Скачать или смотреть The Hacker Manifesto

Students in a new class I’m teaching this Fall will be creating a personal manifesto as their final project, and while looking for examples to show them I ran across Loyd Blankenship’s “The Conscience of a Hacker” – aka, “The Hacker Manifesto.”

His short essay was written 46 years ago, when ARPANET was changing into the Internet, the popularity of bulletin board systems was just beginning to take off, and kids were transitioning from relatively benign practical jokers trying to understand the digital world to serious hackers with more nefarious concerns.

There’s a vast difference between making free phone calls in the 1980s, for example, and today’s scams and identity theft and ransomware attacks.

Nevertheless, in spite of the quantum technological gap from then till now, which it could be argued makes this last-century manifesto seem rather lame, I thought it might be fun to add some video. And more importantly, tackling this opportunity challenged me to learn new video editing skills.

I’m essentially a long-take, slow-dissolve kind of editor, preferring content that needs to be absorbed, not quickly discarded. That kind of visual approach, of course, is entirely wrong for the fast-paced binary world of computers.

Turns out that even after much effort I’m not very good at abrupt, jump cut transitions with lightning-like distractions (designed to keep ADHD viewers from channel surfing) scuttling across the screen. But . . .

Well, you know what they say about never leaving your comfort zone.

Here it is, anyway.