Cybersecurity is decadent and depraved

I wake up in my hotel room after doing my demolab at Greyhat wondering how I made a sale waking up in yesterdays clothes.
My left hand is blank. No target scrawled in Sharpie. That means either (a) I forgot to write it before screwdrivers, or (b) I sold the Canceller to somebody who already knows the target—probably me."

My company manufactures which is a canceller an automatic system that can influence social network users so that it will engage with network effect to cancel one person for a set of time. I sell it for an depraved amount of money but it supports my decadent lifestyle so I don’t mind.

The theme for this years con was Norge’s month of the smartest washer dryer. It’s just like every year the con becomes more and more corporate to the point that we have advertising while in line getting badges.

“Hey are you from the disinformation village?” I was asked and the only true answer was Yes. After going in my room I think I blacked out somehow and when I woke up I was terrified because I had actually sold one of my products I was doing a demo lab at Greyhat. Basically its a 20 minute presentation with an XR camera.

Queueing is a tradition in going that now they have tickets to sit down at places and even VIP access where you can still enjoy the experience of being in line using VR. I remember in the good old days when I designed kiosks that at least you could feel like you were eventually coming to something that worked. Half of the time though the kiosks would break and then the line becomes so long they have to put it in the event room because it causes a fire hazard at that point. VR helped a lot with the organizers honestly.

I was really concerned with who I actually sold my product to because it is unofficial name is called “the canceller”. It is a SaaS suite that can be used to character assassinate anyone. Unfortunately my hands must have gotten smeared since the name of the target wasn’t on my hands and I write them down in permanent marker so no smudges would be there. 

Back when she was scraping terabytes of social-graph data for her thesis and I was installing Hadoop for pizza money, we swore we’d never sell out.

I went through my laptop looking at the CRM data to see who the sale went through. I see I did make the SaaS sale for Ɯ1MM and a target was chosen (this is encrypted after deployment) and the time to deploy was ten hours before the sale. Since I actually went to be I have five more hours to figure out what I did or use my override key (which would get me fired) but at least I would feel good and fuzzy that I was doing the right thing. The right thing always gets you fired at the corporation I work for because I made it that way.

When I was making the company with my friend who was the graduate student and she was getting her degree in social network theory I actually got bored enough to read her paper. She was analyzing the ability to mimic a influencer computationally after downloading a few terabytes of social network data that she got with her internship. When I deployed the system and she got her degree she actually mentioned me in the defense and made me second author. Eventually she offers me a job as the technical lead of a new startup.

I remember we had lots of fun actually making the company thinking we could try to do some kind of marketing for them to do so. We had great chemistry getting stuff done but the morality of what we were doing started to eat at her but was expected. The worst thing is when we were running out of money we got a government grant to make new types of weapons. We had the idea of making an system that could cancel someone online by manipulating the narrative it worked but it horrified her but made me smile.

The whole idea was to make it so that we could eliminate filter bubbles or normalize the access of people to limit the influence of influencers at all. Instead the only use we figured out was to do this and it made me extremely rich but, for her she called me once having a slow motion panic attack over the morality of the company. I got to sooth her down so she could go to sleep after being up for seventy two hours. I wish I could feel more morals than others. 

After a while we were burning through capital she because more and more detached to the point that the board just voted her out and appointed me to be the CEO within the company. At that point I just bought her shares at 0.75% each on the dollar and I voted the board out and replaced it with an BaaS or a board as a service system that is not only more efficient than them but also is compliant with everything and uses its own users to efficiently make deals in between. She lives a happy life and I get what I want so it was extremely amicable.

Now I go to all of these cons like everyone else. Get shitfaced afterwards once you make a few sales. Now that they have the large deflector on top of the town they actually can get predictable weather before it would always be over 45 C all the time. “The con barely resembles its old self, but the right after-hours room can still fry your synapses.”

I go back to my computer and look if I can get access to the name that was inputted in. There is an escrow system that can be accessed but I was still blacked out when I made the sale since it is inputted when the sale goes through. But when I put that system in I could see the length and I saw that it was my friend's name and now I have to make the decision. Do I stop it and get voted out or do I let it through…

I make a call to the virtual board I have to negotiate with it for at least one hour. Here how it went:

[Virtual Board — 58 min compressed]

CFO: “Kill the run.  $120k in credits beats reputational bleed.”
CTO: “Checkpoint code isn’t ready.  Hard stop means 6-hour rebuild.”
Chair (deadpan avatar): “Choose.  Interrupt and lose half your unvested.  Continue and you own every SLA slip after hour twelve.”
?”
I reply yes.

You have been charged 2000 units of compute time and a new deontic decision will not be able to be made since you have exceeded your standard purchase.

Of course this may seem a bit kafkaesque to you but it is better than having a real board since boards are 50% less efficient at doing anything else after multiple studies of the subject (which I am the main author on). The real question would be who would want to perform a cancelation to my friend. I supposed I could call her up but I hate phone calls I disabled SMS on any device I own and I use seven proxies to browse the internet.

I have one last thing I can ask which is my new personal assistant program which downloads all of your data, homomorphically encrypts it all and trains an virtual assistant that not only can help make decisions with you but calm you down. Since I don’t want to fall asleep after this I talk to it for an hour and conclude that I should actually call the person.

This really boils my anxiety over and I just take some anti-anxiety medication. I really dislike talking at all to the point that my personal assistant system can actually do a voice clone of me and it will decode into any language so that it gives me a text interface to deal with people. At this point I have automated the whole CRM, ERP, L1 tech support to the point that I am at six nines (99.9999%) of the incoming requests don’t require at all.

The phone call goes like this: “Hey just wondering do you know if anyone would like to cancel you?” They respond “Yea, it was me don’t you remember you said you wanted to meet up at Grey hat?”. An awkward pause starts for a minute and I reply “Oh yea sure but like why would you want to do this?” And she replies “Just want to become anonymous”. I say “How did you do that?” And she responded I made a modification that would create a concurrent false identity so that after the cancelation it would allow you to slip into the identity seamlessly.

So finally I have actually have some kind of redemption arc at this point? Instead of canceling people you could use this to become anonymous. I never really considered the implications of actually using the thing on yourself. I have all of the source code in our repository and I know that a buyout is happening soon. I stared at a window until the system executed and then I saw it pass. She told me she already planned to go to a specific place to get rid of all of the magazines that put her face on covers from the paparazzi drones.

So now I don’t have any ethical conundrum and I guess so the program goes….
I report back to the board and I get written up again and I have only two left for this month or they will reduce my options by 0.001% . I can’t wait until my options vest in three weeks and I will just kill this company by selling it off to private equity. I would get a few hundred million Ɯ’s. 

Since I already made the sales targets I could finally enjoy the conference parties. I think there is someone who has broken parts of hotels that I am really anticipating to come out to but I forgot the name. Anywho I walk out and wait for my Transamerican eyeglasses and take my antipsychotics, antihistamines, and a smooth diet soda and finally get some sleep at this extremely odd hour so I can wake up for the rave tomorrow.

But, right before them I programmed the system to execute on myself and cancel me. I setup the board to be fully autonomous and also liquidated just enough to live the rest of my life on to be anonymous again. I knew that this kind of sales job just painted me into a corner of angst and suffering and the best way to get out is what my friend did. 

Turns out I did have one moral left: the right to disappear.