Freehackers simply want to do this one thing:
“Preserve hacking and invention as methods of personal artistic expression.”
We want to keep the art of our work alive. We want to prevent the business guy from destroying this world we’ve spent our lives building. We want to explore the new medium of art/wires/code without worrying about getting fired because what we do isn’t the positive work of team players.
We want our hack back dammit.
When you claim you hate something, the SNAGs (Sensitive New Age Guys) come out of their little parts of the interwebs claiming you’re not being “positive”. If you hate business douchebags and their greed, you’re not positive. If you can’t stand a bright white smile in your face while you get screwed, you’re not positive. All you need, so the SNAG says, is to be positive and it’ll just be all great for everyone (mostly them).
The managers tell you that you’re not a team player. You disagree with their buzzword-laden idiocy which means you aren’t a good employee. You should just shut your mouth and do what he says, because your lack of social skills is screwing up their bonus. Just let him buy that million dollar WebSphere package the positive sales guy from IBM showed him. You should let your manager enjoy the Steak And Stripper fruits of the sales guy’s labor. That would improve synergy (for him).
Startup crazed MBAs with their eyes on the crotch of every VC within a hundred feet call you a “techie”. They wipe the cocaine off their upper lip and with a smile and with a solid handshake tell you that they’ve got a great idea. Just sign this NDA and you’ll both be rich as fuck. This is a game changing idea. It’ll be the greatest thing since the last greatest thing, and what they say sets your hair on fire. Until you realize, this guy is full of shit, and he only needs you because he’s too stupid to code it himself.
All these people need you, and yet none of them respect you. They want your skills for their own infantile derivative of someone else’s derivative idea to make more money in the advertising sinkhole. Skills you spent your life earning with dedicated study and hours alone with a computer and a book.
The hours learning math, science, logic, reasoning, music, art, poetry, and culture shouldn’t be wasted on adwords. They shouldn’t be lost on useless web sites. They shouldn’t be spent slaving 90 hours/week for a tiny credit in a game.
They should be your art, expressing yourself in any way you want without someone asking, “So how will you monetize that?”
Look around you and watch the culture changing because of your work. Not because of some dick with an MBA, a nose full of ketamine and a head full of CEO dreams. Regular people know your work, whether you work on a website or a device they own, they know your work. You might have just done a character in a game, or a part of a data model, or the physics of the scroll wheel, but you made it.
You made the tools that are now defining their social world. They find lovers with your websites. They have parties playing your games. They share music with your p2p protocols. They create and experience new music with your instruments. They get porn when they can’t get laid, live out Army fantasies, and establish long lasting social relationships using things you made.
Yet, when you tell people you write software or make funky gadgets they laugh at you. You’re a nerd. They say, “You don’t know people (grabs iPhone), you can’t understand faces (hits Twitter), you make things hard to use (calls home), so you can’t make things.”
They say, “You need a real man with real ideas and an MBA to lead you.”
Fuck him.
It’s wrong that a self-centered arrogant drug addict with less personality than a paper plate gets to call the shots. These aren’t real men anymore than they’re real people, and their greed is destroying the culture that geeks created. A culture that celebrated keeping things a little weird and accepting people who are just a little weird, because, well dammit things that are weird are interesting.
Nobody will look back on this time and say, “Man, that Senior Managing Director at a 15,000 person bank was such an influential part of society.” That guy is boring as hell.
Unfortunately, if we don’t try to preserve the geek hacker culture, then they’ll look back and say, Who was this Gary Kildall guy? “I thought Bill Gates created the PC.”
If you hate the same things, then come be positive while you try to fight back.
The Freehackers Union is a gang devoted to preserving hacking and invention as methods of personal artistic expression...by any means necessary.