At my darkest moments, I just want to find the highest cliff, over the most beautiful valley. A picturesque scene of a stream running through a village with those arched Roman bridges over the stream.

And then I’d like to jump off of that cliff and feel the sun at my back and the wind on my face until the inevitability of physics at the ed of the ride.

But I can’t because those shareholders aren’t going to get richer without me slagging away for them now are they?

I want to explain my hacker ethos: I’ll let the mentor tell it like it is:

January 8th 1986: (3 years before I would write my first virus at the age of 11. I read this in Phrack that same year.)

       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 will-
ing 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.

                               

+++The Mentor+++

In the age of f l o c k and r a v e n, and p a l a n t i r running it all, autonomous ground and air drones with human decisions removed from the kill chain – you need to learn to hack, to hide in plain sight, use the ai tools that are free and have a friend who can code check your work. You will be targeted for speaking out it’s already happening – two reddit users who criticized ice not even violently or suggesting violence have been criminally subpoenaed by a grand jury the doj is going after them with CRIMINAL charges for exercising their 1st amendment rights as Americans.

You need to understand that facial recognition uses ir so wear ir blocking stufff, google it, it’s not hard to find. You will be geolocated by your cell phone if you go to protests, use signal with auto delete and take a burner. Buy a pixel 7a for a hundred bucks and root it. Run an OS like graphene with signal and enable the auto wipe with the lock code so if they force you to unlock your phone you type it in wrong with a one character deviation that deletes the whole phone. It’s just a burner so don’t keep anything but signal on it, use prepaid cards bought with cash to activate it only use signal on wifi after that. Mesh nodes and LoRA. Educate yourselves and get on board with understanding that the masks are off now and you have to be very careful.

Good luck, Godspeed.

So it’s been 3+ years. I think maybe it’s the frantic pace of parenthood, husbandhood and the rat race of the corporate world that are drinking my best creative juices….that sounds weirder than I wanted it to.

Of course it could just be that the medication works. Mental shrugs aside, I’m doing quite well.

I’m not sure where I want to start talking here honestly. I still have a lot of theories about the nature of our existence, some wisdom; hard fought for, to add to my sometimes naive beliefs about the basic goodness of people and planet.

I’ll do my best to write some down. Consider this log, reawakened.

Awake.

❤

I like the Cyrillic alphabet, mix it with enough Greek and Mandarin and it looks like aliens wrote it – and in a sense they did.

❤ 

I sometimes push myself too hard, force of habit I suppose. Had to get some cortisone injections as the result of my pure, cussed stubbornness. 

I’m not really injured. Nooooooo. It’ll be fine. 

Four months later I’m at my sports doc and he’s shaking his head, the same head shake I got when he asked me how I’d run an eleven-fifty-eight mile and a half on a grade two torn hamstring….this time neither of my elbows were working all that well but I’d still managed to keep my day to day rock solid…even if there was some sand pouring out of the joints.

It’s late, and if I can actually wake up on time, I’m going to run a few the early a.m.

❤