Defining the security/hacker mindset as extreme reductionism: ignoring the surface abstractions and limitations to treat a system as a source of parts to manipulate into a different system, with different (and usually unintended) capabilities.
To draw some parallels here and expand 2017, I think unexpected Turing-complete systems and weird machines have something in common with heist movies or cons or stage magic: they all share a specific paradigm we might call the security mindset or hacker mindset.
What they (and hacking, speedrunning, social-engineering etc) all have in common is that they show that the much-ballyhooed ‘hacker mindset’ is, fundamentally, a sort of reductionism run amok, where one ‘sees through’ abstractions to a manipulable reality. Like Neo in the Matrix—a deeply cliche analogy for hacking, but cliche because it resonates—one achieves enlightenment by seeing through the surface illusions of objects and can now see the endless lines of green code which make up the Matrix, and vice-versa. (It’s maps all the way down!)
In each case, the fundamental principle is that the hacker asks: “here I have a system W, which pretends to be made out of a few Xs; however, it is really made out of many Y, which form an entirely different system, Z; I will now proceed to ignore the X and understand how Z works, so I may use the Y to thereby change W however I like”.