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Rudy Rucker
Rudy Rucker is a writer, a mathematician and a computer scientist. Born in Kentucky in 1946, Rucker moved to Silicon Valley when he turned 40. Rucker has published twenty-five books, primarily science-fiction and popular science. He was an early cyberpunk and an editor at Mondo 2000. He often writes SF in a style is characterized as transreal. His most recent novels were Frek and the Elixir, a far-future epic about a boy's galactic quest to restore Earth's ecology and As Above So Below, a historical novel based on the life of the sixteenth century painter Peter Bruegel. Rucker is a professor emeritus of computer science at San Jose State University, where he created a number of freeware programs relating to chaos, artificial life, cellular automata, higher dimensions, and computer games. He is presently working on The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, a nonfiction book about computers and the nature of reality. Rucker's website can be found at www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker or at www.rudyrucker.com.
look out
There were only two or three really talented hackers in the late-1980s. The rest of us were too amazed -- agape, gibbering about what we saw -- to really be able to focus. What made being a hacker, and I'm using the word just to refer to people who broke into computers illegally, so singular at the time was our view of the territory ahead.
Engineers at the regional phone companies occasionally got a glimpse-- they ran some of the largest data networks around, had their switching centers online, and, if they so desired, could hop from NPA to NPA without ever touching terra firma. But most of their view was blocked: telco engineers only saw the systems they had direct responsibility for, and they had no sense of what was going on outside the insular Bell companies. (And they sure as hell couldn't elbow their way onto a LMOS system back East and patch one of the binaries in place to turn a line test utility into a remote wiretap, just so a dozen hackers could call a 1-800 conference system and listen to a rap star's home phone. For example.)
The early residents of ARPAnet also had a fuzzy view of the embryonic Net but, frankly, they were a tad.. slow. Yes, they helped invent the internet; they believed in the free flow of information, in email, and FTP. But they were academics and military bureaucrats. In our estimation, they knew as much about the Net as our parents knew about sex. ARPAnet was a profoundly provincial place; they had neither the imagination nor ethical lapses required to spelunk through the wider network and see what was to come.
In short, to be a hacker in the late 1980s was to know something profound about the nature and degree of connectedness before everyone else. But I want to add a much more outrageous postscript: today, an equally singular and premonitory view is coming into focus at a few of the edgier hedge funds on wall street.
I'm not trying to claim equivalence-- hedge funds are by no means "the new Legion Of Doom" (although they certainly seem to be the bad-guy of choice among op-ed writers these days). And I can only provide the most oblique support: investment firms are notoriously private so I don't know how many are headed in the same direction, and the actual details of the direction are just too dry to give here.
But the gist: we have all heard that companies from Wal-Mart to Cheescake Factory rely on sophisticated data mining to run their business. Every customer is analyzed 43 different ways until They know what you will buy before even you do. Even ignoring the enormous gap between rhetoric and reality, these algorithms are at best myopic. Like the idealized model used in undergraduate physics -- no gravity, no friction -- these companies imagine their business in isolation.
But money flows through a network with thousands of significant nodes-- to partners, from customers, away from competitors. The airline industry has come the closest to this kind of holistic analysis, thanks to their penchant for collusion.
But right now the only people who really want to see how all the pieces fit together -- to datamine entire industries, economies -- are on wall street. Coincidently, the web has already made many businesses so transparent that an outsider can know almost as much as management.
Surely, with enough determination.. a lot of bandwidth, some fast computers... somebody will build the first detailed map.. a topography of money flows.. to see what's next.
s.
According to AdWeek, T-Mobile just launched an anime ad campaign that was conceived by Itsuro Kawasaki (director of Ghost in the Shell) and stars a hacker on the lam. God damn-- phone companies used to persecute hackers, not romanticize them!
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posted by steve steinberg at 6:12:49 PM | permalink
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