No, that’s not an insult. It’s both a timely warning and a prophetic bit of advice.
Hacking is going mad worldwide, both in the bad sense of stealing stuff via computers and in the good sense of finding shortcuts to greatness.
Ironic that one word should encapsulate both the starriest summits and the dystopianist depths of the Internet Age, isn’t it?
Just a Part of Life
When data breaches for every adult is just “a part of life,” and teenagers are materializing new forms of money out of thin air daily, it’s time for the rest of us to get hacking.
7 New Hacks
Here are 7 fascinating and disturbing new hacks:
- Robots are looking less like Terminators and more like cute and cuddly WALL-Es, especially now that scientists are hacking them to be chivalrous.
- North Korea hacked South Korea and got all the US’s plans for knocking off Kim Jong-un. Hacking doesn’t just affect your wallet, it’s determining the course of nation-states.
- A girl who was shot by the Taliban for trying to get an education just started school at Oxford University. That’s hacking in reverse plus the Streisand Effect for the win.
- Netflix’s The Confession Tapes documents how cops hack the human brain to trick you into confessing to crimes you didn’t commit. A tense watch full of dystopian possibilities for us Orwell fans.
- Tokens and ICOs (like IPOs but for Bitcoin) will enable us to hack our way to a universal basic income, gravity-powered flights to Mars and intergalactic dominance — all while turning a tidy profit.
- Russia hacked the last US presidential election by simply amplifying our own nuttery against us.
- Google’s new earbuds hack communication, now featuring instant translation among 40 languages. I’ve got a Universal Translator in my next story, by the way.
Unhackable?
What may save us though is the unhackable Bitcoin blockchain technology. When everything we depend on, from credit ratings and bank accounts to traffic lights and ballistic missile defenses, is hackable, the blockchain could return our security.
So, get hacked! If you don’t plug yourself into these new technologies and prepare for these trends, it’ll happen anyway — and it won’t be convenient.
Photo by Justin Peterson on Unsplash
