The last couple weeks have been a busy time for the future, or at least for people talking about it. Two big conferences took place, South By Southwest Interactive and the Emerging Tech Conference. I was at neither of them. But one of the many joys of all this emerging interactive tech is that, except for the parties and the people, you can learn almost as much as a real attendee just from what's posted online by the people who're actually on the scene. Full disclosure: I would have happily attended either event, but my travel schedule already overfloweth with hacker cons and anarchist book fairs, so anything disparaging I might write or say about people who did attend is purely out of jealousy.

There was so much going on at SXSW: Interactive that I haven't really wrapped my head around it yet, but to be honest ETech seems more my cup of tea anyway. Maybe that's just because it had a few people I've actually met or interacted with speaking there, but also it's a little more academic/philosophizing based and less about the business stuff. Plus Valleywag hardly paid any attention to it by comparison, so that's a point in its favor for me. For purposes of being future compliant then, I'm going to skip over Austin and head to virtual San Diego to pick out some highlights.

I'll have a lot more to say about hackers, hacking, and hacker culture in the weeks, months, and years to come, but it's worth checking out what Tim O'Reilly, founder of Etech had to say about the importance of hackers as innovators and explorers in the world of emerging technology. Watch an excerpt from the video here.

Ok, most of the video clip is a long, sort-of-deep Rilke quote about wrestling with angels, and your mileage with that will vary greatly based on personal tastes, but it's got a great take-away line at the end and it's a good jumping off point for poking around the Etech site. I want to highlight a few talks in particular that sounded really cool to me and really pushed all my interest buttons.

First off Pablos Holman gave a talk about insecurity in things we all take for granted. From talking with him at Shmoocon, I think he's given versions of this talk several different places, and I can see why. He shows off some simple but really eye-opening ways of beating security in everything from voice-mail systems to RFID enabled credit cards to simple lock picking. I once watched a guy at a hacker con pick 12 master locks in under three minutes, and I can tell you that I've never looked at a locked door the same way since. There's a good write-up of Pablos' talk here on wired.com. I think that it's really useful to spend some time listening to experts on all kinds of security, because it opens your eyes to the fact that you're not nearly as secure as you think you are, as well as to the fact that some things aren't nearly as dangerous as you think they are. Some people find it sort of depressing and worrying, but I find it very liberating, because, while I certainly take plenty of precautions, I also feel like my real safety is determined by a whole lot of interesting and complex social, cultural, and technological issues rather than just the lock on my door.

Wired.com also has a write-up of Quinn Norton's Etech talk about body hacking, which is one of her abiding interests. And she's not the only one. As technology and biology and chemistry/pharmacology merge ever and ever closer, the amount of options we're going to have when it comes to hacking our own bodies is going to be amazing. Quinn makes the interesting point that stimulants like coffee were among the first body hacks that increased productivity. Now we have people implanting RFID chips and even magnets in their bodies, and there are constant leaps in the integration between electronics and flesh. A lot of people I talk to are excited about the possibilities in this area, and I have to admit that I'm one of them. I'm not sure at what point I'll be willing to implant a machine in my body, but I am sure that point will come.

Then there was a talk that combines one of my all time favorite topics, sex, with one of my new favorite topics, privacy in the internet era. Violet Blue is a sex-blogger of some renown, and a really thoughtful writer about the politics, philosophy, and technology issues around sex, plus about the actual fun parts too. She describes her own account of her talk here on her site (maybe NSFW) and Ethan Zuckerman gives his audience-eye summary here. I already knew that privacy is basically a fiction on the internet, at least in the long haul, and Violet goes into that a fair amount. The one creepy thing I hadn't ever thought of was how people can be unknowingly sexualized by people with rather particular fetishes. I had no idea there was a fetish for people who like pictures of women wearing seatbelts the cut between their breasts, but there is (and I guess according to Rule 34 I should have realized it), so you have people with pictures on their Flickr pages of them in their cars and those pics are being copied off and used as erotic stimulants for complete strangers. Kinda creepy, yeah, but I guess no more so than someone leering at you while you're at the beach or our on the town. Well, OK, a little creepier than that...

I picked these three stories because they're all about how the emerging future is going to be weird and unsafe, and exciting in ways we don't normally think of. Part of what I try to do, and what I'm trying to get other people to do, is to start thinking about and wondering about these other aspects of the future. It's not all going to be bird flu and flying cars you know. Some of us will have magnets implanted in our fingertips. Other people will think that's hot.