. But he saw an analogy between John Van Norman's blinkered vision of computers as large centralized facilities and the public perception today of genetic engineering as something that pharmaceutical and agribusiness, agribusiness corps like Monsanto do, part of this talk about the politicization of the domain is to take that power away even as we work within their space. They cannot be allowed to set the agenda of patenting our very genes, our very essence, so that they own us the way they own genetically modified or engineered seeds so that just as a farmer may find it impossible to legally plant the seed he himself has spawned, you may find it impossible to have a child with your own seed if your seed contains genetically patented information. That's a little stretch, I know, but you got to say these things to get you aware of what is really at stake. Freeman Dyson said, I can imagine people are going to have do-it-yourself kits to use genetic engineering, et cetera, et cetera. Well, kitification, as we call it, has already happened. You can buy lots of kits for both hardware and software and laboratory tools online. One of the reasons this is coming out now, 91 was the first Biohobbius magazine, how to grow your own skin cells, how to do some really weird, wonderful things with mice. They talked people how to capture mice, they talked people how to bring the mice in and in the process of showing them how much benzene, for example, in a certain area where there's an oil spill, was in the mouse, people woke up to how much benzene and cancer producing material was in them. In other words, by using an innocuous means, a dual-use means of calling what they were doing ecological health clinic, they could enable people to do some of the cool work themselves like catching mice and analyzing them and bringing them in and seeing what happened to a mouse. And you could do cool experiments at home and add the cool factor. Like, does a mouse prefer Prozac or Zoloft? Something that's occurred to everybody. So you have... Because you are mice taking Prozac or Zoloft. We're very similar in organisms. What's the percentage? It's immense anti-anxiety, anti-depression. It's one of the things I hope I have time to talk about a little later, but I'll throw it out now. Who invented Flatline as normative? Who voted? Did you vote? No, unless you're here for Big Pharma. You did not vote. Ted Turner said, I'm not taking my goddamn lithium. He says every great idea I ever had was in my manic phase. I'm not going to pass that up just because I might kill myself in a downtime. You know, manic depressants are about 4% of the population. That's a lot. That's huge that evolution kept that. Now, we don't even know exactly all those geniuses in the past who were manic depression. I know my wife has periodically said, don't you think you ought to be tested? And like any good person who oscillates rather than Flatlines, as I like to think of it, I say no, no. What good would that do? Well, all right, you want to medicate yourself in Flatline? I don't think so. You want to go dull? You want to just put cotton wool over your eyes? You want to feel nothing? You want to grow old too soon? You want to dribble instead of spurt? Go ahead. But oh, I'm sorry. I forgot. Most of you aren't 65, are you? I forgot who I was talking to. Can you back up the tape and race that? At any rate, depression was ordained, not excessive depression, but ordinary depression was ordained to be a problem. Just in other words, people feeling down, people getting depressed. You know, well, first of all, a lot of good film noir would go away if people weren't depressed. We need that stuff. But the other thing is, recent studies have shown, now listen to this, because this is where we don't know how smart evolution can be, even when it's being blind and dumb. Depression might have a very good function in our lives, not crippling psychotic depression, but the kind most of us experience off and on. It's like pain for a body. A body touches fire and it burns, and well, what if you didn't have pain? You would just keep touching the fire, and we know that when people can't experience pain, we have these terrible times letting them grow past toddler, because they're doing kinds of things that normal people feeling pain would stop doing because they don't want to die. Pain does that. Pain is useful, so pain is kept. Same with mild depression. The studies have revealed that one of the functions that pain serves is to detach you from a trajectory or course of action that isn't working. For some of you, this will be the only, but most important takeaway from this talk. It's good to get depressed because it's a way of saying in an America that says, keep going, you can do it. Everybody can do whatever they think. It's bullshit. You can't. You can do some things, but not everything, and depression is a way the world signals to you. It's not working, Jack. Back off. You're not going to win American Idol. You're not going to whatever. Depression says detach, and those who detach sooner as a result of getting depressed at the failure of a trajectory more quickly and more lively reconnected with a new path, new goal, and new structure of life because they had detached earlier on in the process, saw what was going on, and chose to do something else. So you take out depression, people are going to be failing all their lives long, and then you're going to have to invent a massive entertainment industry to happy them up. Oh, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. All right. Okay. So you see how easy it is to talk about the future? You just look around, and because most people live in the past, I sound like a futurist. It's great. Just open your eyes, get up an hour earlier, and you can make a living in America. It's great. So what kinds of things have evolved? Let me move quickly into the kinds of things that currently exist. IJEM, the International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition. It's the premier undergraduate synthetic biology competition. It's only a few years old synthetic biology. We didn't know about it, the creation of new artificial structures of organism and life. It's very cool. Student teams are given a kit of biological parts at the beginning of the summer from the registry of standard biological parts. Go up and look at that. The registry is standard biological parts, and they use these parts and make new parts of their own design cool to build biological systems and operate them in living cells. IJEM began as recently as January 2003 with a month-long course at MIT. So it came out of academia. Where did hacking come out of? Well, the military industrial complex, ARPANET, and the whole system built it. And then hackers stumbled into it in KS Computing Club in the 70s moved into it, which is kind of where a lot of biohacking is now. It's kind of like where that was then, and then hackers being young thought they had invented computing. Whereas what they had done is come into this vast closed artificial space invented by the military and the intelligence and the corporate community into which they wandered like mice finding Zoloft. By the way, mice prefer Zoloft and they do not want Prozac. And you can design your own experiments with the mice you catch. And they literally won a recent study. The mice just went back for Zoloft again and again and again. And after one taste of Prozac, they stayed away. So maybe they were adolescent mice and they realized the dangers. I don't know. Okay, so this year, how many iGEM competition? There are going to be over 1200 people in the games. 120 teams who will specify, design, build and test simple biological systems made from standard interchangeable biological parts. It's just like hacking was in the old days when you learned MS DOS or C or Linux or whatever. It's in academia and they've done some very cool stuff. What have they done? Well, they've also spawned DIY bio. Now, why do they call it do-it-yourself bio? Because the word hacker, it was explained to me by a hacker, has been so distorted and bastardized that they want to capture the essence of, well, DIY bio doesn't do it. It's like going to Home Depot and putting up a shed. And it's much more complex and requires more ingenuity but it's really bio hacking but they don't want to even deal with the hassle of, oh, are you hackers? Are you going to change it? You know, it is just to go away. But it came out of academia like hacking did and these are some of the projects that I think are quite cool. You can do self-genotyping. You want to know if you're a carrier for hemochromatosis on your sixth chromosome? A brilliant young woman named Catherine All challenged as hackers were by their professors. You can't do that. She says, I want to know because it's in my family and I want to know if I have hemochromatosis. Well, you can't do that as a high school student. They explained to her and she said with the typical hacker response, fuck you. And, right? And did it. And she did it. And they said, wow, you are smart. And now she's at Massachusetts General Hospital. She went to MIT and she's a very bright woman. But you can do that. She did it in high school on her own. Ten minutes. Yeah, good luck. Oh, oh, the guy's in the red shirt. Duff Congestapo, guys. Oh, oh, yeah. Yeah, like all smart ass resistors come back tomorrow after they let me out of the Iranian jail with no bones that are intact anymore. Yeah, I'm still against the government but I can't walk. What else can you do? You can make stuff E. Coli that smells like bananas or pineapple. What good is that? Because in the presence of toxins, which if you've designed an organism to test when suddenly something smells like bananas, you know it's got arsenic or it smells like pineapple, you know it's got lead or melamine in it. And here's one that's the best of all. I think H. Pylori is the eighth largest causer of death in the world and one of these student teams developed a vaccine for it that's effective and workable. They're also making bacterial photography and I hope I do have a minute to talk about the point of view of the artist because let me just jump to this. There are three kinds of hackers that I have talked to. One comes out of academia and says I'm going back to graduate school because you can learn so much faster, so much more doing biological studies there and then take that out. Another one said, and I quote, bullshit. He says that's not hacking. He says what good does it do if they give you a lab? What we want to do is build the components so you can download and create your own labs and by the establishment of biofabs and collaboratories share both hardware and information. He's working on a table that will enable you to learn instructed by the table itself as you proceed how to build the tools you need that enable you to do serious biohacking. Now if you go to a site, I told him I wouldn't use their names but his website is haybryan.org that's H-E-Y-B-R-Y-A-N you'll find a very very brilliant young guy who says listen, DIY bio is on the east and west coats you know where those of you who live there think there is no other place. Started by people with internet like iGEM. He said I'd like a lab but nobody's going to give me a lab. It means we have to build it ourselves. Here's a hacker talking. The information is out there. You can bootstrap yourself. If you're not doing it fine but the tools we're making will help us bootstrap it even more. And that throws you back to well this is well ponded as Chris Weisopa was known then. He said you learn by doing, breaking into systems, translate this to biology, understanding the organism, building the tools, experimenting. You can't just read about it. You got to read code and write code and we're talking about the genetic code all of which is available and downloadable and in sequential form called biobricks. So you don't have to invent the smell of banana or pineapple. All you have to do is go to biobricks or open wetware site and download the component modules of genetic code that already will create that. See the tools you're not yet script kiddies but you're getting closer. All the best hackers he said even can code even if you code badly. When I say badly I mean it's inefficient it's unsustainable it's hard to understand it's not annotated but who cares it works. So you have to reverse engineer a piece of software you wrote you have to reverse engineer the cellular processes. What are the bites on the wire mean? If I tweak them what happens? Yeah the thing may jump out of the dish and eat your hand but there's risk in everything. Right? You know and some of you blew up stuff you know and you go to a wonderful this B.I.Y. this Biohobbius magazine it was 1991 I mean where you guys been this 2009 and Natalie Germagenco talked about tree cloning she's planted clone trees in the Bay Area and then in Reykjavik because they do a lot of cool stuff in Reykjavik and what is her purpose? Her purpose is for people to look at clone trees and say wait a minute birds are landing in one not in another. Wait a minute this one's different from that one in other words she's taking the starch out of 23 and me you know 23 and me and pay 300 bucks until you have a gene for everything and a gene for nothing it becomes useless to get the information predicated on the hype and the lie that the genome itself simply operates in a binary way expresses this is expressed this happened doesn't work that way so she wants people to ask these questions and by making public art she wants hackers and artists and in my view ministers who are counter cultural to use all these tools and now he said five minutes so I've got a I'm going to rush through and forgive me for doing that page page page God I was going to talk about all the cool stuff I'm going to have to write this up obviously right all the military stuff all the military stuff that people are doing because the issues are real and as Max Kilgir's sociologist who did a great talk yesterday and Russians said the psychological impact is much greater than the body count to know you're doing this out of this kind of material is what's critical I talked about depression I'm going to just mention I have a whole huge section on memory because and how many of you are old enough to have had a colonoscopy and admit it okay thank you colonoscopy is where they keep you awake put a great big long thing up and you can you can stay awake and watch the screen as I said I said don't give me so much versed I want to both see and remember because it's so cool watching this snake with an eye I said well what's that and they said don't ask you know it's like sausage but it was cool and I was polyp free so I'm good for 10 years but most people are given versed when they come out of a colonoscopy my a friend used to listen to people cry out there was this doctor and you know people should choose professions that they love well he always started too soon because he didn't mind hearing screams of pain he found an avenue toward helpful productive societal work that suited him and he would start early and my friend would hear people through the wall in the surgical center cry out in pain and then they would come out an hour later and my friend would say so how was your colonoscopy and they'd say oh it's fine I didn't feel a thing why because versed wipes out the memory well I have a lot of other examples of what we're doing with memory we're gonna inflect them we're gonna change them we're gonna wipe them out we're gonna dull the emotional impact as we already are of traumatic mental memories and of course people are gonna do extreme things and then mitigate the memory to a modulated level that will enable them to still get a buzz and remember but not so much that they're shut down by post-traumatic stress and on and on but and I say a whole thing about memory and identity Blade Runner right your memories you're talking about memories if you aren't who you think you remember yourself to be which constitutes the biobricks of yourself and its construction from within who the hell are you you're who they made you to be and what else is propaganda and the whole management of perception in that whole space but the management of collective memory the management of memory friend we were talking outside just now and he correlates events like Four Days of Paris Hilton or Michael Jackson with what's really going on in the world and why no one hears it in the face of all that noise and there's a correlation there's a very very real thing going on so let me race ahead to what this person said your talk she said to me is about what it takes to structure participation in the biohacking community to realize open data exchanges open methodologies yeah that happens in scientific peer reviewed communities but they have been hijacked by powerful interests so what can an artist do in the biological community in biohacking that has an important role similar to that played by the hacker the young people in the biohacking world are not conscious she said of the political implications of having their questions determined by a paradigm determined in turn by pharmaceutical corporations they don't know they've already been co-opted when they begin their studies not to ask the questions implicitly inherent in the hacker ethos and the hacker community an artist she said can get away with this like a hacker because it's not so when people believe we have no inherent structural authority all I have is my voice no one takes me seriously I love it I'm transparent and I'm harmless the artist in complex technical realm stands for every man we have no credentials this is an important role for the hacker and the artist and the writer to play because it will demonstrate the failure of the corporate promise to deliver a medicalized view of biology which is atomized and individualized as 23andMe purports to tell you that you're just one thing when you shift that whole conversation to the domain of ecological health people begin to wake up to the fact that the environment is what creates their health and if these are the inputs then these are going to be the results and hey what can I do to change that that's what the biohacker community can do and that's what's not going to happen in a corporate lab with bureaucratic processes so my concern with the biohacker this second wave of biohacking is to ask why are we doing this sure it's wonderful to do I'll be with you in a minute no epithelial skin lines that's cool it's playful but the corporations are all over that she says there is more power in a motley collection of interested artists hackers and questioners than the corporate model we all know that to be true I'm on the last sentence okay the question is how to create opportunities for this to be demonstrated and so I will conclude with this quote from George Bernard Shaw this is it okay you go man okay okay this is the true joy in life this is an old man's wisdom listen god damn it this is the true joy in life to be used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one to be a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clot of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy my life belongs to the whole world as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can I want to be thoroughly used up when I die the harder I work the more I live I rejoice in life for its own sake life is no brief candle for me it's a splendid torch which I am holding for just a moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations that is the promise and the possibility of biohacking don't get stuck in mechanical engineering it's so old school it's so 20th century come on into the new world thank you