It's difficult to imagine a world before the internet, or even cell phones if you didn't experience it directly. There was distance, and there was "elsewhere." In 1986, the way you found people who shared your worldview if you were outside a narrow middle class mainstream was through music, or technology. When you listen to bands from the period and before, especially anything on the alternative vein, they were trying to create signals to find people like them.
The distance allowed for a counter-culture, where the lack of distance today means a counter-culture is too dangerous to tolerate.
If you had an IQ above a standard deviation, you were probably pretty alienated, and so you used taste in art, tech, and culture to find others like you. This manifesto was 3 years before before Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine. Ministry had just released "Twitch," into a pop culture dominated by hair metal, in a society where technology still meant muscle cars and mullets. Punk was truly dead, and the affects of new romantics and the me generation and yuppies were at peak decadence.
The Hacker Manifesto is an artifact of its time. I'm rather glad it sticks out, and that it can't be co-opted by our modern and enlightened hegemon. Sure, it's got more of a cringe factor now, but it represents something that was true then, and has remained so today: competence will always be a threat to complicity. There remain people who make, discover, derive, and invent, and they will necessarily disrupt. They are the only true progress. Manifestos rarely age well, but the courage they inspire and the work that results tends to set the trajectory of history.
I read this manifesto in 1993 and for better or worse, I can say I accomplished some things as a result.
I've read it for the first time today and although I recognize the cringe factor, I recognize something else much more deeply. Which is that feeling of alienation. Lost not because I am necessarily more intelligent than my peers, just thinking in different ways entirely. Being forced to align my thought processes was torture and it regularly failed. I wish I understood better what was happening as it happened.
Hackers...the movie. "their only crime was curiosity". I suspect that line was lifted from this.
As for the Manifesto itself, for the most part, looking back, this rings true. I was there... in the 80's...with colourful boxes, acoustic couplers, and pages and pages of phone numbers. I never had the sense of community this document describes...it seemed like a much more solitary pursuit, but you picked up things if you know where to look...and clearly, trails were blazed by those that went before. To paraphase Dali... It wasn't better than drugs, It was drugs.
>> Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm smarter than most of the other
kids, this crap they teach us bores me...
Here's a thought. A smart person realises that everyone around them thinks
they're smarter than everyone else around them, and that everyone can't be
right at the same time, which must mean that most are wrong. Which in turn
means that, to be the one person who is right to think they're smarter than
everyone else around them, is really, really rare. And so very unlikely. So
the smart person will want to see very strong evidence of their own smarts,
before they accept that they are, indeed, smart- and the smarter the person
is, the stronger the evidence they will want to see, because the assumption of
average smarts will make the high smarts of the smart person appear average to
their own eyes.
Bottom line; if you think you're smarter than most kids then you're probably
not smarter than most kids. If you actually go out and say it, then chances
are you're even dumber than that.
Edit: Also, every kid is bored of the crap they teach us at school. Every.
Single. Kid. Some just know how to sit nicely and do as they're told to get
ahead in life. Who's the smart kid, again?
Not sure what your school experience was like, but for me it wasn't a bunch of equally intelligent students all thinking themselves above average. I'm happy to be in a career now where I feel surrounded by people who make me feel stupid; back then, it was very different. In high school, I never got less than an A with minimal effort, while everyone around me struggled. I don't say that to brag--I was just a big fish in a small pond. It's quite rare that many smart people are all clustered together, especially in a US public school in a relatively poor region.
And yet there are marked variations in raw intelligence, with people of exceptional ability hearing similar messages of herd-keeping mediocrity their entire lives, and having to overcome them.
This is probably better than getting a pass to completely ignore social consensus and becoming a supervillain, but the crab bucket doesn't need to be repeated on HN.
Monkeysphere dynamics play out exceptionally hard when it comes to computer security, because a single kid can easily end up putting egg on the face of a tie-wearing cert-touting "CIO".
It's funny; I taught both of these in a literature class for Korean exchange students. (I paired the Declaration with Barlow's song Estimated Prophet.) Fun topic to cover, but I think the students were too cool to feel like cyberspace was something really important to them.
See also, Bruce Sterling's "The Hacker Crackdown", an historical account of the era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker_Crackdown. Some of the players involved, including from 2600 Magazine and DefCon, are still active today.
and a time where it meant a digital vandal over POTS lines;
Well, those were "phreakers."
In the 70's, "hacker" was a person who "hacked" out the credits from public domain software and put their own name in it for resale. And you bought it anyway because software was so hard to come by.
and the old hackers used that changing environment to explain why they didn’t want to teach and learn with young hackers, and missed the chance to sow the seeds for a new spring, whose fertility they pessimistically misinterpreted.
(on a more serious note: this is not the case everywhere, in Germany e.g. the CCC does a wonderful job with the youngsters)
Wow... this transported me to the 90s... This letter is part of my origin story in becoming a Software Engineer today. I can still hear Britney's "Baby one more time" and "Real Slim Shady" in the far distance as I code some of my very first websites and learn to vandalize my highschool's email servers
The part about hackers all being alike really resonates with me. I've felt this way for years, but have not heard others talk much about it. I've had the opportunity to work with young people from all over the world (many nationalities and cultures) who have very different backgrounds than I do and it's so neat to watch them write code and listen to them talk through issues. They think about problems just as I do. I sort of think there is a hacking gene and you are either born with it or not. It's really great to be part of this band of brothers and sisters.
That part made me think of Magic the Gathering. I played a lot of Magic for awhile. While traveling I'd visit random card shops, and I've played in a number of different and far flung cities. Every night, no matter the location, it's the same group of guys gathering around to play some cards. I find it quite comforting, almost magical, and archetypal.
so much angst, but for folks around here of a certain age this brings back a lot of fond memories of a time when the internet still felt wild and limitless.
This was my impression too. Most of it sounds like the kind of stuff that kids who who think too much of their intelligence spout off in grade school. It's kinda cringey to everyone else.
There was a time when being a hacker meant one understood a system and bent the rules to get that system to do something else.
These days, being a hacker seems to mean producing crap and not taking any responsability for it.
I bought it years ago as a tribute to my childhood and have just held on to it. It was going to be a blog but I have never really found the time for that.
Maybe because I grew up in a different background (80s and 90s in Japan), but I always found the "Hacker" culture bizarre. What's with their "underground" theme, after all? Black backgrounds and skull figures and that kind of stuff. Their attitude is pretty much the same as the locker-room culture, which isn't cool either. Gangs and pirates (and ninjas and yakuzas for that matter) were never considered "cool" among techy people in Japan, and I had a trouble understanding their taste.
About 20 years ago there was a hacker-comedy group Neato Elito and they had a parody of this "Konshis 0f a Korrier" or something. I remember thinking it was amazingly funny at the time. I don't suppose anyone's got a pointer? The thing was full of misspellings, so I haven't been able to find it with web searches.
The first part of the manifesto made me feel for the author. Its unfortunate that they never got to attend a school where they were sufficiently challenged and around peers of similar ability/interest. There are many cities/countries around the world that place advanced students in advanced classes with like-minded peers, and it is unfortunate that the public school system in this country seems backward in that regard.
The second part of the manifesto sounds like the deranged ramblings of someone with delusions of grandeur. We can have a nuanced discussion around the current laws, but blatant violations of copyright and patent protections are not acceptable. "Exploring" the world doesn't justify breaking into private systems - if I decided to start "exploring" my neighbors bedrooms at night, I would hardly complain about being thrown in jail or being branded a criminal. Complaining about society's systemic racism is hardly a moral defense for snooping. Just because you're smart and good with computers, doesn't give you free reign to do whatever you want.
This brings back memories. I remember first reading phrack on a BBS, dialing over and over again against the busy signal, trying to be the next lucky one to connect. Years later people would hand them out in cd-rom format at 2600 meetings.
And then decades later, those hackers built the infrastructure for systems of surveillance and control that would have just been a wet dream for those "1950's technobrains," and modern hackers embrace racism and extremism rather than transcending them, and complain that the internet liberating humanity from the shackles of corporate information and communication control has just caused the normies to ruin its quirky charm.
Who will save the revolution from the rot of its own success?
I'd agree that the hacker counter-culture that saw technology as a door to Freedom has largely fizzled out and been replaced by hackers who see technology as a path to money. But I cant think of any of the people who were pushing it and are still around today who sold out. Stallman is still a firebrand. I've been reading 2600 again and Emanuel Goldstein hasn't sold out.
And then decades later, those hackers built the infrastructure for systems of surveillance and control that would have just been a wet dream for those "1950's technobrains,"
Yeah. I'd like to think that at least some of that was just over-optimism and not realizing the negative ends that all of this technology could/would be put to. But I'm sure some of the old-skool hackers "sold out" and figured "hey, just give me the money". The need to pay rent, buy food, etc. is a pretty strong compulsion. That said, I'd like to think that at least some of this crowd have made conscious decisions over the years to not work on certain projects / technologies / whatever, out of the ethical considerations.
modern hackers embrace racism and extremism rather than transcending them
It raises the issue of who gets to decide what terms mean, and the spectre of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy, but one might argue that those "modern hackers" you refer to aren't actually hackers as a result of their embracing those things.
There are only two endgames for a subculture. Either it goes mainstream and loses everything that ever made it special, or it walls itself off from the mainstream and goes mad, like how the Students for a Democratic Society turned into the Weather Underground.
Hacker culture, and the internet in general, fragmented into two pieces, one that went each way. The distributed panopticon finds all signs of life and stifles it into generic corporatized beigeness. The only places outside its reach are full of fascists and other subhuman vermin.
I just feel like we've lost something we can never get back.
Maybe modern underground hackers are embracing racism and extremism. But think about the disconnect between the media's reporting of hackers and what hackers actually were even twenty years ago. A hacker is, according to the news, whatever makes society hate them more. I doubt anybody smart enough to break something miles away with just a keyboard is stupid enough to believe one race is more or less than another.
What do you think is the hacker culture? Everything you hate about tech is post hacker culture. Also its purely about the hack value, making computers do what everyone thought was impossible before, and sharing it with those who appreciate it. That attitude surely have fizzled down. And that is simply the heart of hacker culture.
Being good person or bad person is totally tangential. You can be a good hacker, but maybe not the best person, or you can be a good hacker and absolutely nice.
EDIT: The scene is not actually dead. People are still doing magic with 8 bit computers and Amigas. The sky is the limit inside the box!
Who would imagine we would become the Krell so soon...
I guess that, while trying to connect ourselves so all of us could have a voice, we just invented the machines that brought into reality the worst demons in us.
[+] [-] motohagiography|6 years ago|reply
The distance allowed for a counter-culture, where the lack of distance today means a counter-culture is too dangerous to tolerate.
If you had an IQ above a standard deviation, you were probably pretty alienated, and so you used taste in art, tech, and culture to find others like you. This manifesto was 3 years before before Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine. Ministry had just released "Twitch," into a pop culture dominated by hair metal, in a society where technology still meant muscle cars and mullets. Punk was truly dead, and the affects of new romantics and the me generation and yuppies were at peak decadence.
The Hacker Manifesto is an artifact of its time. I'm rather glad it sticks out, and that it can't be co-opted by our modern and enlightened hegemon. Sure, it's got more of a cringe factor now, but it represents something that was true then, and has remained so today: competence will always be a threat to complicity. There remain people who make, discover, derive, and invent, and they will necessarily disrupt. They are the only true progress. Manifestos rarely age well, but the courage they inspire and the work that results tends to set the trajectory of history.
I read this manifesto in 1993 and for better or worse, I can say I accomplished some things as a result.
[+] [-] codeGreene|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oldandcold|6 years ago|reply
As for the Manifesto itself, for the most part, looking back, this rings true. I was there... in the 80's...with colourful boxes, acoustic couplers, and pages and pages of phone numbers. I never had the sense of community this document describes...it seemed like a much more solitary pursuit, but you picked up things if you know where to look...and clearly, trails were blazed by those that went before. To paraphase Dali... It wasn't better than drugs, It was drugs.
[+] [-] pound|6 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwozkbmjzC4
[+] [-] mikeflynn|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StanislavPetrov|6 years ago|reply
Good times. I still have my red box (modified radio shack tone dialer), although COCOTs have long-since gone the way of the dodo.
[+] [-] walrus01|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] YeGoblynQueenne|6 years ago|reply
Here's a thought. A smart person realises that everyone around them thinks they're smarter than everyone else around them, and that everyone can't be right at the same time, which must mean that most are wrong. Which in turn means that, to be the one person who is right to think they're smarter than everyone else around them, is really, really rare. And so very unlikely. So the smart person will want to see very strong evidence of their own smarts, before they accept that they are, indeed, smart- and the smarter the person is, the stronger the evidence they will want to see, because the assumption of average smarts will make the high smarts of the smart person appear average to their own eyes.
Bottom line; if you think you're smarter than most kids then you're probably not smarter than most kids. If you actually go out and say it, then chances are you're even dumber than that.
Edit: Also, every kid is bored of the crap they teach us at school. Every. Single. Kid. Some just know how to sit nicely and do as they're told to get ahead in life. Who's the smart kid, again?
[+] [-] tvanantwerp|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mindslight|6 years ago|reply
This is probably better than getting a pass to completely ignore social consensus and becoming a supervillain, but the crab bucket doesn't need to be repeated on HN.
Monkeysphere dynamics play out exceptionally hard when it comes to computer security, because a single kid can easily end up putting egg on the face of a tie-wearing cert-touting "CIO".
[+] [-] tomrod|6 years ago|reply
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_hierarchy_theory
[+] [-] thinkloop|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] capableweb|6 years ago|reply
https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
Written by John Perry Barlow (of Grateful Dead fame and more)
[+] [-] rbanffy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] veridies|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] madmaniak|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aestetix|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] p4bl0|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thanatropism|6 years ago|reply
and a time where it meant a digital vandal over POTS lines;
and a time where reclaiming the word "hacker" became fashionable;
and important computer hackers began quietly wearing the word;
and then there was the time where marketers became growth hackers and musicians became harmony hackers.
But the digital vandals never fully wrested away the word from AI lab wizards;
Ruby on Rails hackers never recovered it from the digital vandals;
and harmony hackers never even intended to break away from this sedimentation of connotation;
and investment funds and hackers both posted and read "hacker news";
and no one disavows anything.
[+] [-] reaperducer|6 years ago|reply
Well, those were "phreakers."
In the 70's, "hacker" was a person who "hacked" out the credits from public domain software and put their own name in it for resale. And you bought it anyway because software was so hard to come by.
[+] [-] atoav|6 years ago|reply
(on a more serious note: this is not the case everywhere, in Germany e.g. the CCC does a wonderful job with the youngsters)
[+] [-] adim86|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _wldu|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ALittleLight|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dpeck|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jldevictoria|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbalau|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] q3k|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulmalenke|6 years ago|reply
I bought it years ago as a tribute to my childhood and have just held on to it. It was going to be a blog but I have never really found the time for that.
[+] [-] heyoni|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|6 years ago|reply
2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5007508
also 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5053949
2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1520964
2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=432214
2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=178686
[+] [-] Geenkaas|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] euske|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] waisbrot|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisweekly|6 years ago|reply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker_Ethic_and_the_Spi...
[+] [-] whack|6 years ago|reply
The second part of the manifesto sounds like the deranged ramblings of someone with delusions of grandeur. We can have a nuanced discussion around the current laws, but blatant violations of copyright and patent protections are not acceptable. "Exploring" the world doesn't justify breaking into private systems - if I decided to start "exploring" my neighbors bedrooms at night, I would hardly complain about being thrown in jail or being branded a criminal. Complaining about society's systemic racism is hardly a moral defense for snooping. Just because you're smart and good with computers, doesn't give you free reign to do whatever you want.
[+] [-] efiecho|6 years ago|reply
https://old.reddit.com/r/phrack/comments/7b0qqg/just_a_heads...
[+] [-] StanislavPetrov|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krapp|6 years ago|reply
Who will save the revolution from the rot of its own success?
[+] [-] waisbrot|6 years ago|reply
Who are you thinking of?
[+] [-] mindcrime|6 years ago|reply
Yeah. I'd like to think that at least some of that was just over-optimism and not realizing the negative ends that all of this technology could/would be put to. But I'm sure some of the old-skool hackers "sold out" and figured "hey, just give me the money". The need to pay rent, buy food, etc. is a pretty strong compulsion. That said, I'd like to think that at least some of this crowd have made conscious decisions over the years to not work on certain projects / technologies / whatever, out of the ethical considerations.
modern hackers embrace racism and extremism rather than transcending them
It raises the issue of who gets to decide what terms mean, and the spectre of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy, but one might argue that those "modern hackers" you refer to aren't actually hackers as a result of their embracing those things.
[+] [-] Enginerrrd|6 years ago|reply
Pardon my ignorance, but can you elaborate on what you mean by this?
[+] [-] bbanyc|6 years ago|reply
Hacker culture, and the internet in general, fragmented into two pieces, one that went each way. The distributed panopticon finds all signs of life and stifles it into generic corporatized beigeness. The only places outside its reach are full of fascists and other subhuman vermin.
I just feel like we've lost something we can never get back.
[+] [-] watwut|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RandomGuyDTB|6 years ago|reply
Disclaimer: I'm not a hacker.
[+] [-] trianglem|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] z3phyr|6 years ago|reply
What do you think is the hacker culture? Everything you hate about tech is post hacker culture. Also its purely about the hack value, making computers do what everyone thought was impossible before, and sharing it with those who appreciate it. That attitude surely have fizzled down. And that is simply the heart of hacker culture.
Being good person or bad person is totally tangential. You can be a good hacker, but maybe not the best person, or you can be a good hacker and absolutely nice.
EDIT: The scene is not actually dead. People are still doing magic with 8 bit computers and Amigas. The sky is the limit inside the box!
[+] [-] rbanffy|6 years ago|reply
I guess that, while trying to connect ourselves so all of us could have a voice, we just invented the machines that brought into reality the worst demons in us.