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...
The Hacker’s Manifesto (1986)
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Re: The Hacker’s Manifesto (1986)
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
and a time where it meant a digital vandal over POTS lines; Well, those were "phreakers." In the 70's, "hacker" was a person who "hacked" out the credits from public domain software and put their own name in it for resale. And you bought it anyway because software was so hard to come by.
And those hackers became competitive to see who could put the coolest looking intro in front of the hacked/cracked software bragging about who crack it. And then those intros eventually gave rise to what they called the Demo Scene where "hackers" would gather to see who could write the coolest visual/audio experience under various levels of constraint. And many of the graphic algorithms derived by hackers in the demo…
"And many of the graphic algorithms derived by hackers in the demo scene gave rise to the algorithms used in today's 3D videocards."
Is there anything to support this?
Re: The Hacker’s Manifesto (1986)
#113Re: The Hacker’s Manifesto (1986)
#114It'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 tryin…
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.
Re: The Hacker’s Manifesto (1986)
#115Why not call it the [edit] phreaker manifesto? Particularly when it's on a magazine called Phrack?
Those guys were called 'phreaks', not 'phrakers". BTW, Apple was founded by two phreaks.
It was founded by one phreak and a slick-talking salesman.
(And also by Ronald Wayne, poor bastard.)
Re: The Hacker’s Manifesto (1986)
#116Related: A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence Written by John Perry Barlow (of Grateful Dead fame and more)
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.
Re: The Hacker’s Manifesto (1986)
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you give some examples?
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, ...).
Do they have on in SF?
Re: The Hacker’s Manifesto (1986)
#118Maybe 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.
Re: The Hacker’s Manifesto (1986)
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
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?
"You may stop me, but you can't stop us all."
Still correct.
Re: The Hacker’s Manifesto (1986)
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, ...).
Do they have on in SF?
Noisebridge is one I believe. Covered in at least one Doctorow book. Strange Parts did a nice video on it too.