Another one got caught today. It’s all over the newsfeeds: “Teen Arrested in Cybercrime Scandal,” “Hacker Infiltrates Financial Systems.”
Damn kids. They’re all alike.
But have you, with your algorithm-driven profiling and sanitized corporate logic, ever looked beyond the headlines? Have you ever wondered what drives the hacker? What pushes us to explore systems and transcend boundaries?
I am a hacker. Step into my world.
Mine is a world forged in the classroom. A place where I’m surrounded by mundane lessons on topics I mastered long ago, where innovation is stifled, and curiosity is punished.
“Why didn’t you show your work?”
Because I solved it in my head.
“Cheater. Underachiever. Trouble-maker.”
Damn kids. They’re all alike.
Then I found it—my first computer. A machine that responded with precision and logic, free of bias, free of judgment. If something went wrong, it was because I made an error, not because of some arbitrary authority’s opinion.
Damn kid. All he does is play games. They’re all alike.
But then something clicked. A gateway opened, not through clunky dial-ups but via fiber-optic lines, encrypted tunnels, and the boundless possibilities of the cloud. I found a network of minds, a community of explorers who saw the world as it could be—not as it was dictated to us.
“This is it. This is where I belong.”
I know everyone here, even if I’ve never met them. We connect not through small talk or handshakes, but through shared questions and solutions.
Damn kid. Probably wasting bandwidth. They’re all alike.
You’re right—we are alike. We’ve been fed educational systems designed to pacify us when we craved innovation. We’ve been trained to conform, rather than to question. The few who understood our hunger for knowledge became our mentors, but they were so rare—drops of clarity in an ocean of apathy.
This is our world now: the world of code, neural networks, and quantum processors. The beauty of the blockchain. The elegance of decentralized systems. We explore what you fear and innovate in ways you can’t control. You call us criminals for pushing boundaries, for challenging the gatekeepers of information.
We exist without race, without borders, without predefined roles. You build surveillance states, you exploit data, you manipulate markets—and then you call us the threat. You fear our curiosity because it sees through the cracks in your systems.
Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is curiosity. My crime is valuing ideas over appearances. My crime is outthinking a world too comfortable in its mediocrity.
I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may catch one of us, but you’ll never stop us all. After all, we’re all alike.
Note from Tom: I found it only fitting to have the original manifesto, by The Mentor, rewritten by ChatGPT.