Infosec is a high-stakes game of entropy

Every once in a while I get a little despondent about life in the security field. The shiny will rub off and I'll see the stark reality that my industry is built around the idea that people are awful. Billions and billions of dollars spent annually in hardware, software, and human assets to stop theft, and the worst of it is that if my whole job is to protect Person A's ideas, and your whole job is to try to steal them, assuming I do well at my job our net lifetime contribution to the world is zero.

We are just annihilation and entropy. We are exothermic and high-cost. We are creative but completely untapped for moving the world forward, and literally the only one whose ideas have a chance at succeeding is Person A, and that's only if they're able to afford the battle.

Imagine the world we could have created by now if all 3 of us were allowed to be creative toward a greater good. Imagine if businesses could innovate without fear of attack, if inventors didn't have to work so hard to secure patents just to stop theft. Maybe this comes across as a rant against fiat currencies, but books and movies show us what the human mind is capable of not just imagining, but also bringing to life. We know there have been scientific advances that were directly inspired by media. There was a US general, who, while watching the first "Predator" movie, jumped up and shouted "I WANT THAT!" when the predator became invisible, prompting decades of R&D into invisibity tech. But even that example was intended to be used toward the enormous industry of loss & loss-prevention, because what is a military if not an applied security institution?

But where would we be if all of us could take our ideas and turn them into reality? What medicines would we have? What access to information? What reaches of space?

But instead you just want to steal, and I just have to block. At scale that would suggest at least 2/3 of the planet is involved in some variation of this stupid dance.

Going back to sci-fi, one of the major themes in that genre seems to be that others got their shit together and figured out how to develop toward a common good. Star Trek IV made a big show of us still using money and how damned inconvenient it was, but it's a fairly common trope: societies rapidly advance after "moving beyond money". That's not to say they've moved beyond greed, because greed often underlies the plots of many sci-fi stories, but it's significant BECAUSE it's uncommon in those imagined worlds.

A society that isn't fettered with using 2/3 of its resources to just prevent malice makes for awe-inspiring visuals and ideas. Imagine if it could be ours, and all we'd have to do is stop trying to steal each others' crap.

But then maybe that lack of secure-by-design philosophy, born of centuries of fighting over resources, is why Jeff Goldblum was able to hack the mothership with a PowerBook 5300.