I feel like the irony of a post complaining about the death of hacker culture written entirely by ChatGPT pretty well summarizes where we're at.

Read the original instead of this AI slop:

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 1950's 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.

I think it captures the original motivation and thrill of exploration beautifully. Who doesn’t remember as a kid seeing a blinking cursor and the feeling there was an entire universe to be discovered?

I’m 100% on board with the message of getting back to exploration for its own sake, and that conformity gets in the way of that.

In ancient days, I printed out the original and hung it on the wall by my computer.

This one I'd regret wasting space in my trash.

From the article

> Then: Phrack was the Rosetta Stone. 2600 was gospel. IRC was sacred ground. Zines were copied, not monetized. We earned respect by contributing tools, ideas, or code, never by chasing clout.

2600: The Hacker Quarterly is definitely not quite what it was decades ago, but I was still so giddy when my first article got published there that I dereferenced a null pointer on purpose.

I'm a professional hacker, and I love what I do, but this is one of the most cringe articles I have ever read. You shouldn't idolize the activities that you do and elevate them to a quasi-religious practice. Can you imagine a plumber or an airline pilot writing a manifesto like this? This happens with a lot of professions, but particularly in tech and ESPECIALLY in the offensive disciplines of cybersecurity. It makes for some of the most insufferable people you can ever interact with. They put all the eggs of their identity into one basket and it makes them overly self-important on that one topic, prideful, snobbish, and insecure. My advice to other hackers: pick up at least one or two other hobbies. Realize that it's not what you do that matters, but how you do all things, and most importantly how you engage with people.

what hits harder, the fact that this was written by an LLM or inspecting the monospace font and finding cloudflare analytics javascript

Man everyone says every article/blog post that is on HN is written by an LLM. Almost every single post.. I actually didn't get strong AI vibes from this one but maybe I just am bad at recognizing. Sure it's a bit cringy but I think that's kinda the point? idk...i like the idea of keeping the culture of exploration of technology just for the sake of it (not to monetize everything) alive.

The original "manifesto" was a deeply cringe zine article written about a group of people who would go on to run IT security practices at the major I-banks.

This update applies a fresh layer of vaseline to the camera lens: "creators in a world of closed systems", "anarchists with a cause". "Our goal was not destruction." Who are you calling "we"? I was there. It was for the most part a bunch of people trading scripts and running them in the hopes of possibly shutting people's phones off or stealing mail spools.

I'm not high-horsing or condemning 90s hackers. They were teenagers fucking around doing what teenagers do (though: I cough a bit when I read Blankenship writing about how we all "existed without skin color" and not "judging people for what they looked like").

What's insidious about this piece is how they use hagiography to cover for a pure gatekeeping argument. Bug bounties commoditizing vulnerability development to produce CVEs! Why, I never: the audacity to pay teenagers in Indonesia to document vulnerabilities when our forebears had to surreptitiously trade source trees on EFNet to participate in the scene.

This piece was written about 6 months before LLMs upended vulnerability research. What LLMs are going to do to the scene is a can of worms, so let's just put a pin in that, and judge it by the standards of August 2025, which by the standards of 1994 were a golden age of hacking, both in opportunity and in the intellectual depth of the field and the possibilities for engaging meaningfully with computer science.

this doesnt really reflect the vibe old school hackers give. "solder a wifi module to a calculator" sounds like a cartoon-inspired project.

Why not reference call spoofing (i forgot the name) where they were able to call for no charge because they were able to spoof a real call. that's the kind of hacker vibe i want continued.

This resonates. I have just got back to hacking an old flip-dot display after sitting on the shelf for years.

https://www.bobek.cz/buse/

Here is an exercise, find one character usage that the original didn't have and that this new one is littered with...

Hacker culture is still alive at NetBSD community

This sounds like ChatGPT.

The Hacker Spirit was largely subsidized on the (relatively) high salaries afforded to engineers*.

What happens when that well dries up?

Plus the relative freedom available to said hackers in the past, that is now being choked by the very same tools they've built.

We like to think of ourselves as capable systems designers, coming up with complex reliable/durable/highly-available/distributed systems to be proud of. But we can't stop and think about the only system that really matters in the end.

* Not saying it was 100% the case, nothing ever is, but you can't deny that a large part of historic and modern hacker culture grew from well off places who could afford it. Sure, sure "necessity is the mother of all invention" and all that, but that breeds a different kind of innovation.

>Yet, somewhere the spirit persists. Hidden away in encrypted Matrix rooms, deep inside dead drop Git repositories and onion forums, the real work continues. The underground never died — it just moved to quieter places.

You wish. True hackers wrote HAKMEM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAKMEM, wrote ZMachine interpreters in PostScript, wrote compilers for the Subleq machine with memory indirection and ran GNU/Linux on it. You pale against Lisp hackers who almost ate Discrete Math books for breakfast.

The PC "hacking" was nothing more than a bunch of kids playing with really underopowered toys.

There's more hacking spirit in Fabrice Bellard and Common Lisp/Scheme books than the whole PC hacking/cracking and phreakign scene.

This is a genuine hacking act:

https://bellard.org/dvbt/

This too:

http://www.erikyyy.de/tempest/

The same with Emacs hackers repurposing the editor for anything. IRC, Email, ZMachine interpreter, music and video player interfaces, web browsers, equation solvers, controlling aiports in Germany as an ATC messaging router (and I am NOT kidding about the last one)...

This might be the craziest achievement from a GNU product ever. Repurpossing a text editor to manage a civil infraestructure:

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsStories

Everything we love about human creativity is being destroyed by AI models and when some of us point it out, we're getting downvoted by an army of AI kool-aid drinkers. It's plain insane.

You downvoters really cannot see what's wrong with a Phrack article written in an insufferable LLMish tone that reads just like a 2026 LinkedIn feed?

You are lost.