Civilization as a tower of holes

Epistemic note: This essay conflates two related concepts, the tendency of humans to build civilization by exploiting Nature’s rules and the vulnerability of that same civilization to exploits in turn, under one name. I’d like a better name for these two concepts and am open to suggestions.

There is a kind of mindset that pays attention to edge cases and how to discover, expand, and exploit them. Some do it for fun; others for profit; still others as a way to prevent such exploits.

Gamers often speak of “munchkinry”, the art of transmuting loopholes into power. Whether they’re ascending a Level 1 kobold to godhood, executing arbitrary code in Super Mario World, or simply putting buckets on the heads of NPCs and robbing them blind, gamers’ tendency to exploit weird edge cases has amused and frustrated designers since—well, no one knows for sure, but probably for as long as there have been games.

In gaming, such tricks are often confined to thought experiments or specialized challenges, as they can upset the balance of actual play. In the real world, however, bad actors are frequently undeterred by the disapproval of system designers. Professionals recognize the need to discover and patch exploits as an essential part of security mindset. And the line between game and reality often blurs, as when gamers pull off a virtual heist worth tens of thousands in real money, or the CDC studies an accidental plague in World of Warcraft for insights into the spread of epidemics. Each year, serious experts and hobbyists alike compete in hackathons to find critical exploits before the bad guys do.

There’s a deeper pattern beneath this tendency to ask how many miles can be extracted from a given inch. We can see it reflected in medicine, in science, in engineering, and even in politics and manipulation. So let’s take a little bit of time to look at the world from a munchkin’s-eye view, starting where it all began: biology.

Nature, the first bio-hacker

Reproduction is a hard problem. Factories need to work off blueprints, and for an organism to replicate, it needs to contain instructions for making more of itself. Biology solved this problem with an exploit of its own; somewhere in the distant past, a pile of chemicals discovered that it's possible to store information in pairs of nucleotides. Atop this discovery did nature slowly and diligently assemble the entire structure of DNA, RNA, and all the complex organisms that depend on them.

And nature didn't stop there. From the discovery that it's possible to extract energy from sunlight, there flowed an eruption of chlorophyll-bearing organisms that carpeted the world in green. Some lucky microbes found that they could turn water into oxygen, and produced so much that it poisoned the world. Then some other lucky microbes learned to use all this oxygen, and by the power of the Aerobic Exploit they formed the basis of life as we know it.

From the munchkin’s-eye view, biology is a long series of weird quirks of chemistry that have been ruthlessly (if rather clumsily) exploited to cover the Earth in self-replicating, self-repairing, solar-powered micromachines. It’s quite the bizarre achievement, from the perspective of the rest of the cosmos, which largely expects to find a bunch of barren rocks and gas clouds orbiting the stars. Instead, Earth has all this life everywhere. What a bunch of haxx.

But nobody patched reality, and nature kept churning away. Some microbes teamed up to form colonies, and this worked so well they just kept going. First cell clusters, then specialized tissues, then dedicated organs; a tower of life built on the Comparative Advantage Exploit, eons before any economist coined the term.

From specialization sprung a new discovery: String a few long cells together, have them talk to each other with tiny biochemical shocks, and you can send signals from one end of a creature to another in an instant! Connect more of these “neurons,” and you get simple instincts; connect more and more of them in a complex, ever-changing web of weighted triggers, and you get thoughts.

Then those thoughts start making plans, and find more exploits of their own.

A tower of holes

Human brains are good at finding exploits. Many of our civilization’s greatest accomplishments can be traced back to One Weird Trick that keeps on working and working and working no matter how gleefully we abuse it. We’ve stacked dozens, hundreds, thousands of these tricks atop each other: Burning old plants makes heat, and heat makes steam, and steam builds up pressure, and pressure does work…

 ...and if you spin the right metals and hook a wire up they make lightning, and the lightning can be steered…

 ...and with a ludicrously complicated stack of exploits, you can extract vast energies from certain rocks and make steam from that…

...and if you heat it up in just the right way you can make sand do math, and that opens up a whole new realm of glorious opportunity for hacks, because it turns out the whole universe runs on math, and nobody’s caught the devs doing a live physics patch since the whole thing started.

Speaking of math, most of hacking is powered by this sort of thing. For instance, a privilege escalation attack might use your permission to do X to infiltrate account Y, then use Y's authority to enable Z, and then, by the power granted Z, wreak havoc or make off with money or secrets.

It’s not just engineering and programming that can be seen through the lens of exploits. Humans and human society might have more bugs than the rest of the cosmos put together. Strategies for the unscrupulous abound: “Get the person in power to trust me and whisper in their ear.” “Get the king to put me in charge of the military and stage a coup.” “Gain control of the part of the system that would investigate me and falsify its reports.”

Social engineering and scamming pull similar tricks on our minds. “To unlock your winnings, wire us $100.” “Click here to enter your password.” “We’ve been trying to reach you about your car’s extended warranty...” Approximately every single route by which humans make decisions can be, and frequently is, exploited as part of a wider strategy, by the sort of mind that sees people as having predictable behavior which can be manipulated.

Exploits are everywhere, and they concern everyone. Life is full of rules, whether they be universal laws, contingent facts of biology, or programmed features of an operating system. Human civilization is built, in large part, out of the increasingly sophisticated exploitation of these rules. It’s a shockingly robust construct, all things considered, but it’s still a vulnerable one. Diseases find exploits of their own, tricking our immune system with tactics like “These Aren’t The Proteins You’re Looking For.” Bad actors regularly break open our systems and suck money out through the cracks. Superstimuli hijack our senses; demagogues hijack our brains. And more or less all the rules above the level of fundamental physics have exceptions.

We live in a tower made of holes.