"Hacking" occurs when we use technology to achieve results that were not part of the original procedure designed by its inventors. This can be as simple as using a can opener to fix a satellite, or as complex as borrowing a phone network so that information can be free in the sense of "liberated" from control. To think like a hacker, we go down a path that begins with repurposing code and gear and extends to a rejection of means-over-ends morality and categorical thinking. It is subversive like Prometheus more than Che Guevara or Elvis Presley.
It compares to the mentality of a knight in ancient cultures. The knight was above all laws made for normal people, since he was trusted to do what was right according to the whole of civilization and nature, even if it meant that some unfortunate would be deprived of life, liberty, or happiness. The knight did what was necessary to push his surroundings toward a higher state of order, avoiding the entropy caused by those who were doomed to the world of appearance and could thus see only binaries: living/dying, money/poverty, right/wrong. The knight transcended these boundaries and "hacked" his surroundings by pushing them to do things that otherwise could not be done, replacing previous designs with better ones.
Design and logical structure form a "hidden world" in which hackers, philosophers, artists and knights operate. The world of appearance deals with physical objects, but not the underlying structure which connects them. Similarly, users see the appearance which computers are programmed to show them, but have no idea of the workings of networks and operating systems. A knight must know how to manipulate this hidden world, and must have the moral strength to be destructive only when it is constructive to do so.
Hacking in 2025 is far different from hacking in 1985. During the formative days of hacker culture, computing resources were scarce. Most people used slow machines with limited memory and storage and could not get access to the instructive operating systems like UNIX and VMS unless they hacked into larger machines for that access, which required spoofing the phone system to be able to afford the long-distance calls required.
Today, desktop UNIX-like operating systems are plentiful, and network access is a nominal monthly fee. One reason that hacking has appeared to stagnate is that it has not re-invented itself to address this new reality. When most people think of "hackers," they imagine the black hat criminal element that steals credit cards and identities. White hat hackers have become like adult chaperones at a teenage sex party, wagging disapproving fingers but having little overall effect. Much of hacking has been taken over by "brass ring hackers" who specialize in difficult logic puzzles that have no relation to conditions in reality.
Since it is no longer necessary to hack machines for access, hacking must redefine itself according to its core principle: understanding the structure behind the appearances of computing, and to like a good knight, always reinvent the design of the underlying layers so that technology and society move toward higher degrees of organization.
The problem we face as a species with our big solipsistic brains is that most of what we think we know is in fact not real because it relies on procedure:
In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance. Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true.
In their capacity as disrupters hackers are a hedge against entropy, or the state of disorder that occurs over time and is exacerbated by people acting on appearance as if it were structure, causing them to manipulate form but not function. Most human technologies are flawed and operate poorly, subjecting the user to untold problems, much as governments and ideas are flawed and cause similar confusions. The hacker of today must unite philosophy, computing and politics in a quest to find better orders and to defeat entropy by understanding how things work, and not what pleasing appearances will sell to a credulous consumer base.
Hackers as knights represent a potential force of change in our society. We can see where technology could be organized better, so that without inventing a new type of computer we can make older computers better; hackers can prank society to point out its illusions and contradictions. Because we have the skills to do this, we are necessarily above the law, and must use that status to achieve the kind of re-ordering of civilization that normal people cannot. Should we choose to accept the role with all of its responsibilities, we are the knights who can redesign industrial society into something that serves humans instead of imprisoning them in a world of appearances.
Knights, cakravartin, samurai, and philosopher-kings revolt against the form of entropy that occurs when people repeat procedure instead of thinking through a task from intentions through cause-effect to results in reality. We reject the idea that using control to limit which procedures are acceptable is functional:
Control needs time in which to exercise control. Because control also needs opposition or acquiescence; otherwise, it ceases to be control. I control a hypnotized subject (at least partially); I control a slave, a dog, a worker; but if I establish complete control somehow, as by implanting electrodes in the brain, then my subject is little more than a tape recorder, a camera, a robot. You don't control a tape recorder - you use it. Consider the distinction, and the impasse implicit here. All control systems try to make control as tight as possible, but at the same time, if they succeeded completely there would be nothing left to control. Suppose for example a control system installed electrodes in the brains of all prospective workers at birth. Control is now complete. Even the thought of rebellion is neurologically impossible. No police force is necessary. No psychological control is necessary, other than pressing buttons to achieve certain activations and operations.
When there is no more opposition, control becomes a meaningless proposition. It is highly questionable whether a human organism could survive complete control. There would be nothing there. No persons there. Life is will (motivation) and the workers would no longer be alive, perhaps literally. The concept of suggestion as a complete technique presupposes that control is partial and not complete. You do not have to give suggestions to your tape recorder nor subject it to pain and coercion or persuasion.
Categories measure effects; if you want the fields watered, there are a number of approved methods or procedures. While procedures often work in our favor, they also accelerate entropy by disconnecting action from goal, making humans into automatons who follow procedure blindly even if it ends in horrors. Since all human societies to date have self-destructed through rote application of obsolete techniques, this seems a greater risk than we realize, and hackers are a hedge against it.
We close by citing an old-school document that tried to assemble the sensation of the time, namely the Hacker's Manifesto by +++The Mentor+++, who was active on our BBS Dead Animal Pickup and triggered the Steve Jackson Games investigation by triggeting federal paranoia:
Another one got caught today, it's all over the papers. "Teenager Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal", "Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering"...
Damn kids. They're all alike.
But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950s technobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?
I am a hacker, enter my world...
Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm smarter than most of the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me...
Damn underachiever. They're all alike.
I'm in junior high or high school. I've listened to teachers explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. "No, Ms. Smith, I didn't show my work. I did it in my head..."
Damn kid. Probably copied it. They're all alike.
I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me...
Or feels threatened by me...
Or thinks I'm a smart ass...
Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...
Damn kid. All he does is play games. They're all alike.
And then it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a board is found.
"This is it... this is where I belong..."
I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again... I know you all...
Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They're all alike...
You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We've been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.
This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. 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. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.
Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.
I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike.
+++The Mentor+++
Fundamentally, hackers represent a refusal to obey not just the rules but the procedure. To use the device, there is a process that we all must equally follow; hackers, both beneath society as outsiders and above it by not being beholden to its necessity for repetition of procedure for continuity, act without regard for the rules because they are oriented toward objectives, and in their calculus better proficiency with technology is always an improvement on simply following the rules.
Complex societies become ruled-based over time and cultivate rule-followers, since this is the way to economically succeed on a personal level, which leaves them open to attack by the rule-agnostic who are concerned less with procedure and support for infrastructure than they are with theft; hackers by refusing to follow a means-over-ends morality and psychology serve as inoculations against these attacks by focusing on goals and realities instead of procedure and principle.
Houston Area Quorum for Recidivism (HAQR)
~+^*^+~
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