There's HOPE on Planet Earth

In 1996, I came across a copy of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly for the first time.

For anyone unfamiliar with it, 2600 is a magazine through which hackers have spent decades sharing knowledge, asking questions, and occasionally making lawyers and governments quite angry. I found it as an isolated kid growing up in rural England, and the world described within its pages felt impossibly distant from my own. I had access to a computer, sure, but not the world that 2600 was describing.

In that magazine, I read about the second edition of an event called HOPE, or Hackers On Planet Earth. HOPE is, and was, a gathering of hackers held in New York City. Even the name sounded like something from another world. New York existed in films and on TV, but not in the darkest depths of Northamptonshire. The idea that I might one day travel there seemed about as plausible as the Spice Girls showing up at my house and asking me to be in their next music video. Give me a break. It was the 90s.

Thirty years later, I landed at John F Kennedy International Airport to give a talk at the seventeenth instalment of HOPE.

There And Back Again

I've been to New York before. I'd done all the tourist things, been there for work and for leisure and, one time, a date that went exceptionally badly. But this trip felt different - like it had been years in the making.

I had crossed an ocean to talk about storytelling, technology and the ways our creations shape the lives of the people who encounter them. Around me were people opening machines, questioning systems, sharing knowledge and building peculiar things simply because they thought those things ought to exist.

I was struck by how familiar it felt.

HOPE has its own history, traditions and rhythms. The US hacker scene is generally more cybersecurity dominated. In Europe, it's more creative. But in spite of these different root systems, the flowers smelled just as sweet at HOPE as they do elsewhere. There was the same curiosity, the same refusal to accept that things can only work the way we have been told they work, and an equal number of people wearing hats made almost entirely out of LEDs. Heck, there was even a stall selling Club Mate.

There were cultural differences, of course. In all my years of working with and travelling to see people in the US, I've always been struck by how many of the little things are different, and how many of the big things are the same. I feel the same about my experience of HOPE.

What connected us was not that everyone thought, spoke, or behaved in the same way. It was a shared belief that knowledge should move, systems should be questioned, and the world should be something that people are empowered to take part in shaping.

Townies of The World, Unite!

During the weekend, I also got to hang out with a group of people I had known online for several years, but had never managed to meet in person before.

I'm part of a community on the Fediverse (think Twitter, but made up of interconnected spaces rather than one enormous platform owned by a billionaire with the emotional stability of a dung beetle) called Hackers Town. For years we had shared jokes, ideas, difficult days and passing fragments of our lives, always via short digital messages mostly in plain text.

Then, suddenly, they were humans standing in front of me.

The internet did not make the geography between us disappear. What it did, though, was allow relationships to grow across that distance, so that meeting in person felt less like encountering strangers and more like discovering that people you already cared about had acquired mass, voice, and surprisingly firm opinions about how to make tea.

Note: never, ever, EVER, using a microwave.

I also met Renoly Santiago, who played Phantom Phreak in my one of my all-time favourite films, Hackers.

The film arrived in 1995 and presented hacker culture as a neon-lit world of rollerblades, gender-defying outfits, and systems that looked better than any actual desktop did in reality. Even today. The movie was not particularly technically accurate, but it understood something important about finding your people, sharing what you know, and refusing to let systems dictate the limits of your imagination.

Meeting Renoly, and so many online friends in person, was enormously meaningful to me. A fictional story inspired by hacker culture, and the magazine that inspired the movie, had both crossed the Atlantic, helped shape a child who felt trapped inside a much smaller world, and eventually brought that child back to New York as part of the community they had once watched from afar.

Stories travel. Ideas travel. And people, when borders and finances allow, sometimes get to follow them.

Making Doors

For many people, the word hacker still means 'criminal breaking into a computer system'. They picture someone like Mr. Robot, wearing a black hoodie, typing quickly and having absolutely no social skills whatsoever.

Hacking can involve computers, but the hacker spirit is not confined to them. Hacking is the instinct to look at a boundary and ask who put it there, whom it serves, and whether we might build a door through it.

The system might be a computer network, an institution, a national border, a cultural assumption, or an inherited idea about who is allowed to belong. Hacking begins when we refuse to accept that the current version is the only possible one, take the time to understand how it works, and begin imagining what else it could become.

That does not mean every distinction between us should be flattened. Our cultures, histories, traditions and communities matter. They give shape and meaning to our lives, and cultural exchange becomes meaningless if everything is blended into one globally marketable paste.

Breaking boundaries does not mean erasing difference. The aim is not to turn the whole world into one room. It is to make sure every room has open doors.

A door lets us welcome somebody without pretending they were always the same as us. It lets knowledge pass in both directions. It gives us the opportunity to listen, learn and be changed by one another, rather than merely collecting the most convenient pieces of somebody else’s culture and calling it connection.

That kind of connection requires work. During HOPE, I heard people speak about the importance of fighting even when victory is uncertain, and of making sure we punch up rather than down. Solidarity is not simply standing beside people who already understand the world exactly as we do. It means listening when another marginalised community tells us something we did not know, accepting that good intentions do not make us infallible, and choosing to build the door anyway.

Hack The Planet

After EMF this year, I wrote about moving slowly and mending things. Before I flew to HOPE, I wrote about rewilding the web and reclaiming some of the strange, collaborative spaces paved over by corporate platforms. Increasingly, I suspect these are all parts of the same thought.

We can move slowly enough to notice the walls around us and understand what they are doing. We can rewild the spaces between them, allowing communities and ideas to grow beyond the tidy enclosures prepared for us. Then, when we find a boundary that exists only to keep knowledge, power or possibility locked away, we can start opening doors.

To hack the planet is not to conquer it. It's about refusing to accept that distance, difference, and inherited divisions must determine whom we may know, what we may learn, who we can be, or what we might build and create together.

The world is full of boundaries we did not choose. Some protect differences worth cherishing, while others exist to keep people apart and power safely contained in the hands of those who already possess it. We owe it to one another to work out which is which, and act accordingly.

That's the HOPE that I found in New York: the shared belief that no wall is unbreakable, and what we do with that belief is a choice we get to make, together.

Until next time,