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                   The Concience of a Cypherpunk
                        Written by 0xVoodoo
                         Oct. 11th 2024
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| It has been thirty-eight years since The Mentor                     |
| first gave the budding technological world a glimpse                |
| into the mind of a hacker.                                          |
|                                                                     |
| Since then, the telephone modems, blue boxes, and BBS's             |
| described by the Mentor have been replaced with IP routers,         |
| torrenting clients and social media platforms.                      |
|                                                                     |
| That same internet, which was once the wild west,                   |
| is now more akin to a major metropolis, puppeteered                 |
| by a handful of mega-corporations.                                  |
|                                                                     |
| I was born just early enough to get a glimpse at the                |
| old internet, the good internet, as it slipped through              |
| our fingers.                                                        |
|                                                                     |
| Hacker culture is now relegated to a few true holdouts.             |
|                                                                     |
| While "cybersecurity professionals" of the modern era still         |
| often make references to jokes and events from the golden age       |
| of hacking. That is all they are, references.                       |
|                                                                     |
| Few still hold the beauty of the baud close in their hearts.        |
|                                                                     |
| Every skid ass software dev, security engineer and pentester        |
| these days call themselves a hacker. Then look on in awe at people  |
| like us, as some sort of genius or prodogy.                         |
|                                                                     |
| Behind the facade of genius however, are stories. Ones told around  |
| digital campfires by the few, who still play the game. They are     |
| stories of exploration, of a thirst for knowledge, and of bending   |
| the rules because we could, and now, because the rules are immoral. |
|                                                                     |
| So here we sit, thirty-eight years later in a near-dystopia. The    |
| masses hooked on their dopamine boxes, plugged into the matrix.     |
| Either blind to, or outright supportive of the ever                 |
| growing presence of Big Brothers heel on our throats.               |
|                                                                     |
| Privacy is dead, mercilessly executed by governments and companies, | 
| claiming it's for our own good. Its corpse is propped up by a few,  |
| well-meaning individuals. A last quiet resistence                   |
| against digital tyranny.                                            |
|                                                                     |
| While those individuals and organizations are doing what they       |
| can, it's not enough, and it has left the last of us...             |
|                                                                     |
|                   The true hackers...                               | 
|                   The ones I dub cypherpunks...                     |
|                                                                     |
| To wage a guerilla war against those who would seek                 |
| to break and enslave us.                                            |
|                                                                     |
| Sure, you may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all.      |
|                   After all...                                      |
|                   We're all alike. ;)                               |
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