The Hacker’s Manifesto (1986) | Hacker News Reader

The Hacker’s Manifesto (1986)

phrack.org

141 pointsOuterVale73 comments

This is so nostalgic for me. In 1999, I watched a couple of movies, and I decided I wanted to be a hacker. I watched the movie Hackers, Swordfish and let's not forget The Matrix. These were all influntial to me, I went down a rabbit hole and found the Hacker Manifesto, which I resonated with. I slurped up all the information I could find (There wasn't much), and then came a realization that changed everything for me. Hacking was as hard as writing software to me, one was creating and inventing things and the other was tearing down what others had made...not to mention it was also illegal (White hat was not really big at the time). I was like, if I was gonna do one, I'd rather develop software and make things that made people's day and got praised for than ruin people's day and possibly go to jail. Hence my origin story as a software developer :)

Sneakers (1992) also worth a look

There's a recent series to the topic of prime numbers, not sure if it's worth a watch.

I'm only talking about the movie not series.

There is definitely some naivety about this manifesto - mostly about what computers would end up looking like in practice once the hardware and software industries figured out how to build them so they could be marketed to the petty authoritarians who administer schools, as well as the smart rebellious kids, and every other sort of person including ones who were never at +++The Mentor+++'s high school. It's net-good if the average normie has access to the incredibly powerful computers and networked systems of the present day, but that will necessarily dilute the number of people interested in deeply exploring computer systems as a percentage of total internet users, which indeed is what actually happened. Not to mention all of the other complicated social consequences of the widespread adoption of networked computers that occurred in the decades after this essay - I suspect the author would like some and dislike others, depending on their other values in life.

Nonetheless, I can't help but admire the rebellious spirit in this article. A lot of human social systems really are conformist and oppressive - high school absolutely included - and I have some respect for people who chafe against it.

I guess it would be good to ask, what specifically was +++The Mentor+++ arrested for, and is that law good or bad?

Oh it was really stupid actually:

Blankenship was hired by Steve Jackson Games in 1989.[3] He authored the cyberpunk role-playing sourcebook GURPS Cyberpunk, the manuscript of which was seized in a 1990 raid of Steve Jackson Games headquarters by the U.S. Secret Service.[4][5] The raid resulted in the subsequent legal case Steve Jackson Games, Inc. v. United States Secret Service.[6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyd_Blankenship

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jackson_Games,_Inc._v._U...

Reminder to rewatch the 1995 movie Hackers :)

I used to read it quite often when I was 15, now that I am in my 40s, I think the manifesto is quite weak, even though its romantic in its attempt to celebrate curiosity and claim a new home for some.

Now I align more with Bunnie's [1] way: when you look at a thing as a thing, strip it from its social weight, a program is just a program, you can study it, understand its machinery and mechanisms, and make it do what you want. You can understand things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyYsVeYzbik

PS: I still think phrack 49/14 was the most iconic article I have read, and has changed the way I look at programs ever since.

12 year old me would disagree with you. The movie hackers and the manifesto inspired me. Being a gay geeky kid in the 90s, this helped me feel not alone.

I respect your opinion, but we would have had some flame wars back in the day ;)

12-year-old you would have resonated powerfully with that sort of thing. Adult you probably realizes that being smarter than everyone else really doesn't matter as much as you think it does. And even (especially!) the smartest people show their work if they want credit for it. Age is like that. It puts things in perspective.

The enduring bit of the Manifesto, I think, is the idea that we need to cultivate our curiosity even when society tells us we shouldn't. I mean that in the sense of both "we ought to" and it being a physical need, like an addiction.

The rest of it sounds a bit like Julia Stiles in Ghostwriter (PBS TV series): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLlj_GeKniA

The whole ‘we exist without nationality, race, gender, etc’ is what I’m referring to. I don’t think I considered myself particularly smart, but did feel that structured education is largely a waste of time for some people.

I (re)watched Hackers on the big screen a month or so ago (it was the 30th anniversary), and it was an absolute pleasure. You should definitely rewatch it!

As for the hacker's manifesto: we are now old. Teenage rebellion content doesn't resonate as much. I reread it after watching Hackers and agree it's not as great as I remembered. Though I also reread it multiple times as a teenager. It really resonated back then, and I'm forever grateful for it.

> we are now old. Teenage rebellion content doesn't resonate as much.

This statement tells more about the personality traits of the person that makes it than about age. I, for example, would claim that the central thing that changed with age is that you gained deeper knowledge, and you have more money.

I would say that I still rebel for the same causes as in my teenager time (while many people of the same age got much more conformist), but

- with the insane baggage of additional knowledge, I (can) use a very different approach than the more naive one of my teenager time,

- with more money, a lot of things become easier, i.e. in opposite to the teenager time you don't have to invest you precious time resources in some things that can be solved with money.

Well said.

Indeed, "Smashing The Stack For Fun And Profit" changed my life, even though I work nowhere near security. It's about perspectives.

Shout Factory and 88 Films both released Hackers in 4k recently. Commentary track as well, havent had a chance to listen to that yet. But the 4k transfer was great.

Thanks for this. Trying to follow along but modern compilers and cpus seem to modify the disassembly in a way that makes it tough to follow along. Tried throwing a bunch of flags at gcc but still getting some diffs. Had this issue when I was working with an older C book as well.

Maybe Godbolt has some way to emulate this better

This article does not work due to many protections that were added since then, not only in compilers but also the kernel and CPUs. If you want to follow along, download a Slackware 3.0 ISO.

Then go watch Sneakers after :)

I usually watch WarGames after :)

Shall we play a game?

haha I actually made https://punkx.org/overflow/ to play with my daughter and it initially started with buffer overflowing to win tictactoe inspired from wargames, but I thought force jump to gameover was cooler.

A question and a suggestion: 1. How much of a first-mover advantage is there? 2. Maybe have the first player only execute 5 instructions on the first turn, to remove whatever first mover advantage there is -- that way at the end of each player's turn they will always be 5 moves "ahead" of their opponent, whether they went first or second. 3. Okay, a second question: I'm curious how well handicapping by e.g. one player getting an extra instruction per turn?

its actually not much of an issue because as you are writing your shellcode the other person has access to it as well, and ofc there is the monkeypatch nop pawn

I like to think that Serial Lain Experiments picks up on this 1990s vibe of where computers were going (whilst going off the rails just a bit), along with the strange parity of Hacker culture with emerging EDM scene (Cyberia comes to mind)

            I made a discovery today.  I found a computer.  Wait a second, this is
    cool.  It does what I want it to.  If it makes a mistake, it's because I
    screwed it up.  Not because it doesn't like me...
                    Or feels threatened by me...
                    Or thinks I'm a smart ass...

and then 4chan happened, and "hackers" started looking like https://krebsonsecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/bogac... and running underpaid botfarms in Cambodia and this just feels hopelessly romantic and naive. What do kids like this do today, with constant internet access and no phone lines to tie up?

your username, comment and worldivew are perfectly in sync, cynic. i pray you discover something meaningful and share it

Most, if not all, of the efnet era #2600 heros turned out to be complete parodies of themselves, or total sellouts. One need not look further than the recent Defcons.

Previously:

The Hacker’s Manifesto (1986) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21346387 - Oct 2019 (128 comments)

The Hacker's Manifesto (1986) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1520964 - July 2010 (16 comments)

The Hacker’s Manifesto (1986) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=178686 - May 2008 (5 comments)

Loyd Blankenship (The Mentor) about the "Conscious of a Hacker" 16 years later in 2002 at H2K2:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tEnnvZbYek

The Wikipedia page has plenty of interesting miscellany for the curious reader.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_Manifesto

If you are interested in hacker culture, you might enjoy the game I released yesterday, Outsider (https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/).

The main character is an old school hacker (AND a cracker, which is a different thing) and the game leans heavily on the community's culture.

This should have a permanent home on the hacker news site: https://news.ycombinator.com/manifesto.txt :)

See also:

The Hacker's Renaissance – A Manifesto Reborn (2025)

https://phrack.org/issues/72/19#article

> I found a computer. [...] If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up.

Not any more, now we have “AI”!

your choice in tooling can be the mistake...

The author doesn’t explain the jump from finding community online to committing crimes/hacking.

Or did I miss it..?

The specifically defend themselves as not criminal but merely curious knowledge seekers.

I love this. This manifesto is what got me into tech. Thank you for sharing

The original hackers are the ones from the Lisp Machines and ITS/WAIS under the PDP10.

The rest of these are just PC wannabes.

Actual hacker knownledge: http://www.inwap.com/pdp10/hbaker/hakmem/hakmem.html

Under PC's, today, great hackers should be the guy behing https://t3x.org, the one behind EForth running under Subleq, reverse engineers, people reusing DNS' connections for tunnels such as the folks from Iodine, people reusing AWK+netcat (or plain GAWK) and awk+openssl to create Gopher and Gemini clients, Goerzen from https://complete.org creating NNCP and a bunch of nice tools...

And OFC Fabrice Bellard, which is on par with people from the MIT/SAIL and ITS/WAIS who created and expanded TECO Emacs, LISP, primordial AI, first networked environements, AI grounds...

I read Steven Levy too- the original hackers were model railroaders. And there are no true Scotsmen

Maybe I am too dismissive/cynical, but my impression is that people who write stuff like this really want to think they are the main character in a movie.

The way it is written is a bit like the the Navy Seal, GNU-Linux copy-pastas.

If you go back and read these after knowing what happened over the last 30 years. It is difficult to take seriously. I feel similarly when reading "A declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace".

I think it's pretty cringe, but also that we're expecting an awful lot from a zine article. This is basically the tone of every cDc tfile. Tfile culture was (a male-dominated) Tumblr before there was Tumblr.

It's very full of itself. But I fully understand where it comes from. When you are the only one seeing something in technology that others simply cannot see. When you think about these things in a way that no one else can understand. And when that allows you to do things that no one else thought were possible.

You just see the world in a way that no one else around you does. A world that is between indifferent and hostile to your way of thinking and seeks to assimilate you into a fundamentally incurious, indifferent, uninspired apparatus.

Believe it or not if you are an expert in almost field you will understand things that other people do not. A lot of people in those fields will feel that way you are describing.

There is nothing special about this because you happen to be able to do it with a computer/electronics/network.

it's precisely not about having a deep understanding of a field

You become an expert by tinkering and experimenting.

I understand a lot about how bicycles work because I tinkered and built my own. It isn't exactly the same as hacking, but it is very similar. When you work on old bikes, motorbikes, cars you sometimes have to come up to novel solutions to problems.

The fact that you and the author can't see the similarities is exactly the issue I and others have pointed out.

It is not the same thing, because back in 1986 the "hacker" concept was new, associated with criminality, and not with 'curiosity', information processing and thinking. It is not really the same as bikes and cars, which are around for quite some time and are made of tangible, mechanical stuff, whereas information are just abstract '0s' and '1s'.

You're arguing a straw man.

No I am not.

Secret Service raid makes you the main character https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jackson_Games,_Inc._v._U...

I'm am aware of this raid and similar ones. It doesn't make you the main character or really that important. Whenever the EFF post something, I know it will be ignored by almost anyone that has power.

This is because you are not an idealist. Only idealists can motivate people (for good and bad). You are just boring.

You’re not cynical. The writer is self absorbed and many many people became “hackers” for similar ”cool” reasons.

Really you’re all just generic and overplayed programmers. It’s the same thing that causes programmers to call themselves ninjas and rockstars while someone like a chemical engineer doesn’t.

I think the Ninja stuff tbh comes from like a lot of pseudo-eastern philosophy that people buy into when it comes to programming and/or videos games e.g. the CSS Zen Garden.

Hacker and Programmer are categorically different.

Plumber is a category as well. The difference is that plumbers do not gather once a year to declare the Eternal Principles of Pipe. There is no Council of the Wrench. No one is arguing about the True Spirit of the Elbow Joint. They simply tighten the fitting and go home.

I believe Adam Savage has relayed the Plumber's Manifesto at some point: 1 Shit flows downhill 2 Payday's on Friday

There is significant overlap between the two groups.

they didn't used to be and the difference was only barely developing at the time this was written

According to AI (so question it), The Mentor was 21 when he wrote this. There's something about the early 20s that makes many people believe that the world has deeper significance and scope than it really does. It can be a delusional time. This is also, coincidentally, when people who get schizophrenia often start to show symptoms. I'm not saying The Mentor has this particular affliction, I'm saying that the early 20s is a trigger that brings out a lot of things in people, which they later get over.

Is there any direct evidence of what you claim? Otherwise this is speculation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_Manifesto hacker manifesto written by Loyd "The Mentor" Blankenship in 1986

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamedesigner/7426/loyd-blanke... Loyd Blankenship born 1965

Thanks. I was vaguely aware of who this person was. I was more referring to the schizophrenia.

there is direct evidence that disorders like schizophrenia and bipolar tend to manifest in the early 20s. generalizing that to everyone's experience of their 20s is obviously a bit tenuous

The last of your prefrontal cortex's major systems come online in your earlier 20s, which can lead to bipolar or schizophrenia if those systems are disordered. In most, it just happens to lead to "your first deep thoughts about the broader world and your significance in it" and may lead to writing youthful cringepieces like "The Conscience of a Hacker". It's kind of like a second puberty. The underlying cause is the same, if the results are vastly different.

Very few things that get called speculation actually are.

That's just like your opinion man, I see it through rose coloured glasses as a poem from more naive times back when some folks still had some hope... This was way before vulture capitalism fucked everything up you know, or at least that's how I remember it but I was like 10.

Not everyone was into this hopeful vision of cyberspace though, Masters of Doom comes to mind.

You’re right (as someone a bit older but also with rose-tinted glasses).

There was a feeling of hope on the Internet at the time that this was a communication tool that would bring us all together. I do feel like some of that died around 9/11 but that it was Facebook and the algorithms that really killed it. That is where the Internet transitioned from being about showcasing the best of us to showcasing the worst of us. In the name of engagement.

s/Doom/Deception/

We really got ground down, didn't we.

"It's not cool. It's commie bullshit!"

I always found it amusing that the original Jargon File defined "hacker" tongue-in-cheekily as "one who carves furniture with an axe"—and when I first learned of Loyd Blankenship's authorship of the Hacker Manifesto in 2000 or so, he was running a business selling custom-made furniture.

Peak Gen X culture

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