The Electronic Frontier - Reclamation of Freedom
The following is an excerpt from the Hacker's Manifesto that was published in phrack magazine September 25, 1986:
"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."
I remember the first time an old friend gave me my first modem and a set of telephone numbers for it to dial. The noise that came from the modem rattled my eardrums with tones of which I had never heard before. Once it had finally silenced on my screen was some crude graphics saying "Welcome to Skarabrae BBS". It then asked me to pick a "handle". I had been just introduced to William Gibson and fell in love with the term "cyberpunk". However that seemed a bit to cliché, so I typed Cyber-Punk. I was then given a list of commands I could use to navigate the Bulletin Board System. It was something like never before here was a place that existed not in a physical realm but contained many of the same activities. You could chat with others, play games, read books and more importantly download pretty much whatever anyone posted which included music albums, games, etc. It was the chatting that really sold me. Here anyone could talk about anything, saying what they truly seemed to feel. The things that were just too taboo to talk about in front of others, face to face with fear of dirty looks simply did not exist. It was true freedom of speech.
It was amazing and I had to learn more about this online world. I started purchasing 2600 magazines finding that this world was much larger than the small B.B.S I had just joined. A short time thereafter came CompuServe and AOL. This world started to grow and evolve. More and more people started to ultimately get hooked into this online world. It was like a new drug had just hit the streets, but this one was thousands of times more addictive than any other. Here was a place where you could be anyone, meet anyone, say anything. Whatever your heart or mind desired.
From the time man harnessed electricity many have sat tinkering with it, trying to figure out what it was and what could we do with it. The possibilities were endless; lights, recording devices, communication devices, heat, travel. You name it. With electricity anyone could have power. Something everyone seems to have a craving for in someway or another. This electronic world since the start has had a counter-culture always associated with it. From Nikola Tesla wanting to give free wireless electricity. The telephone phreaker's wanting to master the Ma Bell network to make free calls and sharing the information. To the modern day hacker wanting to learn and share all they can. Something about this power sparks a sense of liberation in human beings.
So as I write here on Steemit a platform where one can make electronic currency by sharing thoughts, ideas, or whatever one wants really. I think about how we are saying "NO MORE!" to the bankers or governments wanting to control our money. We are using this electronic world to try and take back our power and it is just one more step closer to our reclamation of freedom.
Link to the full Hacker's Manifesto: http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html
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