hacker culture

The Mentor (Loyd Blankenship) reads his 1986 essay "The Conscience of a Hacker" at H2K2 in 2002 and adds his own insight about its backstory.

A compilation of the hacking scenes from the 1995 film Hackers, featuring flashy visualizations of computer intrusion.

A one-minute clip from the 1995 film Hackers in which characters trade technobabble about RISC architecture changing everything.

A HOPE X talk giving an in-depth explanation of how elevators work, from their history in hacker culture to using their control systems to bypass building security. It covers features and abilities of elevators that most people never see.

The full documentary 'The Internet's Own Boy' about programmer and activist Aaron Swartz, with interviews with family, friends and internet figures. It covers his work on access to information and the legal case preceding his death.

C-SPAN footage of the L0pht hacker collective testifying before the US Senate Governmental Affairs Committee on May 19, 1998. The members discuss internet and computer security weaknesses. The uploader says the media remembered only the claim that they could take down the internet in 30 minutes.

Josef Holzer walks through his family's Krameterhof, one of Europe's oldest permaculture farms in the Austrian mountains, with fish ponds, terraces, fruit trees and grazing animals. It showcases water management and microclimates.

Nina Paley's one-minute animated free culture anthem with vocals by Connie Champagne, arguing that copying is not theft.

A short edited excerpt of Terence McKenna arguing that culture acts as an operating system for the mind, set to imagery and music. It touches on psychedelics and how they change thinking.

A comedic Kung Fury spinoff in which Hackerman demonstrates 'hacking' household objects through time. It parodies 1980s hacker tropes.

A Guardian clip of Barack Obama at the Obama Foundation summit saying that call-out culture is not activism and that casting stones will not bring change.

Permaculture instructor Andrew Millison visits the chinampas, the floating gardens of Xochimilco in Mexico City. He looks at this ancient Aztec agricultural system and the project restoring it.

Jonathan Schiefer interviews Larry Wall, creator of Perl, in a 33-minute conversation. Wall discusses his self-designed linguistics degree and how language and programming overlap.

A one-minute rap by George Hotz (geohot) aimed at Sony, made as an entry for a contest while Sony was suing him over the PS3 jailbreak. It is a humorous diss track delivered from the middle of the lawsuit.

A speech by comedian Konstantin Kisin at an Oxford Union debate on whether woke culture has gone too far. He argues the case in a short segment of the debate.

Nina Paley's TEDxMaastricht talk arguing against copyright and for copyleft and free culture. She argues that restricting ideas harms creativity and that culture belongs to everyone.

Farmer Gabe Brown talks about how he rebuilt the soil on his ranch using no-till farming, cover crops, and grazing animals. The talk was recorded at a sustainable agriculture symposium in Idaho in 2014.

A long video essay by Natalie Wynn of ContraPoints on cancel culture, drawing on her own experience of being pile-on targeted by other leftists. It is theatrical and discursive, mixing argument with performance.

Devine Lu Linvega of Hundred Rabbits talks about low-power, offline computing, esoteric languages and the Uxn virtual machine, informed by years of sailing the Pacific. The talk frames computing sustainability through a permaculture lens.

Karl Fogel's 2006 Google Tech Talk traces copyright from a 16th-century English censorship law to a distribution monopoly. It then surveys alternative economic bases for creation and distribution.

Geoff Lawton documents a permaculture project that turned barren Jordanian desert into green, productive land. It covers the techniques he used.

Folding Ideas' long essay on why playing poorly in World of Warcraft feels rude. It traces how raiding culture shifted from relaxed fun to optimization, theorycrafting and wikis.

Peter Zeihan speaks at Iowa Swine Day 2022 on geopolitics, the end of globalization and agriculture. He argues that supply chains, energy and farm inputs are all about to be disrupted.

A short clip from the 1995 film Hackers in which the characters attempt to hack the Gibson supercomputer, shown with flashy stylized visuals of digital intrusion.

A 2012 lecture by Richard Stallman at Reykjavik University arguing that copyright, built for the printing press, fits poorly with computer networks. He criticizes draconian enforcement and corporate lobbying.

A video essay from Pop Culture Detective arguing that The Big Bang Theory normalizes sexism and toxic masculinity through its portrayal of nerd men. It analyzes recurring tropes in how the male leads treat women.

A short film from Agenda Gotsch introducing syntropic agriculture and Ernst Gotsch's agroforestry methods, made for COP21. It shows degraded land regenerated into productive forest farms.

Neil Postman's 1997 lecture at College of DuPage, based on his book, argues that Americans treat technology as a national religion and depend on it to solve larger human problems. It includes audience questions.

Eben Moglen's re:publica 2012 talk argues that media which spy on and data-mine the public threaten freedom of thought, and that free technology and free culture are needed to protect it.

Jason Scott's multi-episode documentary on the bulletin board system scene of the 1980s and 1990s, built from over 200 interviews. It captures how hobbyists ran dial-up systems before the internet went mainstream.

Al Baydha project co-founder Neal Spackman gives a final update nine years in, explaining how desertification followed the loss of indigenous land management and how the land has changed since inputs stopped in 2016. It lists which species worked best.

Amazon's Jon Jenkins at Velocity 2011 on how operations can drive revenue and on Amazon's highly available, autonomous architectures. It includes details on deployment frequency and Amazon's move to AWS.

Valve News Network goes through over twenty accounts from ex-Valve employees, mostly from Glassdoor, about what it is like to work at Valve. It covers the company's flat structure and culture.

A short film about the Dervaes family, who grow over 6,000 pounds of food a year on a tenth of an acre near downtown Los Angeles. They grow more than 400 plant species, keep chickens and ducks, and get most of their food from the plot.

Craig Heffner's Black Hat 2013 talk on exploiting network surveillance cameras, covering how insecure their firmware is. It shows how easily such devices can be compromised.

A HOPE09 talk on how modern computer chips are manufactured, from 22nm transistors to ultra-clean fabs and the tricks used to pattern tiny features with light. It frames chipmaking as hacking electrical engineering and physics.

Code Rush is a one-hour documentary following Netscape engineers in Silicon Valley through the company's last year as an independent firm. It covers the Mozilla open-source announcement, the frantic push to ready the source for release by March 31, 1998, and the toll on engineers' lives before the AOL acquisition.

A long interview by Blender Guru with Ton Roosendaal, creator of Blender. They cover Blender's origins, the move to open source, why Ton is not driven by money, Autodesk, and what sets Blender apart from other open source projects.

Cory Doctorow's 28c3 keynote argues that the copyright wars were just a skirmish and that the real fight will be a war on the general-purpose computer. He explains why locked-down devices, DRM and surveillance tools all depend on removing general computation.

Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, discusses the hard parts of running an open source project: online community conflict, why its patterns arise, and a cultural history of open source. He offers ideas for more civil, productive communication.