7 ms·

To me, this manifesto has little more than historical value. It's more an expression of generic adolescent angst rather than of hacker culture. It's a poor "ma

To me, this manifesto has little more than historical value. It's more an expression of generic adolescent angst rather than of hacker culture. It's a poor "manifesto" too. What exactly are the aims of The Hacker? "Exploring", "Outsmarting you", and "judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like". Platitudes, really, if you set aside the emotional outbursts surrounding them. The Jargon File offers a more balanced and intricate exploration of The Hacker. It's always worth a read. http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/index.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/index.html

sevensor 10y ago
> To me, this manifesto has little more than historical value. It's more an expression of generic adolescent angst rather than of hacker culture. Well sure, but let's not discount the historical value of its angsty naïveté. This is an important part of our cultural history -- it helps explain the peculiar contradiction that many of us still feel a sense of persecution even as working in technology has become both lucrative and respectable.
- lubujackson 10y ago
  Computing in general started with such an idealistic, academic mindset. It's important to remember that the "hacker mindset" was really a call to return to that original approach where people would literally hack together on a computer, explore its limits and do it simply for the thrill. By the 80s, there was a business/professionalism that was eating away at that early approach and the "manifesto" is almost a straight lament. Same thing happened to startups, the Web, etc.
  - sevensor 10y ago
    I see where you're coming from, but this is an oversimplification. A lot of the early work on and thinking about computers was about the possibility of top-down social control. This features explicitly in Weiner's Cybernetics and at least implicitly in Von Neumann and Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. (The Soviets latched onto the same idea and tried to build a central-planning computer network.) The "hacking" ethic was really part of the counterculture, and like the counterculture, it ultimately dissolved into the mainstream.
    - pnathan 10y ago
      > The "hacking" ethic was really part of the counterculture, Right. And that's often missed. The hacker ethic and the FSF project are fundamentally countercultural to the Big Iron mentality of the 60s-80s. In the 90s it started getting sanitized by the Open Source folks, and the collision of Big Money and Software in the 00s subverted and subsumed the whole business. But there are still many people who hack for the sake of the hack. They are often looked down on... it's still countercultural to the modern software/VC world. :-)
      - uola 10y ago
        I agree with your and the parents comments about hacker culture being counterculture. I don't agree that it still is. The countercultural aspect largely disappeared as computers (and software) became cheap and information widely available. I cringe a bit when see modern hackers using their $3k laptops to have fun coding C in a terminal by themselves. Nothing wrong with that of course, but not necessarily something I would say is a good modern representation of the hacker spirit.
        Joof 10y ago
        Unless they are hacking on shaders, CUDA or deeplearning (which admittedly isn't C most of the time). Although, I admit that a web server is probably more handy if it's not shaders. I still like terminals; even on my 3k laptop (which is largely for gaming).
        loydb 10y ago
        ^This. I broke into my first mainframe in 1977 because I had to if I wanted to play Colossal Cave Adventure. :) I learned to blue box because I had to if I wanted to talk to my friends around the world and couldn't afford the phone bill. I tell people now that if you want to pen test, cool, grab some VMs and go nuts. You might even get a bug bounty or two...
Karunamon 10y ago
It's almost as if ideals and principles are necessarily broad generalizations.
loydb 10y ago
To be fair, I was pretty damn angsty at the time :) Always exciting to see this pop up someplace new. It's being translated into Polish for a textbook this year as well.
- justinhensley 10y ago
  How did you feel about it showing up in the critically acclaimed film, Hackers? That was my first exposure to it.
  - loydb 10y ago
    Pleased, because I think I'm the answer to the trivia question "What was the first email address to ever appear in a major movie credit roll". Sad, because, damn, is that a bad movie.
    - api 10y ago
      I think it's a great bit of campy cinema. It's like Wet Hot American Summer with ravers and 90s cyberculture. It's a lot better today than it was when it was made. Instead of lame it feels charmingly funny and nostalgic.
      - justinhensley 10y ago
        I completely agree. I actually thought it was extremely cool even when it was released, but I was 12. While a wholly inaccurate portrayal of hacking or even computing, it did contribute to my fascination with both.
        int_19h 10y ago
        For all the factual inaccuracies in this movie - which was like 99% of it - I think they have done an amazing job relaying the spirit of the manifesto - the general notion that hacking, as a culture, is really about challenging yourself and satisfying your curiosity.
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
Although just to be safe, I'd reccomend going back to an older version of the Jargon File. Around 3.x or so, ESR started poisoning the well, and adding some stuff that definitely doesn't belong, reflective of his ideology.
ashark 10y ago
> We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias > judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. Hm. I may make these parts CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md in my next Github project.
- zeveb 10y ago
  Careful — I don't know if GitHub will want you to refrain from judging people by their skin colour, c.f. http://www.businessinsider.com/github-the-full-inside-story-2016-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/github-the-full-inside-story-...
- Pete_D 10y ago
  I know at least one project already has - the surf browser's code of conduct[0] is more or less the full text of the manifesto. http://git.suckless.org/surf/tree/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md http://git.suckless.org/surf/tree/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md
maxerickson 10y ago
Mary Sue would like a word with you.
icc97 10y ago
I'd say a major point of a manifesto is to inspire people which it clearly did.
jff 10y ago
In my opinion, the Jargon File is a fun look back at historical hacker lifestyles, but it's also a microcosm of a very few schools in the 60s and 70s. Teenagers have a bad habit of reading the Jargon File and thinking that's how they MUST behave to be a hacker--I did it, to my embarrassment, and a trip to Defcon or most any freshman CS course will find others doing the same. You don't have to start saying "grok" to be a hacker, or adopt the idiotic "-p convention" which doesn't even really exist in Lisp any more. Both the Hacker Manifesto and to a lesser extent the Jargon File also tend to perpetrate an "us vs. them" ("freaks vs. squares", "hackers vs. normies") mindset that's pretty outdated these days. You know the only people who give a shit about categories like "geeks and jocks" any more? The ones who are so tied up in their manufactured geek identity that they don't realize the jocks are also learning Python after football practice these days.
- sevensor 10y ago
  A lot of people have adopted "grok" without understanding its subversive connotations. The shade of Robert Heinlein is laughing at us all. Edit: just checked the Jargon File on "grok," and it mentions neither sexual congress nor ritual cannibalism. I think ESR may be chuckling as well.
  - throwanem 10y ago
    > The shade of Robert Heinlein is laughing at us all. Hardly a new state of affairs. I mean, he invented the Rapture of the Nerds back in the fifties!
    - chadgeidel 10y ago
      Wow, really? I haven't read enough Heinlein - what was that in? I always thought Rapture of the Nerds was grounded in Vinge's "The Coming Technological Singularity" (https://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html https://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.ht...)
      - throwanem 10y ago
devishard 10y ago
> It's a poor "manifesto" too. What exactly are the aims of The Hacker? "Exploring", "Outsmarting you", and "judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like". Platitudes, really, if you set aside the emotional outbursts surrounding them. Platitudes, yes, but they're platitudes because everyone assumes that those are goods that everyone values. The thing is, while most people would say they value those things, very few people actually follow through on it. But hacker culture is all about what you actually follow through and do, so they actually follow through. Take, for example, a social justice movement that pulls women out of STEM and into women's studies and related fields, and then complains that women don't get into STEM fields. Meanwhile, women are actually much better represented in hacker culture than in most of STEM, because hackers, unlike the rest of the conversation around women in STEM, don't give a fuck about women. They only care what people do, and it turns out women do about the same amount of stuff as men.
- sverige 10y ago
  I think you've put your finger on the difference between hacker culture in the early 80s and now.
- et-al 10y ago
  > because hackers, unlike the rest of the conversation around women in STEM, don't give a fuck about [gender]. They only care what people do, and it turns out women do about the same amount of stuff as men. Wanted to emphasize this. Hope you don't mind the edit.
  - devishard 10y ago
    That edit is fine and says a reasonable thing that I agree with, but there are two reasons why I said "women" instead of "gender". 1. "Hackers don't give a fuck about women" is a more shocking statement than "Hackers don't give a fuck about gender" given millennial social justice sensibilities. That shock was intended, because it demonstrates to readers who aren't hackers the difference between their view and the hacker view, in a very visceral way. When you read, "Hackers don't give a fuck about gender", you have to think about it to realize how fundamental a difference in thinking that is. But when you say, "Hackers don't give a fuck about women", you can feel how different it is. 2. Gender is also a much larger issue than women in STEM. In the context of this discussion, "Hackers don't give a fuck about gender" is true, but in a larger context, I think hackers do care about gender, because gender is very hackable.
eggy 10y ago
I will not argue the angst angle or semantics of manifesto, but given the context of who and when they wrote it, it was and can still carry some weight. But just as your comment betrays your age (I think?), so does mine. I remember going to 2600 meetings in the lower plaza of the Citigroup building once a month. At that time, someone told me Feds come and photograph to record attendees (all 5 or 8 people if a good turnout). I was new, and laughed it off, until I say two guys taking snapshots (no digital cameras then!) our way. We would wave at them. Good memories of HOPE 1994 too. Funny to see the back of my head in some of the videos of it posted to YouTube. They were put up only these past 3 years or so. I also remember the weight of the situation hit me at the least expected during Phiberfest at Irving Plaza, NYC in 1995, celebrating Phiber Optik's (Mark Abene) release from prison. I don't think taking chances with your time, and someone else's money (VC) is the same as putting yourself out there the way it was in late 70s, early 80s as a hacker. I think modern 'Hacker' culture as popularly used now, is more 'three-piece', and that anything that may be actually legal, but more on the darker side is actually attacked by modern 'Hacker' culture. Whether you agree with Anonymous, whose manifesto borrows some from The Hacker's Manifesto, it is more in line with the meaning of the word 'Hacker' to me, and less ameliorated like over-cooked, over-watered oatmeal of the word's usage today by self-described hackers.
- loydb 10y ago
  We found out that the SS was filming through hotel mirrors in a couple of rooms during Summercon 88. Poor Knight Lightning had to watch hours and hours of nothing but drunken shenanigans (because nobody trusted the dude who showed up out of nowhere claiming his handle was the "Dictator", so basically we trashed his room. I left a blender in there, the only thing I did in that room was mix batches of Margaritas.) When we had an LOD meetup in Dallas in 1989 or 1990, we changed hotels at the very last minute to avoid a similar situation...
  - jlgaddis 10y ago
    As an early teen when I first read your words ~25 years ago, I immediately related. Even more so a few years later when I was kicked out of my high school computer classes, banned from touching the computers, and then when the FBI showed up at my home (unrelated). All these years later, it feels odd to see this here, read your comment, and write a reply. Your words served as "inspiration" to probably thousands of youth. I hope you're doing well.
crawsible 10y ago
Just think: 30 years from now, my age group will be reminiscing about Justin Timberlake's speech in The Social Network. what a time to be alive
fcanela 10y ago
It showed me (when I was a teenager living away from the city in the 90s) that I was not alone in my curiosity. I had The Mentor Manifiesto in my walls, along with prints of code or networking diagrams (i.e. TCP handshake sequence). I found the text really inspiring then.

sevensor 10y ago

> To me, this manifesto has little more than historical value. It's more an expression of generic adolescent angst rather than of hacker culture. Well sure, but let's not discount the historical value of its angsty naïveté. This is an important part of our cultural history -- it helps explain the peculiar contradiction that many of us still feel a sense of persecution even as working in technology has become both lucrative and respectable.

lubujackson 10y ago
Computing in general started with such an idealistic, academic mindset. It's important to remember that the "hacker mindset" was really a call to return to that original approach where people would literally hack together on a computer, explore its limits and do it simply for the thrill. By the 80s, there was a business/professionalism that was eating away at that early approach and the "manifesto" is almost a straight lament. Same thing happened to startups, the Web, etc.
- sevensor 10y ago
  I see where you're coming from, but this is an oversimplification. A lot of the early work on and thinking about computers was about the possibility of top-down social control. This features explicitly in Weiner's Cybernetics and at least implicitly in Von Neumann and Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. (The Soviets latched onto the same idea and tried to build a central-planning computer network.) The "hacking" ethic was really part of the counterculture, and like the counterculture, it ultimately dissolved into the mainstream.
  - pnathan 10y ago
    > The "hacking" ethic was really part of the counterculture, Right. And that's often missed. The hacker ethic and the FSF project are fundamentally countercultural to the Big Iron mentality of the 60s-80s. In the 90s it started getting sanitized by the Open Source folks, and the collision of Big Money and Software in the 00s subverted and subsumed the whole business. But there are still many people who hack for the sake of the hack. They are often looked down on... it's still countercultural to the modern software/VC world. :-)
    - uola 10y ago
      I agree with your and the parents comments about hacker culture being counterculture. I don't agree that it still is. The countercultural aspect largely disappeared as computers (and software) became cheap and information widely available. I cringe a bit when see modern hackers using their $3k laptops to have fun coding C in a terminal by themselves. Nothing wrong with that of course, but not necessarily something I would say is a good modern representation of the hacker spirit.
      - Joof 10y ago
        Unless they are hacking on shaders, CUDA or deeplearning (which admittedly isn't C most of the time). Although, I admit that a web server is probably more handy if it's not shaders. I still like terminals; even on my 3k laptop (which is largely for gaming).
      - loydb 10y ago
        ^This. I broke into my first mainframe in 1977 because I had to if I wanted to play Colossal Cave Adventure. :) I learned to blue box because I had to if I wanted to talk to my friends around the world and couldn't afford the phone bill. I tell people now that if you want to pen test, cool, grab some VMs and go nuts. You might even get a bug bounty or two...

Karunamon 10y ago

It's almost as if ideals and principles are necessarily broad generalizations.

loydb 10y ago

To be fair, I was pretty damn angsty at the time :) Always exciting to see this pop up someplace new. It's being translated into Polish for a textbook this year as well.

justinhensley 10y ago
How did you feel about it showing up in the critically acclaimed film, Hackers? That was my first exposure to it.
- loydb 10y ago
  Pleased, because I think I'm the answer to the trivia question "What was the first email address to ever appear in a major movie credit roll". Sad, because, damn, is that a bad movie.
  - api 10y ago
    I think it's a great bit of campy cinema. It's like Wet Hot American Summer with ravers and 90s cyberculture. It's a lot better today than it was when it was made. Instead of lame it feels charmingly funny and nostalgic.
    - justinhensley 10y ago
      I completely agree. I actually thought it was extremely cool even when it was released, but I was 12. While a wholly inaccurate portrayal of hacking or even computing, it did contribute to my fascination with both.
      - int_19h 10y ago
        For all the factual inaccuracies in this movie - which was like 99% of it - I think they have done an amazing job relaying the spirit of the manifesto - the general notion that hacking, as a culture, is really about challenging yourself and satisfying your curiosity.

qwertyuiop924 10y ago

Although just to be safe, I'd reccomend going back to an older version of the Jargon File. Around 3.x or so, ESR started poisoning the well, and adding some stuff that definitely doesn't belong, reflective of his ideology.

ashark 10y ago

> We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias > judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. Hm. I may make these parts CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md in my next Github project.

zeveb 10y ago
Careful — I don't know if GitHub will want you to refrain from judging people by their skin colour, c.f. http://www.businessinsider.com/github-the-full-inside-story-2016-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/github-the-full-inside-story-...
Pete_D 10y ago
I know at least one project already has - the surf browser's code of conduct[0] is more or less the full text of the manifesto. http://git.suckless.org/surf/tree/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md http://git.suckless.org/surf/tree/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md

maxerickson 10y ago

Mary Sue would like a word with you.

icc97 10y ago

I'd say a major point of a manifesto is to inspire people which it clearly did.

jff 10y ago

In my opinion, the Jargon File is a fun look back at historical hacker lifestyles, but it's also a microcosm of a very few schools in the 60s and 70s. Teenagers have a bad habit of reading the Jargon File and thinking that's how they MUST behave to be a hacker--I did it, to my embarrassment, and a trip to Defcon or most any freshman CS course will find others doing the same. You don't have to start saying "grok" to be a hacker, or adopt the idiotic "-p convention" which doesn't even really exist in Lisp any more. Both the Hacker Manifesto and to a lesser extent the Jargon File also tend to perpetrate an "us vs. them" ("freaks vs. squares", "hackers vs. normies") mindset that's pretty outdated these days. You know the only people who give a shit about categories like "geeks and jocks" any more? The ones who are so tied up in their manufactured geek identity that they don't realize the jocks are also learning Python after football practice these days.

sevensor 10y ago
A lot of people have adopted "grok" without understanding its subversive connotations. The shade of Robert Heinlein is laughing at us all. Edit: just checked the Jargon File on "grok," and it mentions neither sexual congress nor ritual cannibalism. I think ESR may be chuckling as well.
- throwanem 10y ago
  > The shade of Robert Heinlein is laughing at us all. Hardly a new state of affairs. I mean, he invented the Rapture of the Nerds back in the fifties!
  - chadgeidel 10y ago
    Wow, really? I haven't read enough Heinlein - what was that in? I always thought Rapture of the Nerds was grounded in Vinge's "The Coming Technological Singularity" (https://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html https://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.ht...)
    - throwanem 10y ago

devishard 10y ago

> It's a poor "manifesto" too. What exactly are the aims of The Hacker? "Exploring", "Outsmarting you", and "judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like". Platitudes, really, if you set aside the emotional outbursts surrounding them. Platitudes, yes, but they're platitudes because everyone assumes that those are goods that everyone values. The thing is, while most people would say they value those things, very few people actually follow through on it. But hacker culture is all about what you actually follow through and do, so they actually follow through. Take, for example, a social justice movement that pulls women out of STEM and into women's studies and related fields, and then complains that women don't get into STEM fields. Meanwhile, women are actually much better represented in hacker culture than in most of STEM, because hackers, unlike the rest of the conversation around women in STEM, don't give a fuck about women. They only care what people do, and it turns out women do about the same amount of stuff as men.

sverige 10y ago
I think you've put your finger on the difference between hacker culture in the early 80s and now.
et-al 10y ago
> because hackers, unlike the rest of the conversation around women in STEM, don't give a fuck about [gender]. They only care what people do, and it turns out women do about the same amount of stuff as men. Wanted to emphasize this. Hope you don't mind the edit.
- devishard 10y ago
  That edit is fine and says a reasonable thing that I agree with, but there are two reasons why I said "women" instead of "gender". 1. "Hackers don't give a fuck about women" is a more shocking statement than "Hackers don't give a fuck about gender" given millennial social justice sensibilities. That shock was intended, because it demonstrates to readers who aren't hackers the difference between their view and the hacker view, in a very visceral way. When you read, "Hackers don't give a fuck about gender", you have to think about it to realize how fundamental a difference in thinking that is. But when you say, "Hackers don't give a fuck about women", you can feel how different it is. 2. Gender is also a much larger issue than women in STEM. In the context of this discussion, "Hackers don't give a fuck about gender" is true, but in a larger context, I think hackers do care about gender, because gender is very hackable.

eggy 10y ago

I will not argue the angst angle or semantics of manifesto, but given the context of who and when they wrote it, it was and can still carry some weight. But just as your comment betrays your age (I think?), so does mine. I remember going to 2600 meetings in the lower plaza of the Citigroup building once a month. At that time, someone told me Feds come and photograph to record attendees (all 5 or 8 people if a good turnout). I was new, and laughed it off, until I say two guys taking snapshots (no digital cameras then!) our way. We would wave at them. Good memories of HOPE 1994 too. Funny to see the back of my head in some of the videos of it posted to YouTube. They were put up only these past 3 years or so. I also remember the weight of the situation hit me at the least expected during Phiberfest at Irving Plaza, NYC in 1995, celebrating Phiber Optik's (Mark Abene) release from prison. I don't think taking chances with your time, and someone else's money (VC) is the same as putting yourself out there the way it was in late 70s, early 80s as a hacker. I think modern 'Hacker' culture as popularly used now, is more 'three-piece', and that anything that may be actually legal, but more on the darker side is actually attacked by modern 'Hacker' culture. Whether you agree with Anonymous, whose manifesto borrows some from The Hacker's Manifesto, it is more in line with the meaning of the word 'Hacker' to me, and less ameliorated like over-cooked, over-watered oatmeal of the word's usage today by self-described hackers.

loydb 10y ago
We found out that the SS was filming through hotel mirrors in a couple of rooms during Summercon 88. Poor Knight Lightning had to watch hours and hours of nothing but drunken shenanigans (because nobody trusted the dude who showed up out of nowhere claiming his handle was the "Dictator", so basically we trashed his room. I left a blender in there, the only thing I did in that room was mix batches of Margaritas.) When we had an LOD meetup in Dallas in 1989 or 1990, we changed hotels at the very last minute to avoid a similar situation...
- jlgaddis 10y ago
  As an early teen when I first read your words ~25 years ago, I immediately related. Even more so a few years later when I was kicked out of my high school computer classes, banned from touching the computers, and then when the FBI showed up at my home (unrelated). All these years later, it feels odd to see this here, read your comment, and write a reply. Your words served as "inspiration" to probably thousands of youth. I hope you're doing well.

crawsible 10y ago

Just think: 30 years from now, my age group will be reminiscing about Justin Timberlake's speech in The Social Network. what a time to be alive

fcanela 10y ago

It showed me (when I was a teenager living away from the city in the 90s) that I was not alone in my curiosity. I had The Mentor Manifiesto in my walls, along with prints of code or networking diagrams (i.e. TCP handshake sequence). I found the text really inspiring then.