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.
Yes. And there are also narcissists who believe they are so special, normal rules don't apply to them. And when I read the manifesto as a whole, I get that vibe more then then the smart bored kid vibe.
I mean in all seriousness, it was not learning nor existing without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias why "they called us criminals".
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".
Not really. If I recall correctly, hackers like Phiber Optik and Acid Phreak were thinking Barlow was a corporate spy/shill. And in response published Barlow's credit record.
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 those hackers became competitive to see who could put the coolest looking intro in front of the hacked/cracked software bragging about who crack it.
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.
> those hackers became competitive to see who could put the coolest looking intro in front of the hacked/cracked software bragging about who crack it.
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.
This was mostly before BBSing was a thing, but continued into the early 80's because not everyone could afford a modem and phone bill.
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).
Nostalgia for a simple time, but also a deep appreciation for how people managed to create software/OS with primitive hardware we had in the 80s. Respect.
Maybe this is something that change during the 80s, but my understanding is that the people you are talking about were mainly referred to as "crackers".
The demos in keygens and intros were commonly known as "cracktros".
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)
The history of hacker culture is not as simple as the "hacker" vs "cracker".
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.
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.
To add onto what dpeck said, another thing to keep in mind is how difficult it was to find information on how the world around you worked back then. So these curious kids whose smarts were, yeah, probably only eclipsed by their egos, were legitimately stifled.
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.
you have to put it in context, a lot of the folks reading this were the smart kids (usually ones with a chaotic bend) in their grade school.
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 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.
I think the idolizing of "underground" themes in the hacker subculture had a lot to do with the surrounding American culture, of that era and even further back to its origins. The entertainment industry, like Hollywood films, glorify the outlaw, the rebels, from Star Wars to the Wild West, the "counter-culture", rock music, punk, heavy metal.. That climate influenced generations of adolescents, many of whom never grew out of it, carrying these values into adulthood. It spread around the world too.
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.
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.
I guess @krapp is thinking about the *chan crowd and their echo chambers where white supremacism goes back and forth in a positive feedback loop that, from time to time, gives birth to a violent threat against society.
Stallman is a perfect example. He's one of the most obnoxious and disrespectful people on earth, not to mention a rape apologist, of course he should be expelled from society! And yet the very personality flaws that make him so utterly despicable were the same things that allowed him to accomplish what he did in the first place.
I'm glad that scum like him aren't allowed to have power anymore. And yet...and yet.
>And yet the very personality flaws that make him so utterly despicable were the same things that allowed him to accomplish what he did in the first place.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Since I'm not understanding the down votes, just to be clear: I'm talking that unfortunately, there seems to be people that are smart and yet still believe one race is more or less than another.
I'm not sure the GNAA trolls on /. really qualify as "hackers", although this - again - takes us back into "no true scotsman" territory. The thing is, since most of those posts were Anonymous Cowards, it's hard to know how much actual racist intent was associated with any of it, and how much of it was just trolling / memes and "for the lulz".
Does the last bit matter? Being racist for ‘fun’ is still racism it’s just the poster in question doesn’t want to take responsibility for their comfort with it.
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.
I'm grateful for the folks that came before, but holy shit was that world toxic. Information was horded and coveted, misogyny ran wild, and it took 10x longer to learn than it does today.
Absolutely realize that. Not getting how that should change anything. It was the height of arrogance 33 years ago, and a "teachable moment" for which I'm 33 years late. The changes to the landscape that you refer to, I refer to. I lived them. Today's world was the inevitable outcome. Though I didn't realize that until about 1994.
Today's world would be very different had a few things happen slightly differently.
Back in 1986 there was no way to predict the web. Or ISP's or widespread adoption of IP networks. There was no way to predict open source would eventually win.
In 1986 I was using a Minitel system to do banking from home, communicating through a couple BBSs, from an Apple II and an MSX. We were discussing Xanadu, SGML, and the latest issue of BYTE or Creative Computing. Had Microsoft deployed their Microsoft Network globally a few years before they tried, the web would be extremely different.
We were quite lucky. A lot could have gone very wrong.
> We make use of a service already existing without paying
for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals.
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.
I think the point is that the telephone was actually an older invention that was “relatively” cheap to maintain. The fact that it was a ubiquitous and well understood technology, also meant that fees should be lower since it was essentially in maintenance mode. And keep in mind that Bell being split for being a monopoly was likely in the writers mind too.
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.