The Hacker’s Manifesto (1986)
phrack.org
phrack.org
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.
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.
RISC technology is going to change everything. ;-)
Honest question: Which one is correct?
and a bit of trivia - person who plays him is Marc Anthony (musician, ex-husband of Jennifer Lopez)
Still correct.
> If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me...
> My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.
These quotes are too individualistic to be "commie".
Good times. I still have my red box (modified radio shack tone dialer), although COCOTs have long-since gone the way of the dodo.
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?
I mean in all seriousness, it was not learning nor existing without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias why "they called us criminals".
That claim is manipulative at best.
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_hierarchy_theory
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".
https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
Written by John Perry Barlow (of Grateful Dead fame and more)
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.
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.
The real problem was access. There really were very few computer stores. I remember driving nearly an hour to get to one of the very few computer stores in northern New Jersey (Wayne Software).
The other option was to buy software from those tiny ads in the back of the computer magazines. Those were where you really got the "hacked" stuff. Sometimes you'd see an ad for the same program on multiple pages. And even though it was hacked, you still had to pay $99 for a very basic text editor.
Even blank floppy disks were hard to come by. I remember having to get floppy disks at the famous FAO Schwartz toy store in Manhattan because it was one of the few non-office supply houses that had them. I think they cost something like $5/piece ($15 in today's money).
And then those intros eventually gave rise to what they called the Demo Scene where "hackers" would gather to see who could write the coolest visual/audio experience under various levels of constraint.
And many of the graphic algorithms derived by hackers in the demo scene gave rise to the algorithms used in today's 3D videocards.
I recall seeing a website that collected a large number of such intros, I think posted here a while back. It was very aesthetically interesting and quite pleasantly nostalgic and now I can’t locate it, hopefully some other visitor to this thread can.
Is there anything to support this?
The demos in keygens and intros were commonly known as "cracktros".
(on a more serious note: this is not the case everywhere, in Germany e.g. the CCC does a wonderful job with the youngsters)
They hatin'
The hacker culture has two distinct branches: the academic insiders, and the social outliers, those two have significant different culture. Both of them can be described as the hacking culture, it was just than the access to computers were very limited at the time.
The insiders were those who was privileged to work inside institutions - they used Unix on PDP machines and talked on Usenet, this culture was already well established in MIT in the early 80s. Meanwhile, we also has the outsider who were social outliers, including highschool kids and independent hobbyists, they hacked on home computers (and later PCs), they talked on BBS (or free phone conference by cracking Bell's system), to wardial phone numbers, cracked programs, hacked 6502 assembly, participated in demoscene, etc. If you read the early releases of Phrack, you'll see that many things described in them is cracking, and didn't have much intellectual accomplishment. But remember those were highschool kids playing with their computers in the early 80s, writing a password bruteforce cracker and log into a mainframe was already a huge achievement, not too different from the MIT students who played lockpicking.
Yes, there were some people who did significant damages, they were noticed by the media, and the media started to use "hacker" to label all malicious attackers. So we had "Hacker" vs "Cracker", or "Black Hat" vs "White Hat" terminologies - yes, they are useful terms and I strongly recommend the use of them. Bun just be aware that the actual history is not black-and-white.
The establishment from the first group are biased toward the "real hacking culture" inside the academics, and like to label everyone from the second group as "crackers". For example,
> The problem with screen names or handles deserves some amplification. Concealing your identity behind a handle is a juvenile and silly behavior characteristic of crackers, warez d00dz, and other lower life forms. Hackers don't do this; they're proud of what they do and want it associated with their real names. So if you have a handle, drop it. In the hacker culture it will only mark you as a loser. - Eric S. Raymond, How to Become a Hacker
But it's not the full picture, many people from the second group clearly demonstrated The Hacker Ethics, such as accessing to computers, mistrusting authorities, free information, creating arts, etc. It was just that the circumstance was different. As time went forward, the outsider world was getting increasingly sophisticated as well, by the 90s, we already had world-class information security researchers, such as Aleph One or Solar Designer.
Throughout the 80s, the two groups of people mostly stayed inside their circles and didn't have much interactions (but check Homebrew Computer Club and People's Computer Company, which established the foundation of hackers in the home computer generation). Finally, in the late 90s, the rise of the Internet and universal access to computers eventually merged the two streams of hacking together, and formed the hacker culture as we know it on Hacker News. Linux was the most significant example.
In 1995 when it was quoted in Hackers, and already 10 years old at the time, there were only about 40M people online worldwide. It was extremely uncommon to meet other people your age who understood anything about your "passion". That probably did lead a lot of us to get a little deep in our own head as we explored a new world while coming of age ourselves.
It was another time and understandable for it to be "cringey" for some who weren't exposed to it young and nostalgic for people who were. At the end of the day its probably best not to overthink it.
There was no Google, no Wikipedia, no YouTube. Today, the world largely runs on top of TCP/IP, and anyone can read some docs or any number of books and understand how it works. Back then, the world ran over the phone network, and there wasn't any way to really understand it except through phreaking groups and getting yourself into places you weren't supposed to be.
Before Linux, you'd hear about this wonderful, powerful OS called Unix. But you'd be tinkering around at home in MS-DOS unless you went to college or had a really progressive high school. The only way to experience Unix would be to hack or social engineer your way into getting access.
That doesn't justify the entitlement, no, or the ego. And it certainly didn't justify computer crimes. But this manifesto is from a very different age, where those smart kids were understandably frustrated because the world was yet to produce the tools and information we take for granted today.
All of them are community supported, non-profit and doing some fairly advanced stuff in some domain areas (security, electronics, machining, ...).
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.
This influence can clearly be seen in the startup scene, at least in earlier days: jock/locker-room culture, rebellious and "disruptive", seeing a company as a gang of pirates.. It's very American - as one of them myself, I love this attitude in some ways, but, having lived in a few other cultures, I also understand that it has aspects of teenagers' mentality and behavior.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker_Ethic_and_the_Spi...
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.
tell that to the most populous nation in the world, you can post the response here
YMMV.
https://old.reddit.com/r/phrack/comments/7b0qqg/just_a_heads...
Who will save the revolution from the rot of its own success?
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.
That's one way to look at it, and judging from the downvotes my comment has been getting, the way a lot of people here see it.
But to me, hackers aren't as immune to political or cultural influence as perhaps they'd like to believe, and it's inevitable that the web and its culture (and the general rightward shift that culture seems to be undergoing) will have transformed hackers as it has everything else.
Disclaimer: I'm not a hacker.
Unfortunately there's a lot of evidence showing the contrary.
then they aren't.
Pardon my ignorance, but can you elaborate on what you mean by this?
Who are you thinking of?
I'm glad that scum like him aren't allowed to have power anymore. And yet...and yet.
And yet those personality flaws wound up being the reason he is no longer president of the FSF or on the MIT board of directors.
Being obnoxious, disrespectful and a rape apologist didn't help him accomplish anything in regards to free software. He succeeded despite those personality flaws, because the community around him enabled him, and many would (and have) argued that he has held the progress of the movement back.
>I'm glad that scum like him aren't allowed to have power anymore. And yet...and yet.
Being an asshole doesn't make you a good leader or effective communicator. I feel like this is some weird cargo-cult belief that's entered the community because of people like Stallman, Linus Torvalds or Steve Jobs. We don't have to give scum like him power, we choose to, because for some reason we consider giving in to empathy and tolerance to be a form of weakness.
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.
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.
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!
"You think this is cool?"
"Yeah, it's cool."
"It's not cool. It's commie bullshit!"
I managed to get in on this kickstarter
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2086704960/beyond-the-l...
"... this is my ... manifesto"
Apparently they made a revenue of 3k from the venture[1].
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc.#1975%E2%...
(And also by Ronald Wayne, poor bastard.)
Anyone in the telecommunications industry care to speak to this? Because this guy sounds like a spoiled brat who doesn't realize that good things cost money.
He is talking about the pre-internet landline network, an international communications system that reached virtually everyone in both the biggest cities and the smallest towns, and was so reliable I was nearly twenty before I realized that dial tone wasn't always on if the bill was paid. That wasn't cheap; you needed thousands and thousands of line workers and engineers and administrators and customer service workers to make it all work. And you needed to raise billions of dollars to build the damn thing in the first place.