On the essay that changed me

It’s been years since I first got my hands on “The Conscience of a Hacker” by the Mentor, yet I can still recite the entire thing without a second thought…

I remember, when online classes struck, I didn’t want to study that much, thinking “why would I if it is so easy in these times?” which was not the most mature decision I have made, but it turned out well. Instead of that, playing games seemed like a better option, which was obviously not supported by my parents. Therefore, my dad bought a wifi router to block such activities and the game started. He would create an obstacle and I would find a way to get around it, learning about computers, how they operate and communicate with other systems. This ultimately led to a pathway of privacy and the discovery of this YouTube video.

Since then, I changed a lot - started digging deeper into cybersecurity, learning how fragile the entire infrastructure that I was using really was and how vulnerable we are as humans. Why is it that such a short text impacted me and many other people?

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.

My claim would be that it is due to the universality of the experiences that the author highlights. There is a number of us, who found what we were taught boring, dull and simply not entertaining enough, while we had the potential to study incredible knowledge. With no other way of finding a source of it, we escaped to the internet, where there is a number of things to do - both productive and counter. Even when doing the first, the feeling of being judged by other, usually older, people is palpable. Their lack of understanding of the current world makes it agonising and worthless to listen to them in the eyes of the young mind, which was perfectly captured by the Mentor over 40 years ago.

This is our world now...

What we see is that the mechanisms didn’t change since January 8th, 1986. What rotated is the people. Now instead of complaining about the electricity in itself, it is about social media, internet and multiplayer games. Those who were the peers of the author are now the ones who are “in charge” of homes and disabling their children to use further advancements that they do not understand. They, however, have more experiences and can unintentionally make us better by pushing us to cheat, while hoping their methods, that stem from their larger life experience, can stop us. It is usually not in the ways that they expect.

We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias...

One of the most beautiful parts of the internet is that we do not see the other part of the internet cable. While there exist racism and discrimination in the real world, even on the national level with politicians belittling people of other colour than themselves, internet is completely separated from that, allowing everyone to be a character with no external properties - just a pure mind, unless specifically decided otherwise. Then, however, it is a conscious decision, made acknowledging the possible reactions from other members of a digital society.

The same argument goes for nationality and religion. We are given a clean sheet when stepping into the realm of online forums while some declare wars over those humanly differences, as he later says.

Therefore, one might say that the internet is a space where respecting of others’ rights is easier than anywhere else.

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.

With that respect comes the understanding of human’s value. The people writing for Phrack on their terminals at 3am weren’t destroying anything. They built a culture cleaner than the one that was handed to them.

Curiosity over destruction, sharing over hoarding - the values that the Mentor believed when sitting in the jail cell and writing this manifesto as a response to getting arrested. A “criminal” wrote a piece that holds more humanly values than the court that was pressing charges.

I still sometimes think about my dad and the router. He was not a bad person for trying to block me, and I was not a criminal for getting around it. We were both right in our own ways. The Mentor gave me the permission not to feel ashamed of my doings, but rather to appreciate what I am - a human.

The Mentor, like many others, remained free in his mind despite living in this world. If they could, so can we.

After all, we are all alike.