The Hacker Manifesto at Forty

Yesterday marked the 40th anniversary of the Hacker Manifesto.

I was seventeen when I first read it. A kid in Ontario with a CoCo 1 and a 1200-baud modem, spending most of my teenage years holed up in my bedroom, desperate to understand something since I couldn’t yet understand myself.

The digital trespassing in the Manifesto wasn’t really my scene — I never broke into systems that weren’t mine. But the frustration? That landed. “We’ve been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak.” Yes. Exactly.

And the dismissiveness. Oh, the dismissiveness. “You’re wasting your time on that thing.” “Get off the phone line.” “You’re always playing games.” (They couldn’t tell the difference between a game and me learning 6809 assembly to make the machine do what I wanted.) Every curious kid with a computer heard some version of this. The adults couldn’t see what we saw. To them, it looked like a toy. To us, it was a place where things finally made sense.

The Manifesto resonated with something I already felt but couldn’t articulate: that curiosity wasn’t just acceptable, it was essential. That taking things apart to understand them was a feature, not a bug.

Forty years later, I still feel that resonance in my bones.

What Hacker Actually Means

There’s a definition in IETF RFC 1392 that’s always stuck with me:

hacker — A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular. The term is often misused in a pejorative context, where “cracker” would be the correct term.

Delights. That’s the word that matters.

Not “tolerates” or “endures” or “professionally engages with.” Delights. The hacker finds joy in understanding. In poking at seams. In asking “but what happens if I do this?”

This isn’t about breaking things (though yes, sometimes things break). It’s about the fundamental orientation toward systems: curiosity first, boundaries second. Learn what it does before you decide what it’s for.

The media spent decades confusing hackers with criminals. They still do, mostly. But the folks I’ve known who embody this mindset — the real hackers — aren’t interested in destruction. They’re interested in possibility. In finding the spaces between what a system was designed to do and what it could do.

That’s a creative act. An optimistic one, even.

The New Frontier Looks Familiar

And now here we are, in early 2026, watching something fascinating unfold.

GenAI has become the new playground. Claude, GPT, Copilot, local models, agent frameworks — there’s a whole ecosystem of systems to explore. And the hackers are out there, delighting in intimate understanding. Poking at the seams. Asking “what happens if I do this?”

Over the past few months, I’ve watched people build (and built myself) what they’re calling “life operating systems” and “business operating systems” — agent-based architectures that help manage the cognitive load of modern existence. Personal knowledge graphs that learn your preferences. Automated workflows that handle the administrivia so you can focus on the interesting parts.

Some of these ideas are wild. Some are genuinely brilliant. Many are both.

What strikes me is the energy. It feels like the early internet again, or the early days of personal computing. There’s a window right now — before the platforms ossify, before the terms of service clamp down, before someone decides how it’s all supposed to work — where curious people can just explore.

And they are. We are.

Before They Figure Out How to Sell It

Here’s the thing about these windows: they close.

The early web was a glorious mess of experimental pages, weird communities, and people figuring out what hypertext could become. Then came the walled gardens, the advertising platforms, the algorithmic feeds designed to maximize engagement at the cost of everything else.

The early PC era had hobbyists building strange and wonderful things in garages. Then came the locked-down devices, the app stores, the ecosystems designed to extract maximum value from every interaction.

We’re in one of those windows now with AI. The models are powerful and accessible. The tooling is evolving faster than anyone can keep up. The big players haven’t yet figured out exactly how to monetize every angle, so there’s still room to maneuver.

This is when the hackers thrive. When the systems are new enough that nobody’s sure where the edges are. When you can wire together Claude and some Python and a wild idea and see what happens.

(Yes, I’ve been doing exactly this. So have you, probably, if you’re reading this.)

The window will close eventually. The platforms will mature. The commercial interests will find their footing. That’s not cynicism — that’s just the pattern. The early internet believers thought the open web would last forever, and they were wrong about that.

But they weren’t wrong about the value of what they built during that window. The protocols, the communities, the culture — so much of what makes the internet worthwhile came from that early hacker era. The spirit survived even as the commercialization rolled in.

I suspect the same will be true here.

Explorer, Learner, Maker

What I love about the hacker mindset isn’t the technical skill, though that matters. It’s the orientation.

Explorer: There’s something out there I don’t understand yet, and that’s an invitation, not a threat. Let me see what I can find.

Learner: Understanding isn’t a destination — it’s a practice. Every system I figure out teaches me something about how to figure out the next one.

Maker: Knowledge wants to become something. Understanding wants to be put to use. The point isn’t just to know — it’s to build.

This is the thread that connects the seventeen-year-old with the CoCo to the version of me typing this today. The tools have changed. The systems have changed. The fundamental delight in taking things apart and putting them back together in new ways? That’s still there.

And when I watch the AI hacker community doing their thing — building agents, crafting prompts, wiring together systems that nobody planned for — I see the same energy. The same curiosity. The same willingness to explore territory before it gets mapped and fenced.

The Manifesto’s Legacy

“This is our world now,” the Manifesto said. “The world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud.”

Forty years later, the electrons have gotten faster and the switches have gotten smaller. The baud has become the API call, the token stream, the model weight. But the underlying truth remains: there are systems in the world, and some of us find deep joy in understanding them.

The Manifesto was angry, as manifestos often are. It was written by someone who felt criminalized for their curiosity. But beneath the anger was something more enduring: a declaration that understanding matters. That exploring matters. That the person who wants to know how things work isn’t a problem to be solved — they’re a gift to be cultivated.

We need more hackers, not fewer. People who delight in understanding. People who ask “what if?” before asking “what’s allowed?” People who build strange and wonderful things in the spaces between what systems are designed to do and what they could become.

So here’s to forty years. Here’s to the explorers and learners and makers. Here’s to the CoCos and the 1200-baud modems and the modern APIs alike.

And here’s to whatever we build next, before they figure out how to sell it to us.