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me of an old puzzle of Chinese history: Why were the very strongest dynasties - the Han, the Ming, the Tang - always confronted by the best organized, most deadly rebels? The answer was rooted in a violent, greedy tango of the development of each side. The better a dynasty defended its farmers or its trade or its annual rice harvest, the more the rebels from the steppe had to become strategic and unified and powerful. When it was easy to pick off single farmers, then the rebels had no need to be well organized. They could be a bit lazy. Could snatch a year’s undefended harvest in an afternoon. But the stronger the empire, the stronger the rebels had to become5?. Amsterdam in 1994 was a bunch of lone, weak, unprepared farmers. Twenty years later we have a digital empire, and the attackers it deserves are appearing, refined and evolved by this same competitive logic. They are better organized, smart, intent on getting to the heart of the black boxes of power. And the more we defend against them? The better they will become. That our most essential systems are vulnerable to loss of control is a chilly feeling. It is areminder of the power of the people who know how to crash and manipulate - or build and operate - parts of our world most of us barely understand. It’s like discovering someone could take over your lungs or your heart. We don’t understand those devices either, most of us. But we depend on them entirely. Some of these hackers are moved to mischief by technical beauty. Some by the giddy smashing rush of breaking in, of touching the core. Others by greed or patriotism or by secret, zealous, unlawful obsessions. What the technically best of this group share, however, is a pressing desire to get as close as possible to the kernels where inarguable and even invisible code decisions are made, where digital DNA is printed in a sense, and where a total mastery of the binary guts of the system is possible. That Cap’n Crunch thrill, the dream of whistling up control over the thick, helpless trunk of a network, that remains the dream. Remember Conway’s Law: The design and activity and control of a network redounds on, even determines the real world. If the whole network is, in a sense, filled with holes, if it contains inherently the possibility of being turned into a “weird machine” - what does that mean for the real world? The Seventh Sense insight of this chapter, the key feeling, is that all the systems we rely on, that we think we control - financial or political or digital - can all be made weird and pwned by forces we cannot see and struggle to stop. Our markets, our elections, our knowledge - all of these, dependent on linked systems themselves, can become weird. We can no longer regard them as certain and harmless. The hacker’s drive to get to the kernels is not merely an information technology problem. It’s a larger statement about networks, about the way that power and danger are still and always one and the same. The desire to hack the cores of our world is a marker of just how profoundly, even secretly influential the kernels have become - in ways we're just now beginning to understand. Bratus was right, that we don’t really understand any system until it’s been exploited, pwned. This is as true Computing and 2013 IEEE 10th International Conference on Autonomic & Trusted Computing 159 But the stronger the empire: See Turchin, p. 3 110 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018342