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The Hacker Manifesto
Loyd Blankenship The Conscience of a Hacker, also called the Hacker Manifesto, was published in 1986. Loyd Blankenship aka The Mentor wrote it after his arrest and it got picked up by Phrack, and achieved fame since then.
1986
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.
Crypto Anarchist Manifesto
Timothy C. May A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy.
Mid-1988
Computer technology is on the verge of providing the ability for individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other in a totally anonymous manner. Two persons may exchange messages, conduct business, and negotiate electronic contracts without ever knowing the True Name, or legal identity, of the other. Interactions over networks will be untraceable, via extensive re-routing of encrypted packets and tamper-proof boxes which implement cryptographic protocols with nearly perfect assurance against any tampering. Reputations will be of central importance, far more important in dealings than even the credit ratings of today. These developments will alter completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions, the ability to keep information secret, and will even alter the nature of trust and reputation.
The technology for this revolution, and it surely will be both a social and economic revolution, has existed in theory for the past decade. The methods are based upon public-key encryption, zero-knowledge interactive proof systems, and various software protocols for interaction, authentication, and verification. The focus has until now been on academic conferences in Europe and the U.S., conferences monitored closely by the National Security Agency. But only recently have computer networks and personal computers attained sufficient speed to make the ideas practically realizable. And the next ten years will bring enough additional speed to make the ideas economically feasible and essentially unstoppable. High-speed networks, ISDN, tamper-proof boxes, smart cards, satellites, Ku-band transmitters, multi-MIPS personal computers, and encryption chips now under development will be some of the enabling technologies.
The State will of course try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, citing national security concerns, use of the technology by drug dealers and tax evaders, and fears of societal disintegration. Many of these concerns will be valid; crypto anarchy will allow national secrets to be trade freely and will allow illicit and stolen materials to be traded. An anonymous computerized market will even make possible abhorrent markets for assassinations and extortion. Various criminal and foreign elements will be active users of CryptoNet. But this will not halt the spread of crypto anarchy.
Just as the technology of printing altered and reduced the power of medieval guilds and the social power structure, so too will cryptologic methods fundamentally alter the nature of corporations and of government interference in economic transactions. Combined with emerging information markets, crypto anarchy will create a liquid market for any and all material which can be put into words and pictures. And just as a seemingly minor invention like barbed wire made possible the fencing-off of vast ranches and farms, thus altering forever the concepts of land and property rights in the frontier West, so too will the seemingly minor discovery out of an arcane branch of mathematics come to be the wire clippers which dismantle the barbed wire around intellectual property.
Arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wire fences !
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
John Perry Barlow Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
February 8, 1996
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.
You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.
You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.
Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.
Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.
In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.
You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.
In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.
Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.
These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.
We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.
A Cyberpunk Manifesto
Christian As. Kirtchev We are the ELECTRONIC MINDS, a group of free-minded rebels. Cyberpunks. We live in Cyberspace, we are everywhere, we know no boundaries. This is our manifest. The Cyberpunks' manifest.
February 14, 1997
I. Cyberpunk
1/ We are those, the Different. Technological rats, swimming in the ocean of information.
2/ We are the retiring, little kid at school, sitting at the last desk, in the corner of the class room.
3/ We are the teenager everybody considers strange.
4/ We are the student hacking computer systems, exploring the depth of his reach.
5/ We are the grown-up in the park, sitting on a bench, laptop on his knees, programming the last virtual reality.
6/ Ours is the garage, stuffed with electronics. The soldering iron in the corner of the desk and the nearby disassembled radio, they are also ours. Ours is the cellar with computers, buzzing printers and beeping modems.
7/ We are those that see reality in a different way. Our point of view shows more than ordinary people can see. They see only what is outside, but we see what is inside. That's what we are - realists with the glasses of dreamers.
8/ We are those strange people, almost unknown to the neighborhood. People, indulged in their own thoughts, sitting day after day before the computer, ransacking the net for something. We are not often out of home, just from time to time, only to go to the nearby radio shack, or to the usual bar to meet some of the few friends we have, or to meet a client, or to the backstreet druggist... or just for a little walk.
9/ We do not have many friends, only a few with whom we go to parties. Everybody else we know we know on the net. Our real friends are there, on the other side of the line. We know them from our favorite IRC channel, from the News-Groups, from the systems we hang-around.
10/ We are those who don't give a shit about what people think about us, we don't care what we look like or what people talk about us in our absence.
11/ The majority of us likes to live in hiding, being unknown to everybody except those few we must inevitably contact with.
12/ Others love publicity, they love fame. They are all known in the underground world. Their names are often heard there.
But we are all united by one thing - we are Cyberpunks.
13/ Society does not understand us, we are "weird" and "crazy" people in the eyes of the ordinary people who live far from information and free ideas. Society denies our way of thinking - a society, living, thinking and breathing in one and only one way - a cliché.
14/ They deny us for we think like free people, and free thinking is forbidden.
15/ The Cyberpunk has outer appearance, he is no motion. Cyberpunks are people, starting from the ordinary and known to nobody person, to the artist-technomaniac, to the musician, playing electronic music, to the superficial scholar.
16/ The Cyberpunk is no literature genre anymore, not even an ordinary subculture. The Cyberpunk is a stand-alone new culture, offspring of the new age. A culture that unites our common interests and views. We are a unit. We are Cyberpunks.
II. Society
1/ The Society which surrounds us is clogged with concervacy pulling everything and everybody to itself, while it sinks slowly in the quicksands of time.
2/ However doggedly some refuse to believe it, it is obvious that we live in a sick society. The so called reforms which our governments so adeptly use to boast, are nothing else but a little step forward, when a whole jump can be done.
3/ People fear the new and unknown. They prefer the old, the known and checked truths. They are afraid of what the new can bring to them. They are afraid that they can lose what they have.
4/ Their fear is so strong that it has proclaimed the revolutional a foe and a the free idea - its weapon. That's their fault.
5/ People must leave this fear behind and go ahead. What's the sense to stick to the little you have now when you can have more tomorrow. Everything they must do is stretch their hands and feel for the new; give freedom to thoughts, ideas, to words.
6/ For centuries each generation has been brought up is a same pattern. Ideals is what everybody follows. Individuality is forgotten. People think in a same way, following the cliché drilled in them in childhood, the cliché-education for all children. And, when someone dares defy authority, he is punished and given as a bad example. "Here is what happens to you when you express your own opinion and deny your teacher's one".
7/ Our society is sick and need to be healed. The cure is a change in the system...
III. The System
1/ The System. Centuries-old, existing on principles that hang no more today. A System that has not changed much since the day of its birth.
2/ The System is wrong.
3/ The System must impose its truth upon us so that it can rule. The government needs us follow it blindly. For this reason we live in an informational eclipse. When people acquire information other that that from the government, they cannot distinguish the right from the wrong. So the lie becomes a truth - a truth, fundamental to everything else. Thus the leaders control with lies and the ordinary people have no notion of what is true and follow the government blindly, trusting it.
4/ We fight for freedom of information. We fight for freedom of speech and press. For the freedom to express our thoughts freely, without being persecuted by the system.
5/ Even in the most-developed and 'democratic' countries, the system imposes misinformation. Even in the countries that pretend to be the cradle of free speech. Misinformation is one of the system's main weapon. A weapon, they use very well.
6/ It is the Net that helps us spread the information freely. The Net, with no boundaries and information limit.
7/ Ours is yours, yours is ours.
8/ Everyone can share information, no restrictions.
9/ Encrypting of information is our weapon. Thus the words of revolution can spread uninterrupted, and the government can only guess.
10/ The Net is our realm, in the Net we are Kings.
11/ Laws. The world is changing, but the laws remain the same. The System is not changing, only a few details get redressed for the new time, but everything in the concept remains the same.
12/ We need new laws. Laws, fitting the times we live in, with the world that surrounds us. Not laws build on the basis of the past. Laws, build for today, laws, that will fit tomorrow.
13/ The laws that only refrain us. Laws that badly need revision.
IV. The vision
1/ Some people do not care much about what happens globally. They care about what happens around them, in their micro-universe.
2/ These people can only see a dark future, for they can only see the life they live now.
3/ Others show some concern about the global affairs. They are interested in everything, in the future in perspective, in what is going to happen globally.
4/ They have a more optimistic view. To them the future is cleaner and more beautiful, for they can see into it and they see a more mature man, a wiser world.
5/ We are in the middle. We are interested in what happens now, but what in what's gonna happen tomorrow as well.
6/ We look in the net, and the net is growing wide and wider.
7/ Soon everything in this world will be swallowed by the net : from the military systems to the PC at home.
8/ But the net is a house of anarchy.
9/ It cannot be controlled and this is its power.
10/ Every man will be dependent on the net.
11/ The whole information will be there, locked in the abysses of zeros and ones.
12/ Who controls the net, controls the information.
13/ We will live in a mixture of past and present.
14/ The bad come from the man, and the good comes from technology.
15/ The net will control the little man, and we will control the net.
16/ For is you do not control, you will be controlled.
17/ The Information is POWER !
V. Where are we ?
1/ Where are we ?
2/ We all live in a sick world, where hatred is a weapon, and freedom - a dream.
3/ The world grows so slowly. It is hard for a Cyberpunk to live in an underdeveloped world, looking the people around him, seeing how wrongly they develop.
4/ We go ahead, they pull us back again. Society suppresses us. Yes, it suppresses the freedom of thought. With its cruel education programs in schools and universities. They drill in the children their view of things and every attempt to express a different opinion is denied and punished.
5/ Our kids grow educated in this old and still unchanged system. A system that tolerates no freedom of thought and demands a strict obedience to the rules...
6/ In what a world, how different from this, could we live now, if people were making jumps and not creeps.
7/ It is so hard to live in this world, Cyberpunk.
8/ It is as if time has stopped.
9/ We live on the right spot, but not in the right time.
10/ Everything is so ordinary, people are all the same, their deeds too. As if society feels an urgent need to live back in time.
11/ Some, trying to find their own world, the world of a Cyberpunk, and finding it, build their own world. Build in their thoughts, it changes reality, lays over it and thus they live in a virtual world. The thought-up, build upon reality.
12/ Others simply get accustomed to the world as it is. They continue to live in it, although they dislike it. They have no other choice but the bare hope that the world will go out of its hollow and will go ahead.
13/ What we are trying to do is change the situation. We are trying to adjust the present world to our needs and views. To use maximally what is fit and to ignore the trash. Where we can't, we just live in this world, like Cyberpunks, no matter how hard, when society fights us we fight back.
14/ We build our worlds in Cyberspace.
15/ Among the zeros and ones, among the bits of information.
16/ We build our community. The community of Cyberpunks.
Unite !
Fight for your rights !
A Cyberpunk Manifesto v2.0
Christian As. Kirtchev We are those with analog/digitalized soul. Cyberpunks. This is to be A second manifestation.
January 28, 2003
I. Cyberpunk
We are the neo men. Those new species of homosapiens, that were meant to be born at this age. The way we feel the world, includes the cyberspace as natural. Our first breath take in this world, at the moment of our birth, consisted the dense of electricity flow in wires, the machinery buzz surrounding the place, the data vibrations on information high-ways on air and cable. The way we take technology equals the way others take food, water and air. The data-space it self is the extra element of our environment. But we are that mutation, which is not only ordinary presense of technological tools. Everybody can learn and become to understand technology and new technology, but we are those, who have got it naturally. We are those that see reality in a different way. Our point of view shows more than ordinary people can see. They see only what is outside, but we see what is inside. That's what we are - realists with the glasses of dreamers. The way we think and look out to the environment, the blood that rushes through our veins, the air that fizzles in our brains - it is that mutation that distinguish us from others. Being a net-head, a technological-geek, computer nerd is not it, that's a sign. We are new; every and each area of the new being is something we take as homely and familiar. We know history and we know it is dead crawling for life. A Cyberpunk is just a label word, the content inside is us - the man and women who are different, most of us are out of understanding. You can call us crazy, mad, insane, strange, weirdos - that is the most close word in your dictionary to cover what you think of something never manifested before. Most of today's world is meeting a serious change. Some are sticking with the ruins, some are moving ahead letting go of the past. Society, which still does not want to refresh its self, have found the stability of its existence in the old-approved ways of accepting the ordinary and known. But we are none of them. Cyberpunks will always be refreshing. And even those who claim that Cyberpunk is dead, will be just the ones that can not see it reborn in the new wave of discoveries. You can't say that evolution has stopped, or can you ? "Cyberpunks", we are that evolving part. The rebel, who fights for its own survival. And we believe in our strength, because our advantage is that of understanding new phenomenas, which are unclear to the rest, but part of our being.
II. Society
In times people did need someone to follow, that someone found it out to be easy to gain profit out of the controlled society and that someone begun to control with dirty tricks, getting away with it, because being the only authority, the controlling System was invincible. Society now remains under control and somelike enjoys it.
Society denies us, because we are far more dangerous to their utopia, than the governments are. We do not belong to those society masses.
III. The System
The System. Centuries-old, existing on principles that hang no more today. A System that has not changed much since the day of its birth. The system is what controls you. That is the government, consisted of people who live separately from the social masses. Governments have not changed since the birth of social living in human beings. On the other hand the control is with corporations and there is a question who actually has the control. Is it the corporations who control the governments or they are both the same bureau ? However the system is what needs food and support to exist, that support is given by the masses of society, which are like hypnotized when coming to trust someone to have control over the personal life of each member of them. That support comes by, when the system shoots lies to the social mass. Lies are the truths they want us to believe in. The System must impose its truth upon us so that it can rule. The government needs us follow it blindly. Not only the governments, but the corporations, they dictate fashion styles, food choice and medication prices. They both, Governments and corporations are what the System is. A set of rules, filled in by the media. Only a blind and deaf would grant control over his life to someone, who's greed for money and power is covered by impression of Care, Support, Security and Stability. The system is afraid of chaos, but chaos is just the way they call the possibility of free choice. Where decentralized - people would be able to do better trough.
IV. The Media
Television, radio and press is no longer the only source of information for the seeking man or for the sleeping one. The Internet is the new mediaspace, a space where information can be spread freely and therefore no one is living in informational eclipse now. Even where governments and businesses are trying to set restrictions and control over data flow - there are ways to gather that information, which can 'enlight'. And Information still remains power. We are witnessing the actual growth of our race. No longer informational barriers block the real potential sight and now people can demand more rights. Scientists are making discoveries, which when made public can no longer be so easily blocked for commercial or governmental use. Sad is when people stomped down are willingness to demand what is granted to them. Now the media can awake people, transform societies. The media however have proven to be false or misleading, which confuses in truth filtering, that just rises Information's price.
V. Where are we ?
We are those whose DNA is starting to form a new sight and sense - which will allow the future generations to comprehend cyberspace, the data-space. No heavy or implanted hardware devices will be able to fully replace what the nature is giving us. Mutations are taking place. The evolution granted us with a better set of tools to interact with the environmental changes. That is why we are Cyberpunks, neo human, electronic minds. We know that the Cyberspace is a mirror world, an enhancement, which hosts all past and present creations of man. The cyberspace is that invisible world where, human minds and thoughts merge with matter and takes form visible to the senses, through machines. The cyberspace seems like it always have existed there, here, everywhere - but only now we are making connections and discovering it - we are beginning to change. Cyberpunks - we are those who live in cyberspace and using the current technology is only the vessel to bring us on the other side.
We are the altered new race. Cyberpunks.
This is to be A second manifestation.
A Cyberpunk Manifesto v3.0
Created by the current Cyberpunk people of 2007 AD This is a sheet to design a new Cyberpunk manifesto to meet current/actual facts of 2007.
I. Introduction
"If you would have a thought controlled, wearable computer that you can fully customize, would that computer be an integral part of your consciousness ?" Hail to the ordinary nerds, who don't walk the streets often, being 24 hours a day online, phreaking, hacking, tweaking, etc. Being Cyberpunk, being other than normal people. Seeing what normal people just do not see. The digital life in biological senses of the mainframe, defined as the global world we life in. Labeled as nerd, weirdos, punks, freaks.... Technology freaks, that understand all systems, labeled as freaks/weirdos by society. Knowing more as common people do, hacking systems for fun, digitally overloading their mind with good information... etc... People like us, loving tech and having more friends online as in their own town/city, searching and learning technology to use it in other ways as it was meant to be, searching other means of system liberation, fighting against corporate oppression and censorship, freedom of information wars...
Long live the Cybero-revolution, long live the techno-anarchists, long live the hackers and the crackers...
II. Vision
The world "they" want to give us is a toxic ball of disease, a living corpse ravaged by pollution and malignant complacency. The world "they" want to give us is only meant to serve them, to keep themselves and their closest friends in power, to keep the human cattle complacent and ignorant of alternatives, to exploit and destroy the planet and to suffocate those who can change this world for the better. "They" want the masses to remain docile as sheep, so "they" create "entertainment" to brainwash the masses into a slumber. "They" will do anything to keep themselves in power and suppress anything that may threaten it, including "eternal damnation" at the hands of their schizophrenic fantasy for "God" upon those who disagree.
Who are "they" ? "They" are the companies, countries and individuals who seek domination by addicting the human cattle to certain concepts: oil, drugs, religion, mind numbing "technology" and "popular culture". "They" are once powerful monopolies, defrocked and shattered for refusing to play fair, who are trying to resurrect their former corrupt glory by conspiring with Big Brother to rob us of our freedom and privacy. "They" are Internet-based companies with many tentacles who are buying every smaller company on the net looking to control all net content. "They" are mindless media companies who repeatedly vomit the same garbage for "entertainment" to numb the cattle into submission, and then use "copyright laws" to force Internet companies into oblivion and extend their control over the either. "They" are the actors, musicians, and artists who conspire with the media companies to spread the vomit, and then whore themselves for unworthy political causes. "They" are lunatics and perverts who ram their "theology" down our throats and expect us to have blind faith in their "God" even though their "God" is an outdated illusion. "They" are idiots, too stupid to walk and chew gum at the same time, who manage to become national leaders not by the will of the people, but by luck of circumstances and a political climate favorable for them. "They" are the reason why the world is in such bad shape, and why Cyberpunks are fighting back.
Cyberpunks refuse to be cattle, to jump on bandwagons, to be "one of the crowd". Cyberpunks see through the deception of modern culture, and they fight against it. Cyberpunks are the ones brave enough to deliver their message, to stand before the crowds, the government, the church and the industry and say "YOU ARE WRONG !" Cyberpunks accept the ostracism, because they already rejected "society's" ways for something better. Sometimes, it's a lonely fight, but Cyberpunks are in virtually every society, every country, and when they come together they are a force "they" must deal with.
III. Technology
Advancements in technology keeps us busy, keeping up-to-date with latest tech, almost like old Cyberpunk (pre 2000) turns real in 21th century terms, like 2006 and beyond. Bio-implants, VR wars, techno-information warfare. Future wars not fought with armies, but with computer systems. Current technology makes us Cyberpunks adapt to it, and even (like always) think one step beyond. Thinking 20 years in the future, creating new things with current technology, inventing other means to use a device, changing the original senses of an apparatus, to create a new complex electronic system, like hacking a phone, to turn it into a infra-red TV remote.
IV. Politics
The war against global big time corporations, like Unilever, Shell, Microsoft, Google, Gillette and others, still rages on. Oppression by corporations using the puppet government as their worktool, to keep the people dumb, is not an option for Cyberpunks. We are anarchist/revolutionary anti-system people. We think for ourselves, and do not need some big guy/woman have to tell us what we may think. Fighting corporations, by hacking their systems, spreading viruses, mind-probes, DDOS attacks are now common in 2007. The things described in books like Neuromancer and other Cyberpunk novels wrote (as being SF in those 80s/90s days), became todays reality. 2006+ years (21th century) gets more digital, and so do the governments, by creating Identification protocols to control their humans/people. Cyberpunks still rage war against ID protocols, by becoming unknown, nerds, with big brains, hacking things, etc.
V. Sociology
Cyberpunks tend to be individuals that do not fit in any system or group. They are mostly very intelligent people, who see beyond the explicit. They witness the absurdity of the culture, parody it, mash and transform it. They use the tools of society to witness against it, to document its ignorant self-destructive tendencies and to indite it; sharing their knowledge to a select group, often cursed/hated by system folks. Having more friends on the digital internet/ultranet than in their own town/city. Sharing more knowledge digitally on the net-highway, than via embodied interaction. Spending more time to get more technological knowledge/information than to socialize is not uncommon.
VI. History
Cyberpunks change their ideas, music, fashion, etc. from time to time. In the 80s, they had more synth oriented music, more old-fashion tech, etc. Now in 21th century, we have the global broadband internet, satellite mobile/GSM phones, VR, etc. We adapt to the tech, and the tech adapts to us. We are symbiotic, both biological as technological. Our Cyberpunk movement advances as time goes by. We learn, and we grow more powerful. As we are the soldiers of the technology frontier, not known by the system, but still alive. Cyberpunk, coined by Bruce Bethke and realized by William Gibson, that which once was Science Fiction is now turning into reality. When Cyberpunk fans get their hands on current tech, there will be a huge rise of Cyberpunk fans worldwide, who realize that Cyberpunk is not only not a fairytale, but is also a hi-tech movement that goes beyond the imagination of the original writers of Cyberpunk novels.
VII. Freedom
Cyberpunks encourage the ultimate freedom of thought. Our quest for free access to all information has no boundaries. We are those who need to understand before accepting anything of the media feed. We are the bug in the source code, the probability of (r)evolution that threatens rigid systems. Nobody can control us, and that's why we're chased. We do not belong to the Society they want to create. Skilled programmers, utopian dreamers, artists or office workers, we are the ones who resist, living in the datanet where there's no law applicable, bypassing all the frontiers; cyberworld is where we belong. We're the children of cyberspace, we can do all we want, we look towards the future, trying to think of new technologies, spreading our ideas in the vast ocean of information. We aren't just the aggregators of information nor the static target audience nor the ultimate consumer. For us information is not an intangible stream of data. It as as much a part of us, as we are of it. It runs through our minds, just like blood and oxygen. To hold information or use it for oppression against us is like denying air to breathe. Yet we are also the ultimate brain surgeon, capable of removing any filth "they" would like to embedding us.
A Biopunk Manifesto
Meredith L. Patterson
30 janvier 2010
Scientific literacy is necessary for a functioning society in the modern age. Scientific literacy is not science education. A person educated in science can understand science; a scientifically literate person can *do* science. Scientific literacy empowers everyone who possesses it to be active contributors to their own health care, the quality of their food, water, and air, their very interactions with their own bodies and the complex world around them.
Society has made dramatic progress in the last hundred years toward the promotion of education, but at the same time, the prevalence of citizen science has fallen. Who are the twentieth-century equivalents of Benjamin Franklin, Edward Jenner, Marie Curie or Thomas Edison ? Perhaps Steve Wozniak, Bill Hewlett, Dave Packard or Linus Torvalds - but the scope of their work is far narrower than that of the natural philosophers who preceded them. Citizen science has suffered from a troubling decline in diversity, and it is this diversity that biohackers seek to reclaim. We reject the popular perception that science is only done in million-dollar university, government, or corporate labs; we assert that the right of freedom of inquiry, to do research and pursue understanding under one's own direction, is as fundamental a right as that of free speech or freedom of religion. We have no quarrel with Big Science; we merely recall that Small Science has always been just as critical to the development of the body of human knowledge, and we refuse to see it extinguished.
Research requires tools, and free inquiry requires that access to tools be unfettered. As engineers, we are developing low-cost laboratory equipment and off-the-shelf protocols that are accessible to the average citizen. As political actors, we support open journals, open collaboration, and free access to publicly-funded research, and we oppose laws that would criminalize the possession of research equipment or the private pursuit of inquiry.
Perhaps it seems strange that scientists and engineers would seek to involve themselves in the political world - but biohackers have, by necessity, committed themselves to doing so. The lawmakers who wish to curtail individual freedom of inquiry do so out of ignorance and its evil twin, fear - the natural prey and the natural predator of scientific investigation, respectively. If we can prevail against the former, we will dispel the latter. As biohackers it is our responsibility to act as emissaries of science, creating new scientists out of everyone we meet. We must communicate not only the value of our research, but the value of our methodology and motivation, if we are to drive ignorance and fear back into the darkness once and for all.
We the biopunks are dedicated to putting the tools of scientific investigation into the hands of anyone who wants them. We are building an infrastructure of methodology, of communication, of automation, and of publicly available knowledge.
Biopunks experiment. We have questions, and we don't see the point in waiting around for someone else to answer them. Armed with curiosity and the scientific method, we formulate and test hypotheses in order to find answers to the questions that keep us awake at night. We publish our protocols and equipment designs, and share our bench experience, so that our fellow biopunks may learn from and expand on our methods, as well as reproducing one another's experiments to confirm validity. To paraphrase Eric Hughes, "our work is free for all to use, worldwide. We don't much care if you don't approve of our research topics". We are building on the work of the Cypherpunks who came before us to ensure that a widely dispersed research community cannot be shut down.
Biopunks deplore restrictions on independent research, for the right to arrive independently at an understanding of the world around oneself is a fundamental human right. Curiosity knows no ethnic, gender, age, or socioeconomic boundaries, but the opportunity to satisfy that curiosity all too often turns on economic opportunity, and we aim to break down that barrier. A thirteen-year-old kid in South Central Los Angeles has just as much of a right to investigate the world as does a university professor. If thermocyclers are too expensive to give one to every interested person, then we'll design cheaper ones and teach people how to build them.
Biopunks take responsibility for their research. We keep in mind that our subjects of interest are living organisms worthy of respect and good treatment, and we are acutely aware that our research has the potential to affect those around us. But we reject outright the admonishments of the precautionary principle, which is nothing more than a paternalistic attempt to silence researchers by inspiring fear of the unknown. When we work, it is with the betterment of the community in mind - and that includes our community, your community, and the communities of people that we may never meet. We welcome your questions, and we desire nothing more than to empower you to discover the answers to them yourselves.
The biopunks are actively engaged in making the world a place that everyone can understand. Come, let us research together.
A Cyberpunk Manifesto
Transceiverfreq
August 20, 2011
"Information is information, not matter or energy."
-- Norbert Wiener
The Kanisza Triangle
Created in 1976-79 by Gaetano Kanizsa, Italian psychologist and artist, founder of the Institute of Psychology of Trieste. An optical illusion, comprised of three black circles with equal wedges cut out of them facing the center point and three black angles on a white background. The illusory contours defined by these shapes creates a white triangle in the liminal negative space. This is a metaphor for "cyberspace" in that it is defined by illusory boundaries and yet is intangible.
The "idea" of the triangle exists. But in actuality it is defined by the interaction of the shapes and our mind's perception. This is the simplest symbol as yet I have found to describe "cyberspace".
READ
- Wikipedia - Cybernetics.
- The Human Use of Human Beings - Norbert Wiener, 1948.
- Cybernetics: Or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine - Norbert Wiener, 1950.
- Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism - Merritt Roe Smith, Leo Marx, 1994.
- Human-Built World: How to Think about Technology and Culture - Thomas P. Hughes, 2004.
- Cyberspace: First Steps - Michael Benedikt, 1991.
- Neuromancer - William Gibson.
- Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism - Paul Boghossian, 2006.
- Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer - Steve Mann, 2001.
- Simulacra and Simulation - Jean Baudrillard, 1981.
WE ASSERT:
- information "wants to be free" and should be free.
- information raises quality of living.
- information maturates autonomy.
- not only does information "want to be free" but has an unstoppable and natural proclivity to become free.
- information will maintain it's own freedom by means of inaction or action of liberation by external forces.
- all previous wars are based partially if not entirely in the exchange of, suppression of or discovery of many forms of information.
- necessity breeds invention and the world has a dire necessity for change.
- the human/machine network is the victory of information.
- the internet is at the same anational and a nation unto itself.
- cyberspace exists between the nodes of the network. It is the meta-space defined by the exchange of information between users.
- the internet defines cyberspace by it's own expanding and mutable boundaries.
- the movements of cyberspace encroach on meatspace. In this way the net is always moving into the real world.
- the world is constantly in a state of revolution.
- the web is the world.
WE:
- are native to the net.
- are linked in anonymity and justified in it daily.
- are the network itself. It is defined by our action and inaction.
- are without a born nation and free as such.
- expect more from our generation than the ones before us.
- choose freedom as our nationality and stand alone nodality as our native language.
- choose speed as our method and flux as our driving force.
- reject governance, nations, religion and corporate entities. we reject their stranglehold on the human mind and condition.
- believe "the street" defines it's own use for technology.
- believe there is no such thing as too much information.
- believe all should have access to the network and the data.
- believe access to computing devices - and anything that teaches something about the way the world works - should be unlimited.
- stand against established forms of hierarchies and promote decentralization.
- promote the exceeding of limitations both personal and shared.
- are the technology. the internet is made of meat.
- are not the dejected teenage rebels described by our forebears.
- do not define ourselves by the technology we use but what we use it for.
- believe in the burning presence of the future.
ADVICE (Ø):
- when they call it "paradox", they're hiding the oxygen.
- there's a special quality in a good translation that can never be captured in the original.
- travel light, stay alert and eat what you kill.
- always look at the underside first.
- when you find truth, pass it on, quick, before they bury it under money.
- "the revolution" devours it's young.
- to contact a human opereator, press "0".
Published on CyberPunk
