Hacker Culture Is Alive and Thriving

what killed the hacker culture

https://x.com/melqtx/status/1952170244107288699

Just a kid with a half-broken laptop, a capped internet connection routed through shitty proxies trying to pull himself out of nowhere, one hack at a time.

It wasn’t just about money, I was deprived of options. Hell, I didn’t even know what options existed, let alone which ones I had. All I saw around me was labor, work for someone, follow orders, survive. That was all.

And then everything changed, In 2015, I was introduced to computers and the internet through a government university program for gifted rural youth.

From that moment on, the computer became my whole world. It actually listened when nothing else did. It responded. I messed with it, broke stuff, built stuff, bent reality however I wanted. And it is all logical, not some contrived culture and politics this world works on.

On my very first day, before the orientation even explained how to connect to the intranet and explain what is internet, I had already figured it out. I manually configured the IP and started streaming the campus network. It was always like that, no one gave me a roadmap, no one told me I could be a doctor or a lawyer. I figured it all out on my own, just by hacking.

Back then, I knew nothing beyond a few villages around me and my university. My first time leaving my state was through CTFs. The world I explored wasn’t on a map, it was in a Discord server. A friend or org I’d never met hosted an offsite or organized a CTF, where hackers from across the country, from all around the world, all strangers, came together to hack side by side.

My first job? I hacked the apps you probably use every day. That led to a referral from a Japanese friend I’d never met in person to a dream company.

And my first company? Oh, we just hack. Most of us have never met. We’re scattered across the world. All we do is hack.

So when you say hacker culture is dead?

Just because your privileged ass couldn’t make sense of it doesn’t mean it’s gone.

It is not dead, my friend. It’s thriving. It’s alive. You just never knew where to look.