A Samoan Hackers Manifesto
I Came up in a World That Wanted Power to Be Free
Talofa reader,
I often tell the story of what first got me into thinking about tech, so for this edition, I thought I’d dive deep into what made it such a life-changing point in my life.
Without a doubt, it was getting "hacked" by a high school friend over ICQ late one night while chatting.
That opened my eyes to what was possible with a little knowledge and skill with tech.
From then on, I was hooked.
I couldn’t wait to get my course costs from my university loan to buy my own, very first computer, an Acer laptop.
Real hackers run Linux, so I installed RedHat 5.2—no dual boot, just deleted Windows.
Linux straight, no chaser.
For the next, what seemed like ‘always’, I would battle it out with device drivers, getting my sound card to work, getting my video card to work, learning how to configure, compile and install my own kernels to ensure things worked.
My obsession with getting really good at wielding the power of computing, networking, and programming drove me to learn anything and everything from the hardware up through all 7 OSI layers.
I can’t even hazard a guess at how many hours all up I spent on learning, breaking, and fixing computers, how many all-nighters, weekends, and public holidays I spent just hacking on things.
I thought I just wanted to be a 31337 hax0r, and that was my obsession…
But it wasn’t until I came across a piece of writing, iconic in hacking culture, that I realised hacking was more than computer tricks for me…
That piece of writing was the hacker's manifesto.
The Hackers Manifesto1 is a short essay written Lloyd Blankenship aka "The Mentor" of the infamous hacker group "Legion of Doom".
It featured in Issue 7, of equally infamous Hacker Magazine “Phrack” in 1986, and has been cited in popular culture, like the movie Hackers, The Social Network and in Edward Snowden’s autobiography.
You can read it yourself, but it’s the perspective of a smart kid, misunderstood and dismissed by his teachers, bored and unchallenged at school, who finds a world that challenges and teaches him, where information is free.
Sure- if you're familiar with the manifesto- you might think it's cheesy, a bit cringe, “of it’s time” etc.
But I can’t deny the sentiment of "The Mentor" vibed somewhere deep in me.
Why?
Good question.
The manifesto sounded like it was written by a palagi kid, from the U.S., I’m going to go out on a limb here and say probably from a decent home (one that had a computer at least).
So what did we have in common?2
Let’s Go Back to the Beginning
I grew up in a conservative christian Samoan family and if you know anything about those two cultures, you've got rules to live by and authorities to obey.
Christians, obey your God, parents and the bible.
Samoans, obey your parents, your church and your cultural traditions.
I've always had a problem with those things- not because I didn't think they were good things to do, I just was always curious about the alternatives.
I don't mind following orders3, I just want to know why.
In my early days I was definitely a "credit to my stereotype", I played Rugby, I played Rugby League, Rugby Union. I learned several musical instruments and could sing, dance and entertain on demand4.
I played for the church band and sang in the choir.
I got along fine in these environments, and I don't have a problem with them. I just never really fit in and always felt at odds with everything.
Call it puberty, or your typical teen angst and hormones making everything confusing.
I'm a NZ-born Samoan kid, living in rural South Canterbury, as the only Pasifika family in the town and school district. My dad's a minister of a religion I'm not sure at 12 or 13 I believe in anymore, and I'm playing the bilingual kid's persona successfully, but I don’t have any idea who exactly I really am at the time.
Fast forward to getting hacked while on my Dad's computer, and the world changed for me.
The computer didn’t care I was Pasifika.
It didn’t care my parents were religious or that I couldn’t afford my own computer.
It didn’t care what school I went to, or what area I lived in, or how much money my parents made.
"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"
The “scene” online was an extension of how my computer treated me, on the basis of what I knew and what I could do with computers.
It was either 31337 or it was lame.
But it was never because my school shoes were from the warehouse, or my nose was bigger than the other kids.
"We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias"
For all the confusion in my life and myself at the time, never feeling like I quite fit in anywhere, I think computers were a place I could go and just be me.
The computer never asked anything of me, didn’t have any expectations that I was super skilled or useless at computers. It would let me be great when I got it right, or just didn’t work when I couldn’t.
When I say it would let me be “me”, I still didn’t know who I was then, and my computer wouldn’t care—I could just be.
That was pretty rare for me at that time, to have a space where I didn’t have to live up to anything or anyone’s expectations. The better I did at school, or music exams, or representative sports teams, or other expectations from church or the community because we were “such good boys,” the more the expectations to be good or great, or to maintain, just kept coming.
I tell myself it could always be worse—a lot of people had much worse childhoods—but I know better than to downplay my lived experience.
It wasn’t the worst; it was just that *gestures at things I’d written above*.
“So hacking and computers, gave you an outlet, and a space to just be. That’ deep.” - me interviewing myself.
Funnily enough, I realised it went even deeper than that.
Hack the Planet
In my Christian, Samoan world and in society in general, I was always aware that there were rules for some people, and not for others.
*cough*Israel*cough*
Based on no fault or credit to yourself, you could be born into advantage or disadvantage, and your lot in life would then be subject to those rules, and the work required to overcome them.
Just take a look at what's happening in Gaza right now, and the UN's useless-ness to even get a ceasefire as the death toll of 33,600 Palestinians, a heart-breaking 70% of those killed are women and children, continues to rise.
Sure, it seems naive thinking about it now, but hacking, as an ideology for me, was about equity, empowering the powerless, and giving voice to the voiceless. We could bring information, knowledge, and hence power to the people through the digital world, making resources that were once exclusive to the Ivy Leagues, and the greatest minds available to the economically poorest peoples to enrich and uplift them.
When hackers were breaking professional engineers' software, and kids who hadn’t even made it to university were finding their way around controls and power, that was the light-bulb moment for me—that the power was and always is with the people, not the companies and not the government.
The hackers were like Robin Hood to me.
Money was nothing; it was all about the skills and the prestige of being knowledgeable and skillful—and using those skills for good causes because it was the right thing to do.
When the Hackers Grow Up…
The hacker's manifesto, to me, is the soul inside every Pasifika geek who didn’t fit into the rugby or sporting and entertainment stereotype, no matter how much we had the attributes or looked the part.
The hacker culture and community were people who respected intelligence, curiosity, thinking outside the box, not conforming, being anti-authoritarian, and anti-establishment.
And it wasn't with fancy gear or an Ivy League computer science education.
It was kids who were weird and most likely neurodivergent, who only needed a terminal on an old laptop to break into NASA or the FBI and run riot with something they'd figured out from some manuals online.
As I grew older and explored more philosophies—stoicism, anarchism, atheism, and a few others—I've started to see a lot more outside my traditional Christian worldviews. All these philosophies really enriched how I saw the world, people, events, and ideas.
The hacker mindset was really the one that broke me out of where I was and gave me permission to keep thinking outside the box I existed in. There were others like me who didn't want to follow these rules, who saw the same things in front of them but wanted to configure them in a way that was better—for everyone—not just themselves and their tribe.
Real World. Real Consequences.
It's funny; I'm partway through George Orwell's 1984, and I know in popular culture this is the reference for all things "waking up" to the authoritarian state and overreach, tyranny, and a dystopian future that's going to be doom and gloom for humanity.
I saw the hacker's manifesto, and that kind of thinking, as the resistance to the 1984 future. That the O.G. hacker mentality and culture is the antidote to Orwell's dystopian future.
While I know I romanticize the hell out of hackers, hacking, and hacker culture, I'm definitely not deluded by the reality of the real-world consequences of hackers and hacking.
A list of the LoD alumni, the Fraternal Order of the Legion of Doom, shows a majority of the members getting caught and charged with crimes. There are lots of FBI raids on hackers, Computer Misuse Acts and Bills being passed to stamp down on hackers, even hackers turning rat on their community—there's a very real side to thinking (and let's be honest, playing) outside the box.
In this world, we5 are still subject to the rules & laws of our society—but that's what I take from the hacker's manifesto, that the hacker doesn't just enter the matrix to free themselves of their physical form but to also avail themselves of all mental, emotional, and spiritual constraints as well.
Final Words
In conclusion...
I'll leave you with this
"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."
Thanks for reading, see you in the next one.
ia manuia,
Ron.
Admittedly, despite being in a single-income household with 4 siblings, our house did also have a computer (Amiga 500) because Dad wrote his sermon’s on it.
If it’s no skin off my nose and it gets me what I’m after, no dramas. Otherwise, why?.
Which my brothers and I often did.
i.e. the Global South lolsob.