• Frank
• Jul 19,2008
• In: Features

The Last HOPE, Part 1 of 4

As anyone who’s been following the imapcsite twitter knows, yesterday I attended the first day of The Last HOPE, quite possibly the final biennial conference of the Hackers On Planet Earth in Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City. Due to various obligations, I am unable to make the conference today and tomorrow. Thus I only was able to witness a short sample of that momentous event that is the HOPE conference; the twitter feed is an even shorter sample–fed up with typing from my conventionally-keyboarded (read: slow and frustrating) phone, I gave up at 5pm. Here I will blog my notes and observations of Friday’s part of the conference in four parts; surely CNET or some other source can fill the inquisitive reader in on Saturday’s and Sunday’s conferences.

I arrived at the conference at 9:50 AM. After registration, where attendees are fitted with a tombstone-shaped badge, some of which have RFID tags, and a long, heavily packed elevator ride to the conference floor, I filed into one of the three conference rooms for one of the three concurrent 10 AM talks: Email: Descendant of the Telegram, presented by Richard Cheshire, the Cheshire Catalyst, a grizzled veteran of HAM radio, telex and who knows what other technology that seems archaic today. His lecture, rife with examples of old telegrams, briefly described international telegram convention–always indent your signature 5 spaces!–and their effects on modern email. While interesting, it was brief, and the entire lecture was but 15 minutes. When a talk is so short–I’ll come back to this later–the Q&A session tends to get bogged down in tangents and irrelevancies. I rate it 2 / 5.

At 11 I went to another room for Earth Intelligence Network: World Brain as EarthGame, presented by Richard Steele, one of the great legends of HOPE. A profane, permanently pissed-off “recovering CIA agent”, Steele pushed his Earth Intelligence Network, a plan long on rhetoric and technicalities and short on rhyme or reason to mobilize public intelligence “in the public interest”. The presentation began with an elaboration of what is essentially a left-libertarian/hacker view of the world: the Negative Trends of the world include “collapse” of modern societies, the effects of human activity on the climate and environment, Naomi Klein’s concept of Shock Capitalism, and an ascendancy of political corruption. The Positive Trends? the “wealth of networks”, an upswing in environmentally conscious thinking and business action, and “democratic information”.

Steele then presented his solution. Between derogatory, if somewhat true, references to the presidential candidates as “zombies” who are “unfit to govern”, presently “slinging carefully crafted pieces of crap at each other”, and Obama specifically as a “house Negro” and a “slick, arrogant non-player”, he presented a list of the countries he thinks will own the world in the future. Specifically excluding the US and EU, he named the BRIC economies, Indonesia, Iran, Venezuela, and “Wild Cards” such as the Congo. (Whether he was referring to Congo-Brazzaville or Congo-Kinshasa was not specified.) His goal is to create a “model”–an oft-used term of his–to allow the creation of “seven billion billionaires” and turn the bottom five billion into a “wealth generating engine”.

Using technology as an accessory to thinking, rather than a crutch for a lack thereof, he plans systems to integrate entire neighborhoods, then move on to larger aggregates. Some countries, such as Singapore, the Nordic countries and the Netherlands, have adopted some of his suggestions, he says, and the United States is now functionally a third world country in infrastructure. Moving into the macro sphere, he speaks with expertise about the flawed mindset of the intelligence and Cabinet agencies–most of the important information is open and public, with only a small percentage being secret and classified, but the government is ignoring the public information for the secret information, with predictable results. With some digression into rants with questionable statistics–50% of the health system is waste, and the citizenry consists of “gerbils on a wheel”–he details the major threats facing the humanity, from highest to lowest priority:

1. Poverty
2. Infectious Disease
3. Environmental Degradation
4. Inter-State Conflict
5. Civil War
6. Genocide
7. Other Atrocities
8. Proliferation
9. Terrorism
10. Transnational Crime

and notes that the government, where it has priorities at all, has them completely wrong, and does not have any way of processing all the information and data it encounters. (I don’t think that it should, but Steele’s position is a tad more nuanced.)

The presentation then continues into hacker-friendly territory: he wishes to see platforms with standards and openness for almost everything, including open money (I’m curious as to what he means by this). As a closing note, Agent Steele offers the following analogy:

Open Source : Proprietary :: Darwinism : Intelligent Design

Food for thought, definitely. Even though I disagree with parts of his argument, the idea is intriguing and I rate this lecture 4 / 5.

I will be continuing my posts of my experience yesterday at HOPE with Post 2, featuring the best way to safeguard your stuff when you fly and the plethora of vulnerabilities in computerized election systems that are being deployed this year in many states. I expect that post to be up within an hour, and the other two parts by tomorrow morning. I apologize for the gaping delay between the events and my blogging of them; I did not bring a laptop to the event, and had other things to do during the day today.

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