
Hacker’s Manifesto (1986) - romes
http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html
======
motohagiography
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
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.

------
oldandcold
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.

~~~
pound
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)

~~~
anon1m0us
It's funny how the hacker says, "Cool" and the reader said, "Cool? It's not
cool. It's commie bullshit."

Honest question: Which one is correct?

~~~
pound
that's not a hacker but also an agent.

and a bit of trivia - person who plays him is Marc Anthony (musician, ex-
husband of Jennifer Lopez)

~~~
ChrisArchitect
ah, I was trying to place him. Nice one

------
YeGoblynQueenne
>> 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?

~~~
tvanantwerp
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
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.

------
capableweb
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)

~~~
rbanffy
We were more innocent at that time. I miss that.

~~~
Ygg2
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
We should have seen through the optimism of the time. Humans are... messy.

------
aestetix
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
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)

------
thanatropism
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.

~~~
reaperducer
_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.

~~~
Zaskoda
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.

~~~
mustacheemperor
> 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.

~~~
PokeyCat
Probably pouet.net . I'm still amazed by so many of the 64k demos on there...
incredible what you can do with that little space.

------
adim86
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

------
_wldu
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
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.

------
dpeck
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
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.

~~~
csixty4
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.

------
pbalau
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
Hackerspaces are a huge relief. Many of them are the last bastion of computing
not being spoiled by capitalism.

~~~
pdimitar
Can you give some examples?

~~~
q3k
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
Do you an opinion on the London Hackspace?

~~~
q3k
Only was there as a visitor for an hour or two. Seemed nice, not sure about
their attitude towards SV bullshit.

------
paulmalenke
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
It’s not loading...hello? Can anybody hear me??

------
dang
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
See you in 2022!

------
euske
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
Just out of curiosity, what was considered cool?

~~~
euske
Anime girls and cutesy animals. (I bet this is hardly a surprise to people
today.)

------
waisbrot
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.

------
chrisweekly
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_Spi...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_the_Information_Age)

------
efiecho
A little OT, but have they got control over the compromised domain situation?

[https://old.reddit.com/r/phrack/comments/7b0qqg/just_a_heads...](https://old.reddit.com/r/phrack/comments/7b0qqg/just_a_heads_up/)

------
whack
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.

~~~
DennisP
We can have all the nuanced discussion we like, but most likely Congress will
still do whatever Hollywood's lobbyists want.

------
StanislavPetrov
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.

------
krapp
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?

~~~
waisbrot
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.

Who are you thinking of?

~~~
bbanyc
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.

~~~
krapp
>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.

------
bitwize
"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
Lol. This exchange is the first thing that crossed my mind when I saw the
headline.

------
geggam
reminds me of Capt Crunch :)

I managed to get in on this kickstarter

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2086704960/beyond-
the-l...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2086704960/beyond-the-little-
blue-box)

------
abolishme
_looks at Marc Anthony_

"... this is my ... manifesto"

------
Jldevictoria
Edgy circa 1986

------
diminoten
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.

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

~~~
Torwald
Those guys were called 'phreaks', not 'phrakers". BTW, Apple was founded by
two phreaks.

~~~
cronix
Apple wouldn't exist if not for Allen's original Blue Box Tone Generator. It's
what funded them.

~~~
munk-a
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%...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc.#1975%E2%80%931985:_Jobs_and_Wozniak)

------
johan_larson
> 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
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.

