from http://www.piratetheplanet.com/files/Hacker%20texts/hackthiszine/zine4.txt
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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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