Swords of Light & Fire in the Heart

First of all, I'd just like to say that tlttlotd is an evil, evil man. :) You, sir, have *single-handedly* increased my music library by about six GIGS in the past few days (or you will have when the three bittorrents I'm currently downloading complete, anyway.) How, you ask? *points to the current music line on the entry* I read your memory logs. Yeah, you hooked me on game remixes. (Not that I'm really complaining. *grins*)

Now onto the substantive portion of this entry. I've been reading the book "The Hacker Diaries: Confessions of Teenage Hackers" by Dan Verton that rhiannasilel got me for Christmas. Finding it very interesting so far. I'm in the middle of the second chapter, currently, and already I've been struck by something. One of the most common questions the hacker community seems to get is "how do I learn how to hack?" I know I've asked it many times myself, though usually silently to myself or through carefully crafted web searches rather than outright asking others. And I'm noticing that so far, none of these kids seems to have learned the same way. Some of them found the BBS scene first, others had computers at home with no modems and started cutting their teeth on that. Some started from the software end, others from the hardware. Some started with computers and moved onto phreaking, others went the other way. One of them even started by taking apart his parents VCR. With so many avenues into hacking, and indeed so many different things that can be considered hacking in the first place, the question of how one learns to hack really becomes meaningless. The question might as well be simply "how do I learn?", and obviously the answer is going to be as individual as you are. And if you don't know how you learn, chances are nobody else does either.

It's also analogous to the question "How do I write?". Nobody can answer that, fully. Sure, they can point you to basics about plotting and grammar, characterization and style, conflict and tension and atmosphere and a hundred other TOOLS for writing. But they can't really teach you how to use those tools to actually write. The reason for that is that only you can decide what you will write, when it comes down to it. Your writing is your own, unique and individual. Unless copied, no two books or stories will ever be just the same. And writing isn't about copying. It's about making something new, something that comes from inside yourself.

In another sense, being a hacker is like being Otherkin. It's something you are, not something you learn or become. You can learn skills along the way to make yourself better in walking your path, you can gain experience to understand your path better, but deep down at the core of it all hacking is all about a certain attitude, a certain mindset or quality that you either have or you don't. A certain curiosity, perhaps, though I'm not quite sure that's the right word. I'm not even sure there is a word to describe the burning hunger that is felt when confronted with certain concepts, certain ideas. The things that keep us awake, late into the night, trying to figure out just how something worked or how to fix a certain bug or solve a problem. The thing that drives us not just to solve one problem, but to seek out the next one, and the next beyond that. Always learning.

I don't know if there were hackers before computers, but I suspect there were. If you look for them, you can probably find them. Thomas Edison, perhaps? Leonardo da Vinci, almost certainly. Those men and women who approach life with the attitude that there is much to be learned, and then do so. Those willing to transcend the limits of a single discipline and allow the different arts and sciences they have mastered to intermingle symbiotically and make something altogether new to this world. WE saw it with Da Vinci's merging of art and science, and we see it now in the tools of the hackers: Hardware, software, networking, programming, security, encryption, stealth, strategy, social engineering. Magic. And more...

I think this attitude has been called many things. There was a series recently on television that called such a man a "Pretender". And Da Vinci himself was called a "Renaissance Man". And there's the more colloquial "jack of all trades", of course, which downplays the significance of such men. But I think the one I like the best is the oldest one I know: Samildinach. Roughly, it means the same as Jack of All Trades, but rather than implying "Master of None" as the former phrase does, it instead implies Mastery of them all. It's also a rather appropriate reference to use in discussing hacking, as well, since it was the title of the celtic god Lugh. And who better than a Sun God to represent a Craft whose most explicit function is throwing light on the hidden places in the world inside our machines?