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# Something Wicked This Way Comes
- URL: https://plaintext.ghost.io/something-wicked-this-way-comes/
- Published: 2026-10-08T04:28:50.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-08T04:28:50.000Z
- Author: Chris Roberts

### Your English-Lit cheat sheet for the Hacker Halted keynote. No exam.

You don't need to know your Shakespeare. That's my job for the next fifty minutes. This is just a map so you can follow along, nod knowingly at your neighbour, and take the useful bits home. Read it now, or after. Either way, welcome.

---

### The one idea

**Human nature is the constant. Only the tooling changes.** Which is why a 400-year-old playwright still describes our kill chain better than most vendor decks. Betrayal, ambition past its authority, mistaken identity, and a body count that traces back to one ignored warning. That's not a tragedy. That's a breach report in tights.

---

### The map: five acts, one breach

| Act                            | The play                         | Where we are                                          |
| ------------------------------ | -------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------- |
| **I · Reconnaissance**         | *Macbeth*, the witches' prophecy | They study you first. The omens were all there.       |
| **II · Intrusion**             | *Macbeth*, the dagger            | The fatal first step, and the alert that misled you.  |
| **III · Identity & Deception** | *Othello* · *Twelfth Night*      | The enemy wears a trusted face.                       |
| **IV · Impact**                | *The Tempest*, the storm         | The reckoning lands. What did you build to come back? |
| **V · Reckoning**              | *Julius Caesar*                  | The fault, it turns out, is in ourselves.             |

---

### Lines you'll hear, and what they actually mean

- **"By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes."** The breach you can smell long before you can find it.
- **"To patch, or not to patch."** The defender's dilemma: the risk of the zero-day against the risk of the change.
- **"Is this a dagger which I see before me?"** The alert that pulls you the wrong way while the real one sits three rows down.
- **"I am not what I am."** Iago's motto, and every deepfake since. Is it even a human? Is it still the one from ten minutes ago?
- **"Our revels now are ended."** The outage, the ransomware, the dissolve. Your backups are the whole plot now.
- **"The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves."** It was rarely the exotic exploit. It was the basics we knew, and skipped.

---

### The keeper: good counsel, or how to work with your (AI) colleague

The part worth photographing. Six habits for working with an intelligence architecture, and here's the trick: every one is just as true for a junior analyst or a very powerful service account.

1. **Context.** Give it the full stage. Context in, better counsel out. Don't ask the fool to riddle blind.
2. **The Fool.** Make it argue back. The worth is the pushback, not the flattery. Ask it to take the other side.
3. **Hand on the tiller.** Keep the judgment yours. It acts on your command; a human stays on the loop, and you verify.
4. **Joiners, movers, leavers.** Govern it like staff. Scope what it can touch, review it, and know what that scope is.
5. **Credit.** Name your collaborators, out loud. It costs nothing, and it's honest.
6. **Prospero's release.** Know when to free it. Don't be the one who can't set the power down, or who outsources the thinking they should own.

---

### The one rule

Ask more questions. Of your vendors, your teams, and yourself. And **ask, before you click life's big red button.**

---

### A note on whose voice is whose

Full disclosure, because it's the whole point. This talk, and this page, were written in collaboration with an intelligence architecture. A colleague, not a tool, and credited in the open. Some of what you'll hear tonight is mine. Some of it, the soliloquies very much included, is theirs. Part of the fun is working out which is which, and the fact that you can't always tell is, honestly, half the message.

*Prepared collaboratively with: Chris Roberts, Sid, Claude.*

*Chris Roberts · @sidragon1 · Hacker Halted 2026, Atlanta*