That brings us to today, the era of the hacker ascendant. To put it bluntly, if there was ever a battle between the hacker mindset and a more conventional approach to information technology, the hackers won. Today’s technology is built by hackers (or those descended from them), from Facebook to the iPad. The FBI recruits at Def Con; General Keith B. Alexander, director of the NSA, gives the convention’s keynote in which he asks for help — help because it’s the hackers who understand the technology better than he can hope to, and they’re the people who can make sure it’s everything we need it to be. (And to have productive conversations about who "we" are, and what "we" need our technology to do.)

"We know we can break things, but how can we make things better?"

It might be that now, as the people who started Def Con edge into their 40s, the hacker community as a whole feels a greater responsibility toward the technology it has in large part created. "I think what we see today is a lot of maturity. You see Def Con as the event where people who really care, who want to make things better from a security point of view, really come together from around the world," says Nils Puhlmann, Chief Security Officer at Zynga. "It started out as a culture of ‘let’s break things,’ to now more like ‘we know we can break things, but how can we make things better?’"

That sense of ownership, of responsibility, arguably matters more now than ever. As technology becomes ubiquitous, the stakes get raised. To give one example: twenty years ago, the much-hyped piece of malware was Michelangelo, a virus that would overwrite key sectors on a computer’s hard drive if it were booted up on March 6th, making any data on the drive irretrievable for most users. Today it’s Stuxnet and its variants, sophisticated pieces of state-funded code, designed to infiltrate networks, spy on users, and destroy hardware. Cyberwarfare has become an admitted reality; meanwhile, as author and activist Cory Doctorow puts it, "We’re at a moment now where everything we do involves the internet and computers, and we’re just before the moment where everything we do will require the internet and computers."

At the same time, as Schneier points out, "As tech becomes more ubiquitous, people understand it less." Technology’s no longer in the hands of a powerful few, and collectively, we’re immersed in more and more technology that’s beyond most people’s capacity to completely understand. "I also believe that end users shouldn’t have to care about security. They do have to care about security. but I would really consider that a failing of the hardware and software and computing industry," says Dead Addict. It’s that profound failure — at base, a deeply connected world, but one that’s troubled when it comes to trust and security — that the hackers at Def Con are working to remedy.