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September 12, 2011

Hewlett Packard on gapingvoid: It’s about cybersecurity.

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Hew­lett Pac­kard is kic­king off its cyber­se­cu­rity con­fe­rence today, HP Pro­tect 2011, and they kindly hired gaping­void to design some pos­ters for them.

Basi­cally, I wan­ted to draw something kinda cool n’ fun, something that com­pu­ter secu­rity peo­ple wouldn’t mind taking back home and han­ging on their office walls.

To the une­du­ca­ted, the car­toon might seem tri­vial, but actually, it’s not. Like Len­nie Bruce famously said, “Humor is serious business”.

Fred Wil­son is right, we are indeed in the middle of a major, long-term, glo­bal tras­for­ma­tion, and Obama (or any­body else who wants his job) is NOT, REPEAT NOT going to save us.

So what IS going to save us? The SAME DAMN THING that has ALWAYS saved us:

That’s right. The Play Ethic. Crea­ti­vity. All that good stuff Sir Ken talks about. All that good stuff that gaping­void hope­fully represents.

All serious work begins with serious play first. AND NOT the night before, but FIRST thing in the mor­ning.You think Jony Ives works for a living? Hell, no, he plays for a living. So do I. So do my friends, Char­les Hope, Seth Godin and others like us.

And YES, you can bring that sense of play anywhere– to a con­fe­rence on cyber­se­cu­rity, for exam­ple. Don’t get me wrong; cyber­se­cu­rity is also serious busi­ness. Our collec­tive safety and our live­lihoods as citi­zens depend on it, and com­pa­nies like HP work to help pro­tect our culture’s cri­ti­cal infras­truc­ture sys­tems and gene­rally keep us out of trouble.

It’s a nasty, dan­ge­rous world out there, after all…

That being said, secu­rity nerds are also peo­ple who like to play and get paid for it, more than most. They like to have FUN, at con­fe­ren­ces and anywhere else, of course they do. Who says the good guys can­not be sweaty and unsha­ven? News to me. To PLAY means to HACK something. Hac­king is INHERENTLY play­ful. Of course it fric­kin’ is.

[Note to non-Nerds: the rea­son that nerds don’t spend a lot of time on their per­so­nal appea­rance is because they’d rather spend their brief time here on Earth, wor­king on something that actually mat­ters to them, not spend it on something that mat­ters to the usual crowd of clue­less, super­fi­cial, hips­ter knuckleheads.]

Thanks to Hew­lett Pac­kard for giving gaping­void the oppor­tu­nity to live in a place it hasn’t yet i.e. the com­plex and mys­te­rious world of cyber­se­cu­rity i.e. the world where the hac­kers live and thrive hap­pily. It’s good to know that some of them are on our side. So far, it’s been a blast. Rock on.

[Bonus Link: The ever-brilliant Ben Ham­mers­ley gave a great talk to a bunch of high-level UK cyber­se­cu­rity nerds recently. A won­der­ful read.]

[The “Hire Hugh” page etc.]

Tags: Charles Hope, cybersecurity, Fred Wilson, Hewlett Packard on gapingvoid, HP Protect, Seth Godin