09-05, 09:20–10:00 (Europe/Amsterdam), Main track
Winn’s keynote is a call to action. Winn challenges us with a new goal: Strengthen and defend the human mental immune system. Our brains, sensory nervous systems, and minds are the new attack surface. Will the hacker community rise to the challenge of solving the most existential threat it has ever faced?
A long time ago, on June 27, 1991, Winn testified before the US Congress and was asked, “Mr. Schwartau: Why would the bad guys ever want to use the internet?”
Today, our cognitive infrastructure is under attack, and humanity needs hackers more than ever.
Metawar is the art and science of creating immersive experiences to influence, alter, and define one’s sense of reality. It is the battle for control over one’s belief systems, identity, and sense of reality outside one’s conscious awareness. Reason and emotion are incompatible operating systems.
Big Tech is digitally terraforming the planet’s future cognitive infrastructure, Web 3.0, with little concern for the downsides. The metaverse is an evolving, immersive storytelling environment designed to be the most powerful and addictive reality distortion machine ever conceived. It will also predict and anticipate your every desire and every move!
On the global stage, metawar represents the sixth domain of warfare.1 They who control the technology control the narrative, and reality is only a keystroke away.
We have no choice but to learn how to coexist with the reality-distorting technologies we have created by implementing technical, policy, and cognitive defenses to protect our sense of truth, reality, and self-identity.
Winn’s keynote is a call to action.
The hacker community is among the best problem solvers the planet has ever seen. It acts as a team, a collective of like-minded individuals with an amazing array of skills who stop at nothing to achieve their aims—against all odds.
Winn challenges us with a new goal: Strengthen and defend the human mental immune system. Our brains, sensory nervous systems, and minds are the new attack surface.
Will the hacker community rise to the challenge of solving the most existential threat it has ever faced?
Winn Schwartau is one of the world’s top experts on security, privacy, infowar, cyber-terrorism, and related topics. He has lived cybersecurity since 1983 and his predictions about the Internet and security have been scarily spot on.