By Peter Prickett (Thu, 14 Apr 2005 10:57:40 +0100)
As perhaps the first information philosopher, Richard Thieme has become a figurehead among both the cloak and dagger intelligence community and the highly secretive hacker underground. Richard is an institution in the hacker/security conference circuit and his column 'Islands in the Clickstream' is syndicated to over 60 countries.
WD> CNN have called you 'a member of the Cyber avant-garde', Digital Delirium named you 'one of the most creative minds of the digital generation'. How do you handle such praise?
You drop a zero.
When I joined the national speakers association, I was overwhelmed by a gale force wind of other speakers telling me how much they worked, how great they were, how highly paid they were. A friend told me, when they tell you their fee, just drop a zero.
Same thing. I take kind or generous statements like that to mean, "your work was meaningful for me" or "I like that" or "you made me think."
You never believe your own press - good or bad.
WD> How did you initially get involved in technical commentary?
When I left the ordained (Episcopal/Anglican) ministry in 1993 it was to explore the transformational energies swirling around us then as a result of the information revolution. I was asked to write a column about the human side of technology for the Wisconsin Professional Engineers' monthly magazine. After half a dozen had received a good response I offered them by email which was new then. As E.B. White said, it's no wonder how complicated things get what with one thing leading to another. The columns became Islands in the Clickstream which are now a book (Syngress Publishing 2004) and I used the nascent world wide web to locate magazines and see if they wanted social or cultural commentary on the phenomenon. Within a few months I was writing for magazines in America, Canada, England, Australia, and South Africa. I wrote every month for South Africa Computer Magazine for three years. Islands now goes to at least sixty countries.
As I said, one thing leading to another.
WD> What has been your sons influence upon your work and your approach to it?
My dialogue with my son, who was 12 when I bought him an Apple 2 and who has never looked back - has been invaluable. It's the dialogue. I learned to bring to him what I later brought to some of the young technophiles in hacker cons - absolute respect. He was so much brighter than I was about technical matters and saw things so clearly that our dialogue became an important learning space for me. That continues today, and he'll be 35 this year.
Of course that's true of ALL of our seven children and step-children! But Aaron, the first born son, is the one with the most geeky gifts in relationship to all this.
WD> How have your ministerial experiences affected your approach to information technology?
Absolutely. And my immersion in, teaching of, and writing literature the decade before that. I learned to relate the context of our encounters and conversations to ultimate values. They may be implicit rather than stated, but that was always the deeper context. Information technology like print text before it is a transformational engine for human identity and activity. We think and behave differently as a result of the ways new technologies of information and communication frame our possibilities. I learned to do that in a world of writing and text. I saw that electronic communication was changing us and in fact already had changed us (the telegraph started all this in 1820, after all) in significant ways.
Ministry was ultimately about using symbols, particularly powerful archetypal symbols, as transformational leverage on behalf of people who were searching for solutions, resolutions, higher states, different spiritual and emotional goal states. Preaching was like doing a Tarot reading, if you think about it, using symbols of deliverance, healing, and transformation. It stands to reason
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By Peter Prickett (Thu, 14 Apr 2005 10:57:40 +0100)
As perhaps the first information philosopher, Richard Thieme has become a figurehead among both the cloak and dagger intelligence community and the highly secretive hacker underground. Richard is an institution in the hacker/security conference circuit and his column 'Islands in the Clickstream' is syndicated to over 60 countries.
WD> CNN have called you 'a member of the Cyber avant-garde', Digital Delirium named you 'one of the most creative minds of the digital generation'. How do you handle such praise?
You drop a zero.
When I joined the national speakers association, I was overwhelmed by a gale force wind of other speakers telling me how much they worked, how great they were, how highly paid they were. A friend told me, when they tell you their fee, just drop a zero.
Same thing. I take kind or generous statements like that to mean, "your work was meaningful for me" or "I like that" or "you made me think."
You never believe your own press - good or bad.
WD> How did you initially get involved in technical commentary?
When I left the ordained (Episcopal/Anglican) ministry in 1993 it was to explore the transformational energies swirling around us then as a result of the information revolution. I was asked to write a column about the human side of technology for the Wisconsin Professional Engineers' monthly magazine. After half a dozen had received a good response I offered them by email which was new then. As E.B. White said, it's no wonder how complicated things get what with one thing leading to another. The columns became Islands in the Clickstream which are now a book (Syngress Publishing 2004) and I used the nascent world wide web to locate magazines and see if they wanted social or cultural commentary on the phenomenon. Within a few months I was writing for magazines in America, Canada, England, Australia, and South Africa. I wrote every month for South Africa Computer Magazine for three years. Islands now goes to at least sixty countries.
As I said, one thing leading to another.
WD> What has been your sons influence upon your work and your approach to it?
My dialogue with my son, who was 12 when I bought him an Apple 2 and who has never looked back - has been invaluable. It's the dialogue. I learned to bring to him what I later brought to some of the young technophiles in hacker cons - absolute respect. He was so much brighter than I was about technical matters and saw things so clearly that our dialogue became an important learning space for me. That continues today, and he'll be 35 this year.
Of course that's true of ALL of our seven children and step-children! But Aaron, the first born son, is the one with the most geeky gifts in relationship to all this.
WD> How have your ministerial experiences affected your approach to information technology?
Absolutely. And my immersion in, teaching of, and writing literature the decade before that. I learned to relate the context of our encounters and conversations to ultimate values. They may be implicit rather than stated, but that was always the deeper context. Information technology like print text before it is a transformational engine for human identity and activity. We think and behave differently as a result of the ways new technologies of information and communication frame our possibilities. I learned to do that in a world of writing and text. I saw that electronic communication was changing us and in fact already had changed us (the telegraph started all this in 1820, after all) in significant ways.
Ministry was ultimately about using symbols, particularly powerful archetypal symbols, as transformational leverage on behalf of people who were searching for solutions, resolutions, higher states, different spiritual and emotional goal states. Preaching was like doing a Tarot reading, if you think about it, using symbols of deliverance, healing, and transformation. It stands to reason
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