Cyber manifestoes
- A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
- Hacker’s Manifesto
- The Hacker’s Renaissance: A Manifesto Reborn
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
by 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.
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.
– Davos, Switzerland
February 8, 1996
Hacker’s Manifesto
Author: The Mentor
==Phrack Inc.==
Volume One, Issue 7, Phile 3 of 10
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The following was written shortly after my arrest...
\/\The Conscience of a Hacker/\/
by
+++The Mentor+++
Written on January 8, 1986
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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+++
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The Hacker’s Renaissance: A Manifesto Reborn
Author: TMZ
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|=-----------=[ The Hacker's Renaissance: A Manifesto Reborn ]=----------=|
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|=-----------------------------=[ TMZ ]=---------------------------------=|
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A Memory of Sparks
In 1986, The Hacker's Manifesto emerged from a dial tone, striking the
scene like lightning. It was an act of defiance, a declaration of identity,
a poetic snapshot of a subculture forming in the shadows of mainframes and
TTYs. It reflected the days of stolen long-distance codes, BBSes, and the
belief that knowledge should be free.
Now, in 2025 — 40 years since Phrack first bounced across telephone wires
and underground forums — we look back not to wax nostalgic, but to
understand how the hacker spirit has evolved, splintered, and, in many
ways, sold its soul.
This is not a eulogy. It is a reckoning. We need to face what's really
happened.
"We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious
bias... and you call us criminals." — The Hacker's Manifesto, 1986
From Curiosity to Commodity
Then: We were the kids who saw the blinking cursor not as a barrier, but as
an invitation. We typed characters into the voids and got back secrets. Our
goal was not destruction, it was understanding — to understand the systems
better than those who built them. The thrill of "getting in" was matched
only by the beauty of making something out of nothing.
Now: Hacking is a job title. Curiosity has been commodified. A thousand
"Bug Bounty Platforms" are trying to monetize your desire for
understanding, to turn it into CVEs and T-shirts. CTFs have become
resume-building exercises. Reverse engineers wear corporate badges.
Developed by government employees rather than openly in the community,
exploits get embargoed, not shared.
The paradise of the underground has been paved over by venture capital and
compliance frameworks, steamrolling everything we used to stand for.
We Were Hackers, Not Consumers
Then: We were the creators in a world of closed systems. If the machine
didn't do what we wanted, we opened it. We wrote shellcode by hand. We used
opcode charts like musicians used sheet music. We owned the stack.
Now: The stack owns us. We run opaque blobs inside containers on someone
else's infrastructure. Modern "security research" means fuzzing v8 apps in
Kubernetes or staring into the abyss of vendor APIs.
Many call themselves hackers without ever having debugged a segfault or
read an RFC.
The Underground Is Dead—Long Live the Underground
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.
Now: We scroll past 40-tweet threads explaining how sudo works. Seriously?
We get TikToks on hacking by people in hoodies set to trap music, a
caricature at best. "Influencer" and "hacker" now share the same business
card.
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.
The Corporatization of Dissent
Then: We were anarchists with a cause. When we hacked, it was to challenge
control, not enforce it. We saw the abuse of power, and we exposed it — not
for bug bounties, but for truth.
Now: The same corporations that used to call us criminals now sponsor
"cybersecurity summits." We speak at cons funded by defense contractors.
Nation-state APTs get romanticized. Zero-day brokers operate with impunity.
The hacker ethos was never about permission. Now even our rebellion needs
approval.
The Spirit Remains
I know I sound bitter, but here's the thing: it was never really about the
tech or getting into systems. It was about *freedom*. Freedom to think, to
question, to build and break without limits. That spark is hard to find
now, but it still lives in the rarest of places:
- In the sysadmin quietly running their own mailserver.
- In the student soldering a WiFi module to an 80s calculator.
- In the researcher publishing their PoC without a brand campaign.
- In the collective that forks closed-source hardware just to see what's
inside.
The manifesto lives on — not in blog posts, but in the act of refusing to
conform.
Call to the Next Generation
We do not gatekeep, but we warn.
Do not mistake certifications for competence. Do not confuse platforms with
community. Do not accept that "responsible disclosure" means asking
permission to be curious.
Read the classics. Study the protocol. Run your own infrastructure. Know
what came before you.
Above all: ask questions, and never wait for answers to be approved.
The 41st Byte
This is not a return to the past, it is a declaration of continuity.
For 40 years, Phrack has stood as a monument, not to nostalgia but to
resistance, to knowledge, and to the hacker spirit that refuses to die. Let
this not be the end of an era, but the beginning of the next.
Hack the planet. Again.
Written in honor of Loyd Blankenship ("The Mentor"), in celebration of 40
years of Phrack. By one of the curious, still connected.