Against the Edgelord International
Hackers are trained to think in systems: attack surfaces, payloads, privilege escalation, persistence, obfuscation, cleanup. But contemporary politics and media culture increasingly operate in disturbingly similar ways. Narratives are injected, amplified, laundered, distorted, and made persistent across platforms, communities, and institutions. A meme can behave like a payload. A fake historical analogy can function like privilege escalation. A conspiracy theory can become a persistence mechanism. And in the age of generative AI, cultural exploits can be produced, varied, and deployed at industrial scale.
This talk proposes a hacker-oriented model of narrative warfare and cultural manipulation: the narrative exploit chain. Drawing from context hacking, media pranks, art activism, hacker history, propaganda studies, and Johannes’ own work in film, performance, and political subversion, it asks how stories become attack vectors, how irony becomes armor, how taboo-breaking becomes a recruitment funnel, and how communities can defend themselves without becoming humorless cops of consensus reality.
Sunday 1300 Grand Ballroom