13 ms·

Hacker’s Manifesto (1986)

341 points by romes 7y ago

akkartik 7y ago
Why not call it the [edit] phreaker manifesto? Particularly when it's on a magazine called Phrack?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- shoes_for_thee 7y ago
  By this logic, ever article published in the NYT would be "New York Times"
  - yarrel 7y ago
    The Times of Manhattan.
- PhasmaFelis 7y ago
  Because it's a manifesto of hackers, not of people who read Phrack.
- Torwald 7y ago
  Those guys were called 'phreaks', not 'phrakers". BTW, Apple was founded by two phreaks.
  - cronix 7y ago
    Apple wouldn't exist if not for Allen's original Blue Box Tone Generator. It's what funded them.
    - munk-a 7y ago
      To correct, it was actually Wozniak that was assembling the phreaking boxes. Apparently they made a revenue of 3k from the venture[1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc.#1975%E2%80%931985:_Jobs_and_Wozniak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc.#1975%E2%...
  - PhasmaFelis 7y ago
    It was founded by one phreak and a slick-talking salesman. (And also by Ronald Wayne, poor bastard.)
bitwize 7y ago
"That's pretty cool." "You think this is cool?" "Yeah, it's cool." "It's not cool. It's commie bullshit!" https://youtu.be/u6BR0SJN75g https://youtu.be/u6BR0SJN75g
- GhettoMaestro 7y ago
  Lol. This exchange is the first thing that crossed my mind when I saw the headline.
capableweb 7y ago
Related: A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence Written by John Perry Barlow (of Grateful Dead fame and more)
- madmaniak 7y ago
  Amazing.
- rbanffy 7y ago
  We were more innocent at that time. I miss that.
  - Aeolun 7y ago
    They were good times. All the much better because we were convinced they would last.
  - Ygg2 7y ago
    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.
    - rbanffy 7y ago
      We should have seen through the optimism of the time. Humans are... messy.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- veridies 7y ago
  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.
thanatropism 7y ago
There was a time when "hacker" meant "a wizard's wizard"; 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.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- reaperducer 7y ago
  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.
  - kragen 7y ago
    This is not something I have ever heard of; in the US in the early 1980s we shared software at user group meetings and in BBSes.
    - reaperducer 7y ago
      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).
oldandcold 7y ago
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.
- mikeflynn 7y ago
  It’s entirely lifted/sourced in the movie. They read the last part verbatim in the movie in the scene with the FBI agents in the car.
  - rbanffy 7y ago
    The movie is underrated. RISC technology is going to change everything. ;-)
    - robohoe 7y ago
      RISC is good!
      - rbanffy 7y ago
        Every computer surrounding me agrees. Even the x86 ones, deep inside their execution units, agree.
- pound 7y ago
  I wouldn't say 'lifted'. They were straight reading manifesto itself, not pretending that it's something else. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwozkbmjzC4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwozkbmjzC4
  - pound 7y ago
krapp 7y ago
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?
- mindcrime 7y ago
  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.
  - krapp 7y ago
    > 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.
- watwut 7y ago
  They were not same hackers and likely not even spiritual followers.
aestetix 7y ago
See also, Bruce Sterling's "The Hacker Crackdown", an historical account of the era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker_Crackdown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker_Crackdown. Some of the players involved, including from 2600 Magazine and DefCon, are still active today.
- p4bl0 7y ago
  A very good read indeed. And it's available for free online. https://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html https://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html
pbalau 7y ago
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.
- q3k 7y ago
  Hackerspaces are a huge relief. Many of them are the last bastion of computing not being spoiled by capitalism.
  - pdimitar 7y ago
    Can you give some examples?
    - q3k 7y ago
      The Chaos Computer Club scene in Germany, The Warsaw Hackerspace, NYC Resistor, Helsinki Hacklab, ... All of them are community supported, non-profit and doing some fairly advanced stuff in some domain areas (security, electronics, machining, ...).
      - vector_rotcev 7y ago
        Do you an opinion on the London Hackspace?
        q3k 7y ago
        Only was there as a visitor for an hour or two. Seemed nice, not sure about their attitude towards SV bullshit.
      - MetalGuru 7y ago
        Do they have on in SF?
        7y ago
aezakmi 7y ago
Funny to think that a lot of self called hackers are now Cathedral bootlickers in one way or another.
waisbrot 7y ago
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.
dpeck 7y ago
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.
- Jldevictoria 7y ago
  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.
  - dpeck 7y ago
    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.
  - Chris_Chambers 7y ago
    It would be immediately dismissed as incoherent incel rambling today and seen only by the 6 people who downvoted it immediately when it was submitted.
  - csixty4 7y ago
    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.
Jldevictoria 7y ago
Edgy circa 1986
rdiddly 7y ago
Self-important much? I have little stomach for this kind of thing and that includes the "Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace" because there's nothing separating your supposed wizardry from everyone else. Anyone can learn to use all of your magical tools just by R-ing TFM. And that's exactly what they've done, all the usual hucksters, narcs, and plain unimaginative lame-asses (or maybe hired someone to do it for them), and as a result, you have today's world. It was only a matter of time. Wealth and power are more unequal than ever. There's your revolution. Anyway, if working with computers is where you find meaning, great, but if you're going to break into shit, at least have the balls to own it instead of professing it's nothing more than curiosity, and throwing out the old "I blame society" trope like you're Charlie Manson. Because A) You're not even as ambitious as he was, and B) It's lazy & wussy in both cases. I keep thinking of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYItTxqTc38 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYItTxqTc38 "I went to your institutional learning facilities!" (Get red pen, cross out 3 words, write "schools" and a note: "Be concise. You sound like a cop.") Everybody smart has to deal with all the same things. One of the benefits of going to a nice college is that you're around other smart people. Not because it's nice, but because it's humbling. All the twerps who were the smartest in their class in the town of West Assingville, quickly find out that they're just one among millions, and not even that stellar. So, hopefully you'll do something worthwhile with what you've got. Teach others maybe.
- segmondy 7y ago
  You must be kidding me, you do realize this was written 33 years ago? By teenagers and the world view and landscape was very different then?
  - rdiddly 7y ago
    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.
    - 7y ago
paulmalenke 7y ago
Funny. I own electronandtheswitch.com. 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 7y ago
  It’s not loading...hello? Can anybody hear me??
mister_irony 7y ago
I love how HN community takes edge off VC heroin with posting The Hacker Manifesto and ensuring themselves that they are still living to manifesto's ideas
whack 7y ago
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.
- mistrial9 7y ago
  > blatant violations of copyright and patent protections are not acceptable tell that to the most populous nation in the world, you can post the response here
- DennisP 7y ago
  We can have all the nuanced discussion we like, but most likely Congress will still do whatever Hollywood's lobbyists want.
- esotericn 7y ago
  > blatant violations of copyright and patent protections are not acceptable. YMMV.
_wldu 7y ago
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.
- ALittleLight 7y ago
  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.
dang 7y ago
A thread from 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12319688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12319688 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5007508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5007508 also 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5053949 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5053949 2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1520964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1520964 2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=432214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=432214 2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=178686 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=178686
- Geenkaas 7y ago
  See you in 2022!
hnspirit 7y ago
Hack the planet!
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
>> 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?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- tvanantwerp 7y ago
  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.
  - watwut 7y ago
    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". That claim is manipulative at best.
StanislavPetrov 7y ago
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.
johan_larson 7y ago
> 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.
- heyoni 7y ago
  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.
abolishme 7y ago
looks at Marc Anthony "... this is my ... manifesto"
motohagiography 7y ago
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.
- codeGreene 7y ago
  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.
geggam 7y ago
reminds me of Capt Crunch :) I managed to get in on this kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2086704960/beyond-the-little-blue-box https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2086704960/beyond-the-l...
diminoten 7y ago
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.
efiecho 7y ago
A little OT, but have they got control over the compromised domain situation? https://old.reddit.com/r/phrack/comments/7b0qqg/just_a_heads_up/ https://old.reddit.com/r/phrack/comments/7b0qqg/just_a_heads...
adim86 7y ago
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
chrisweekly 7y ago
Related tangent: I enjoyed and recommend the 2001 book "The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_the_Information_Age https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker_Ethic_and_the_Spi...
euske 7y ago
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.
- treden 7y ago
  Just out of curiosity, what was considered cool?
  - euske 7y ago
    Anime girls and cutesy animals. (I bet this is hardly a surprise to people today.)
- jacobush 7y ago
  I can relate - the movie Wargames was ultimate cool to me when I was a kid, not "Hackers". Though I cringe-loved Hackers too.
- lioeters 7y ago
  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.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

341 points by romes 7y ago

akkartik 7y ago

Why not call it the [edit] phreaker manifesto? Particularly when it's on a magazine called Phrack?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
shoes_for_thee 7y ago
By this logic, ever article published in the NYT would be "New York Times"
- yarrel 7y ago
  The Times of Manhattan.
PhasmaFelis 7y ago
Because it's a manifesto of hackers, not of people who read Phrack.
Torwald 7y ago
Those guys were called 'phreaks', not 'phrakers". BTW, Apple was founded by two phreaks.
- cronix 7y ago
  Apple wouldn't exist if not for Allen's original Blue Box Tone Generator. It's what funded them.
  - munk-a 7y ago
    To correct, it was actually Wozniak that was assembling the phreaking boxes. Apparently they made a revenue of 3k from the venture[1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc.#1975%E2%80%931985:_Jobs_and_Wozniak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc.#1975%E2%...
- PhasmaFelis 7y ago
  It was founded by one phreak and a slick-talking salesman. (And also by Ronald Wayne, poor bastard.)

bitwize 7y ago

"That's pretty cool." "You think this is cool?" "Yeah, it's cool." "It's not cool. It's commie bullshit!" https://youtu.be/u6BR0SJN75g https://youtu.be/u6BR0SJN75g

GhettoMaestro 7y ago
Lol. This exchange is the first thing that crossed my mind when I saw the headline.

capableweb 7y ago

Related: A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence Written by John Perry Barlow (of Grateful Dead fame and more)

madmaniak 7y ago
Amazing.
rbanffy 7y ago
We were more innocent at that time. I miss that.
- Aeolun 7y ago
  They were good times. All the much better because we were convinced they would last.
- Ygg2 7y ago
  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.
  - rbanffy 7y ago
    We should have seen through the optimism of the time. Humans are... messy.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
veridies 7y ago
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.

thanatropism 7y ago

There was a time when "hacker" meant "a wizard's wizard"; 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.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
reaperducer 7y ago
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.
- kragen 7y ago
  This is not something I have ever heard of; in the US in the early 1980s we shared software at user group meetings and in BBSes.
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    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).

oldandcold 7y ago

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.

mikeflynn 7y ago
It’s entirely lifted/sourced in the movie. They read the last part verbatim in the movie in the scene with the FBI agents in the car.
- rbanffy 7y ago
  The movie is underrated. RISC technology is going to change everything. ;-)
  - robohoe 7y ago
    RISC is good!
    - rbanffy 7y ago
      Every computer surrounding me agrees. Even the x86 ones, deep inside their execution units, agree.
pound 7y ago
I wouldn't say 'lifted'. They were straight reading manifesto itself, not pretending that it's something else. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwozkbmjzC4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwozkbmjzC4
- pound 7y ago

krapp 7y ago

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?

mindcrime 7y ago
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.
- krapp 7y ago
  > 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.
watwut 7y ago
They were not same hackers and likely not even spiritual followers.

aestetix 7y ago

See also, Bruce Sterling's "The Hacker Crackdown", an historical account of the era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker_Crackdown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker_Crackdown. Some of the players involved, including from 2600 Magazine and DefCon, are still active today.

p4bl0 7y ago
A very good read indeed. And it's available for free online. https://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html https://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html

pbalau 7y ago

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.

q3k 7y ago
Hackerspaces are a huge relief. Many of them are the last bastion of computing not being spoiled by capitalism.
- pdimitar 7y ago
  Can you give some examples?
  - q3k 7y ago
    The Chaos Computer Club scene in Germany, The Warsaw Hackerspace, NYC Resistor, Helsinki Hacklab, ... All of them are community supported, non-profit and doing some fairly advanced stuff in some domain areas (security, electronics, machining, ...).
    - vector_rotcev 7y ago
      Do you an opinion on the London Hackspace?
      - q3k 7y ago
        Only was there as a visitor for an hour or two. Seemed nice, not sure about their attitude towards SV bullshit.
    - MetalGuru 7y ago
      Do they have on in SF?
      - 7y ago

aezakmi 7y ago

Funny to think that a lot of self called hackers are now Cathedral bootlickers in one way or another.

waisbrot 7y ago

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.

dpeck 7y ago

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.

Jldevictoria 7y ago
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.
- dpeck 7y ago
  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.
- Chris_Chambers 7y ago
  It would be immediately dismissed as incoherent incel rambling today and seen only by the 6 people who downvoted it immediately when it was submitted.
- csixty4 7y ago
  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.

Jldevictoria 7y ago

Edgy circa 1986

rdiddly 7y ago

Self-important much? I have little stomach for this kind of thing and that includes the "Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace" because there's nothing separating your supposed wizardry from everyone else. Anyone can learn to use all of your magical tools just by R-ing TFM. And that's exactly what they've done, all the usual hucksters, narcs, and plain unimaginative lame-asses (or maybe hired someone to do it for them), and as a result, you have today's world. It was only a matter of time. Wealth and power are more unequal than ever. There's your revolution. Anyway, if working with computers is where you find meaning, great, but if you're going to break into shit, at least have the balls to own it instead of professing it's nothing more than curiosity, and throwing out the old "I blame society" trope like you're Charlie Manson. Because A) You're not even as ambitious as he was, and B) It's lazy & wussy in both cases. I keep thinking of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYItTxqTc38 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYItTxqTc38 "I went to your institutional learning facilities!" (Get red pen, cross out 3 words, write "schools" and a note: "Be concise. You sound like a cop.") Everybody smart has to deal with all the same things. One of the benefits of going to a nice college is that you're around other smart people. Not because it's nice, but because it's humbling. All the twerps who were the smartest in their class in the town of West Assingville, quickly find out that they're just one among millions, and not even that stellar. So, hopefully you'll do something worthwhile with what you've got. Teach others maybe.

segmondy 7y ago
You must be kidding me, you do realize this was written 33 years ago? By teenagers and the world view and landscape was very different then?
- rdiddly 7y ago
  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.
  - 7y ago

paulmalenke 7y ago

Funny. I own electronandtheswitch.com. 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 7y ago
It’s not loading...hello? Can anybody hear me??

mister_irony 7y ago

I love how HN community takes edge off VC heroin with posting The Hacker Manifesto and ensuring themselves that they are still living to manifesto's ideas

whack 7y ago

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.

mistrial9 7y ago
> blatant violations of copyright and patent protections are not acceptable tell that to the most populous nation in the world, you can post the response here
DennisP 7y ago
We can have all the nuanced discussion we like, but most likely Congress will still do whatever Hollywood's lobbyists want.
esotericn 7y ago
> blatant violations of copyright and patent protections are not acceptable. YMMV.

_wldu 7y ago

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.

ALittleLight 7y ago
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.

dang 7y ago

A thread from 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12319688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12319688 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5007508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5007508 also 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5053949 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5053949 2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1520964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1520964 2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=432214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=432214 2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=178686 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=178686

Geenkaas 7y ago
See you in 2022!

hnspirit 7y ago

Hack the planet!

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YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago

>> 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?

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tvanantwerp 7y ago
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.
- watwut 7y ago
  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". That claim is manipulative at best.

StanislavPetrov 7y ago

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.

johan_larson 7y ago

> 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.

heyoni 7y ago
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.

abolishme 7y ago

looks at Marc Anthony "... this is my ... manifesto"

motohagiography 7y ago

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.

codeGreene 7y ago
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.

geggam 7y ago

reminds me of Capt Crunch :) I managed to get in on this kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2086704960/beyond-the-little-blue-box https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2086704960/beyond-the-l...

diminoten 7y ago

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.

efiecho 7y ago

A little OT, but have they got control over the compromised domain situation? https://old.reddit.com/r/phrack/comments/7b0qqg/just_a_heads_up/ https://old.reddit.com/r/phrack/comments/7b0qqg/just_a_heads...

adim86 7y ago

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

chrisweekly 7y ago

Related tangent: I enjoyed and recommend the 2001 book "The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_the_Information_Age https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker_Ethic_and_the_Spi...

euske 7y ago

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.

treden 7y ago
Just out of curiosity, what was considered cool?
- euske 7y ago
  Anime girls and cutesy animals. (I bet this is hardly a surprise to people today.)
jacobush 7y ago
I can relate - the movie Wargames was ultimate cool to me when I was a kid, not "Hackers". Though I cringe-loved Hackers too.
lioeters 7y ago
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.

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