When I was a kid, hackers were criminals. Hackers were dreamers who saw through this world and its oppressive institutions. Hackers were brilliant maniacs who defined themselves against a system of capitalist relations, and lived their lives in opposition. Every aspect of the hacker’s life was a tension towards freedom -- from creating communities that shared information freely, to using that information in a way that would strike out against this stifiling world. When nobody understood how technology worked in the systems that surrounded us, hackers figured those systems out and exploited them to our advantage. Hackers were criminals, yes, but their crimes were defined by the laws of the institutions that they sought to destroy. While they were consistently portrayed as criminals by those institutions, their true crimes were only those of curiousity, freedom, and the strength to dream of a better world. Somewhere along the way the ruling class started paying hackers to defend the very systems that they had so passionately attacked. Originally we took these jobs while smiling out of the corners of our mouths, thinking that we were only tricking those in control. But at some point we tricked ourselves. Where power does not break you, it seduces you - and seduced by the siren song of commodity relations, we lost sight of our dreams and desires. Instead of striking out to create a new world, we found ourselves writing facial reconition software that sought to preserve this one at all costs. Today, the attempts at revival of hacker culture make hackers nothing more than mere hobbyists. We pat ourselves on the back and smile about how we’re really hackers again, that we’ve gotten back to tinkering, that we’re doing interesting things with LEDs once more. But this tinkering is only the shadow of its former self. Asking for the right to modify a commodity that has been sold to us does not challenge anything. These projects only help to create bigger cages or longer leashes, recuperating our desires and satisfying our sense of ingenuity by putting wall paper on this ugly world. But some of us still wipe our asses with white papers and dream dangerously. If you’re not satisfied with people modifying their SUVs and being called hackers, look around, find those of us who aren’t either, and hack the planet.
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