illmob

For the last 10 years, I’ve said the same thing: I’m not going back to DEFCON. Every year I told myself the only way I’d return was if work paid for it. And honestly, this might be the last time. Unless I land somewhere new next year that gives me a reason to go, I think I’m finally done. I’ve been going to DEFCON for 15 years. I’ve watched it grow, change, and slowly drift away from what made it special in the first place even before I spent a few million in Bitcoin to fund the first trip (yea im still kicking myself in the ass for selling 75, but not as bad as the 20k bitcoin pizza or the countless others who lost a shitload)

Back in the day, DEFCON was about hackers being hackers. It was about curiosity, breaking things apart to understand how they worked, building weird projects, sharing knowledge, and finding the handful of people in the room who were just as obsessed with technology as you were. It wasn’t about branding. It wasn’t about influencers. It wasn’t about career fairs, corporate booths, or people trying to sell you the latest “cybersecurity roadmap” package. Now? It feels like a different animal.

The price tells part of the story. When I started going, a ticket was around $100. Fifteen years later, it’s pushing $600. That’s a massive jump for an event that feels like it has become increasingly watered down. A lot of the original hacker culture has been replaced by people who discovered hacking through Hollywood, Mr. Robot, and movies that turned hackers into some kind of edgy superhero archetype. The problem isn’t that new people show up everyone was new once. The problem is that too many people show up looking for the shortcut instead of wanting to learn.

The hacker mindset was never about getting a badge, a six-week online certification, or memorizing enough buzzwords to get past a recruiter. It was about spending nights tearing apart hardware, reading obscure documentation, experimenting, failing, and learning because you were genuinely curious. Now everyone wants the title without the work.

Cybersecurity has become full of people chasing the money instead of the craft. Every year there are more boot camps, more “guaranteed career” programs, and more people selling the dream that you can become an expert overnight. And, as always, there are plenty of wolves waiting to separate fools from their money.

Then came AI. AI has changed everything. It has made some things easier, but it has also flooded the space with people who think pressing a button makes them a hacker.

Working with AI can feel a lot like Charlie Babbitt (Tom Cruise) in Rain Man. At first, you think you’re the one driving. You ask a question, expecting a straight answer, and instead you’re sitting in the passenger seat while your brilliant, eccentric companion fixates on something completely different. You say, “Help me write a business proposal.”

The AI replies with a lecture on the history of proposals, three philosophical caveats, and an unsolicited deep dive into Kmart underwear because, somewhere in the statistical machinery, it decided that was relevant. It isn’t stupid. In fact, it’s often frighteningly brilliant. That’s what makes the experience so strange. One moment it’s compressing a thousand pages into five paragraphs. The next it’s obsessing over a detail that has nothing to do with your actual goal.

You learn that using AI isn’t about asking questions. It’s about steering. You become less of a user and more of a handler, constantly nudging an incredibly intelligent partner back toward the objective whenever it decides the scenic route is more interesting than the destination. In that sense, AI doesn’t replace expertise. It demands a different kind of expertise. The people who get the most out of it aren’t the ones who blindly accept every answer. They’re the ones who know enough to recognize when it’s drifting, hallucinating, or confidently solving the wrong problem.

AI needs a sidekick. Not because it isn’t powerful, but because it has no judgment. It can generate possibilities all day long, but it can’t reliably distinguish between the clever answer and the useful one without someone capable of making that call. The danger is that AI creates the illusion that borrowed intelligence is the same thing as earned intelligence. When everyone has access to the same model, it’s easy to mistake fluent output for deep understanding. People start believing they’re experts because they can produce expert-looking work. They mistake acceleration for mastery. The machine did the heavy lifting, and they confuse operating the machine with possessing the knowledge behind it. That’s not an argument against AI. It’s an argument against intellectual complacency. A calculator didn’t teach anyone mathematics. GPS didn’t teach anyone geography. AI won’t teach anyone how to think simply because they can prompt it well. In fact, if you’re not careful, it can become a substitute for thinking instead of an aid to thinking.

The people who become dramatically more capable with AI are usually the ones who were already curious. They interrogate its answers. They test assumptions. They recognize mistakes because they’ve spent years building intuition the hard way. Everyone else risks becoming faster without becoming better.

The signal-to-noise ratio is worse than ever. Everyone has a tool, everyone has an opinion, and everyone wants to call themselves a security professional. But tools don’t create hackers. Curiosity does. Obsession does. The willingness to chase a question long after everyone else has accepted the first answer. The hacker scene wasn’t built by people looking for shortcuts. It was built by people who couldn’t leave well enough alone ,people who wanted to know why something worked, not just that it worked.

The scene isn’t dead because new people arrived.

It’s changing because the culture that produced great researchers is slowly being replaced by a culture that rewards appearances over understanding. It’s easier than ever to look knowledgeable. Harder than ever to know who has actually done the work.DEFCON will always have its history. There are still extraordinary researchers there. There are still people quietly pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.

But the feeling is different.The underground became mainstream, and the mainstream brought metrics, branding, audiences, algorithms, and monetization. The hacker scene used to reward exploration for its own sake. Now it often rewards visibility.

The irony is that the greatest technology for amplifying human intelligence arrived at exactly the moment when fewer people seem interested in developing their own. AI can make great thinkers astonishingly productive. But it can also make shallow thinking sound sophisticated. The difference isn’t the tool. It’s whether the person behind the keyboard is still asking questions after the AI has already given them an answer.

Maybe that’s just what happens when something grows too big. The outsiders arrive, the corporations follow, the money shows up, and eventually the thing that made it special gets harder to find. For those of us who were around before the hype, before the certifications, before everyone wanted to be a “cybersecurity professional,” it’s hard not to miss what it used to be.

The old scene isn’t coming back. And maybe that’s the part that’s hardest to accept.

Get off my lawn.

…As one final effort to keep an old tradition alive, I’m bringing some of the stickers and random stuff I’ve been making in Photoshop over the years. The goal has always been the same: make something that either makes people laugh, makes people uncomfortable, or gets someone to stop and say, “What the hell am I looking at?”

Over the years, that has included things like 3D-printed novelty items featuring hacker-themed designs, questionable jokes, and other weird creations that probably shouldn’t exist, but somehow do.

This year, I’m making a batch of 3D-printed Nintendo cartridge keychains with fake game titles and stupid ideas that seemed funny at the time. The plan is to print around 60 of them and hand them out to friends.

I’m not making these to sell, start a brand, or turn them into some kind of side hustle. They’re just little pieces of the old-school DEFCON spirit: make something weird, share it with people, and hopefully get a few laughs. I’ll post pictures of them here once they’re done.

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