Manifesto

We are the hackers, the dreamers of electric dreams.

We have known promethean creation, willing potent effect from exertion of the imagination.

We took a brief excursion through a forbidden zone -- just a few nanoseconds -- and came out 0 having gone in 1.

The creative life is a beautiful thing, a gift not meted to all people.

The price of these powers is an unrelenting call, one capable of drowning out the rest of life.

The computer made us more and less than what we were.

We press on.

We celebrate Grandmaster Turing's Machines, cheer their ever more pervasive ubiquity, and are inspired by the prospect of eliminating the menial.

Not a single aspect of life will go untouched by these magnificent automata.

At the frontiers of application and design you'll find always hackers,

humming in tymbalic swarm and batrachian chorus,

also bald lone diving silent screaming eagles,

angelheaded hipsters burning for a connection to the evanescent IRC dynamo in the machinery of night.

When gone, our code will speak for us. Our code too then will be gone.

Codefined now with our code, leaving yet legacies tripartite: genetic, energetic, algorithmic.

That said, I don't necessarily want my desktop to look like a fucking cellphone.

Furthermore, you *will* give me a "shutdown" button.

I wish to unhear this twice-digested bullshit about sending desktop searches to Amazon.

Did we lose a war?

That isn't America.

That isn't even Mexico.

And no, I do not care to consult the Info page; I am furthermore uninterested in the Free Software Foundation's opinions regarding man pages.

The GNU info browser suggests nothing more than the squaring of autism itself, stuffed into some broken fork of UW-Pine.

When did people start misspelling "d" as "Kit"?

When did it become acceptable for the output of the "set" shell builtin to scroll?

What's all this brown shit?

I am crotchety. I incline towards disdain of dash as /bin/sh, knowing it makes pretty good sense.

When I press "delete" in a file manager, why am I surprised by a result strangely unrelated to prompt deletion of files?

We stand at the cusp of a world that would have /bin/rm removed, if anyone was thought to use a "shell", on their "workstations", with a "keyboard",

a keyboard that goes "CLACK CLACK CLACK" because twenty-five thousand lights winked out in the struggle against tyrannical Albion, goddamnit.

When you want to experiment with violent UI changes, start a new project. Until then,

cube my desktop, tile my windows, for the love of god switch between them when I press Alt-Tab,

and do cool things with my video card when I'm not using CUDA to do petrochemical exploration or make missiles more accurate.

Together -- I, hacker; you, machine, begotten not made, consubstantial -- we are unstoppable.

We sound our barbaric YAWP over the rooftops of the world.

CLACK CLACK CLACK, baby.

2013-01-25 0037 EST