It's difficult to imagine a world before the internet, or even cell phones if you didn't experience it directly. There was distance, and there was "elsewhere." In 1986, the way you found people who shared your worldview if you were outside a narrow middle class mainstream was through music, or technology. When you listen to bands from the period and before, especially anything on the alternative vein, they were trying to create signals to find people like them.<p>The distance allowed for a counter-culture, where the lack of distance today means a counter-culture is too dangerous to tolerate.<p>If you had an IQ above a standard deviation, you were probably pretty alienated, and so you used taste in art, tech, and culture to find others like you. This manifesto was 3 years before before Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine. Ministry had just released "Twitch," into a pop culture dominated by hair metal, in a society where technology still meant muscle cars and mullets. Punk was truly dead, and the affects of new romantics and the me generation and yuppies were at peak decadence.<p>The Hacker Manifesto is an artifact of its time. I'm rather glad it sticks out, and that it can't be co-opted by our modern and enlightened hegemon. Sure, it's got more of a cringe factor now, but it represents something that was true then, and has remained so today: competence will always be a threat to complicity. There remain people who make, discover, derive, and invent, and they will necessarily disrupt. They are the only true progress. Manifestos rarely age well, but the courage they inspire and the work that results tends to set the trajectory of history.<p>I read this manifesto in 1993 and for better or worse, I can say I accomplished some things as a result.