(Obsolete) Zero.

[hirez]

When we were driving back from Vierhouten, jarkman spotted a sign that pointed to Lelystad. Had I been a lot less focused on getting to the ferry (and could actually remember where the place was) I would have detoured here, which is where this happened.

I still have the t-shirts. They're a bit knackered and only really fit to be worn by the rail-thin version of the JHR, and...

... It wasn't so much mind blowing as mind augmenting. I suppose vaguely like discovering that most of the things you knew or suspected had extra or hidden levels which could be used as a handy leg up out of your reality tunnel.

A couple of years previously, I'd been along to some proto-extropian event where Terence McKenna was going to speak over a live video-link. Or maybe it was going to be Tim Leary and McKenna was organising it. Basically a set of activist post-hippies playing with smart drugs and hunting for the cyberculture that Gibson had conjured up in some ur-Rule34 manner. They had the concept right, but the toolset still revolved around finding the right mind-altering chemical.

HEU provided the toolset for people to start hacking reality.

(I note the GSM Men are firmly denying that A5 can be cracked by the CCC. Good luck with that belief in fairies...)

I missed the next two. (HIP & HAL) One through being too deep into my own reality tunnel, one through sudden poverty.

WTH was... I thought I knew the score. It was good, but I was just a tourist having a bit of a scoff at the MFTL lectures. Instead I met lovely people entirely by accident and I guess worked out that it wasn't all about buffer exploits. There was also John Gilmore talking about the restart in psychedelic research, so maybe those proto-extropians were right. And Humppa, obviously.

For HAR, I had this vague idea that to be properly involved meant being physically connected to the campsite LAN. Even in the last couple of hours of bunging things in a bag, I was dithering about bringing along my aged Bay/Netgear hub.

I'm sure in one conversation or other, it's come up that the Heinleinian Competent Person is unrealistic and just a bad thing to think about because people are basically useless and proud of it. While I'm not a subscriber to the complete list of ship-minding and cutting up of pigs, I do begin to think that a useful sort of chap should be able to manage a wedge of it, plus the set of things that one can learn from hanging round a good hacker-camp.

[ This was buried in the comments section of a recent post and summarises what I've been jabbering about. ]

I look at the reports from Defcon, and the thing looks like a cross between 'Ibiza uncovered' and some form of 'Nerds gone wild' DVD. Las Vegas also gives me the Fear. I'd like to visit the place when the Rat-pack and the Mob were running the show(s), but absent time-travel I'm stuffed.

Hxx/CCC events are, I dunno, more or less the exact opposite of that. It's all the self-organising, co-operative, anarchist, mind(set)-altering good stuff that makes me quietly despair about my alleged real life, but also be intensely glad that it happened and that I was part of it.

[ I've tried several times to write about the experience properly and they've all come out rubbish. This is a fragment from a previous attempt. ]

The separated nature of HAR meant that somehow, each field had a different flavour. One contained the Blinkenlicht tent and several people noodling away on guitars. The field where we'd set up camp turned out to contain the people with the techno and the big speakers. Big disco-balls hung from oak trees, laser-shows over the fake-smoke shrouded lake to the sound of a storming Carl Cox mix, and the guys working on the OpenBSM cell-site code. Everywhere you looked there were teams of people hacking on... something, faces lit by laptop glow and nodding along to the nearest mix.

Comments

[alien8.livejournal.com]

Defcon is very much what you make of it. The reports you see are typically a limited viewpoint as there is _so much stuff_ happening you have to pick and choose.

Having been to both HAL2001 and Defcon (quite a few times) I'd say they're very similar indeed. The Rivera becomes the campsite. the huge areas of tables for 'stuff' become project areas - the focused skyboxes can take you from starter in a field to competent in not much time at all.

It's awesome.

I *highly* recommend it to you. You'd love the parties :)

[easterbunny.livejournal.com]

the complete list of ship-minding and cutting up of pigs,

This is a movable feast for me. I'd say the top 3 items on my personal list are

1. usefully look after a child
2. get a fish from water to plate
3. build a radio without thinking hard about anything except where to scrounge bits

It dawns on my that nothing is really standing in my way bar bicycling down to the toy store that sells the relevant kits (or reciting the correct incantation of numbers at the internet). Plus learning to fish.

[tails-redux.livejournal.com]

...all the self-organising, co-operative...
See you at the Bristol Anarchist's Bookfair next weekend?

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Yes.

[misterfurious.livejournal.com]

W!T!H! was my first "Hacker camp", and 4 years on, HAR was more of the same, and even bigger and better. When I think back to school, and what we were like there, and the emerging BBS scenes, all the messed up shit we got up to that today would result in arrest, and no one of us in my school had *any* idea at all that stuff like this was existing. We were inventing it ourselves, without a clue that so much was already out there.

Then you find out that guys I know now, are mentioned on that thread/advert about a hacker camp from 1993!

I'm only 33, but I'm old enough to recall when I'd read the entire worthwhile contents of the internet. The days before Wiki(whatever) and Lj and even Google. Yet these guys were old hands even then.

Pretty cool.

[misterfurious.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's all it takes?

1. Send child to steal a credit card off someone.
2. Tell child to order a fish supper and a Maplin radio kit from intarwebs.
3. Tell child to go steal car radio for in the meantime. And that he would have got bonus points for initiative if they'd done that whilst procuring the credit card.
4. ?!?
5. Profit!

I suspect someone will have already updated his list. If not, include "Be damned sure you don't leave anything important in your hold luggage, as it might not be on the same plane you are."

Also, "When transporting things that look like bombs in your hold luggage, such as safe time locks, mobile phones, electronic lock spiking kits, and large metal tungsten carbide tipped rods (drill bits) be aware that your luggage might not get on the plane with you."

Surely that is more relevant to the truly modern man?

[jendama.livejournal.com]

I read this, I suppose vaguely like discovering that most of the things you knew or suspected had extra or hidden levels which could be used as a handy leg up out of your reality tunnel. as this:

I suppose vaginally like discovering that most of the things you knew or suspected had extra or hidden levels which could be used as a handy leg up out of your reality tunnel.

It made sense for a few following paragraphs. Then I became confused. I'm better now. Hope you are too.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Discovering things vaginally lends a whole new perspective to the piece.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Good, isn't it?

I guess in many ways, the internet is hacker culture's self-documentation project. If we ignore the Fisher-Price bits that keep the hoi-palloi happy.

It also saves an awful lot wheel re-inventing.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Oh. Was there another safe-cracking invitational?

[jendama.livejournal.com]

Yes. And it also lends a lovely connotative image to your phrase 'reality tunnel' doesn't it?

I rather like that phrase in place of 'vagina' so much that I should probably sit down and write a piece titled, "Reality Tunnel Monologues." But then no one would want to read it ... well, maybe gay males who think it's about something else.

I digress!

[hirez.livejournal.com]

That, too.

You've given me new ways to think about gender (differences). Thank you.