# The manifestos: the Mentor, the cypherpunks, the Declaration, and the texts a culture wrote about itself > Four hundred and fifty words typed by a nineteen-year-old the night after his arrest in 1986. A crypto-anarchist's pastiche of Marx read to a conference in 1988. Seven paragraphs on privacy in 1993, sixteen on independence from a hotel in Davos in 1996, and a page written in Italy in 2008 that a prosecutor would later read aloud. What the hacker culture's founding texts say, why each was written when it was, and where to read them in the original. Source: https://ronutz.com/en/learn/hacker-manifestos Updated: 2026-09-07 --- ## A note on what this article does and does not do These texts are short, famous, and freely available from the people and organisations that published them. They are also, every one of them, still somebody's copyright - Phrack may be redistributed freely, but the words in it belong to their authors, and this site's own licence for its writing cannot pass on what it does not hold. So this article does not reprint them. It says what each one is, when and why it was written, what it argues, quotes a line from each, and links to the original at its home. The originals are one click away and take a few minutes each. Read them there; read the commentary here. ## Before the manifestos: the hacker ethic, 1984 The first statement of what hackers believed was not written by one. In *Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution* (1984), Steven Levy distilled from the MIT model-railroad club and the homebrew computer scene of the 1970s a set of tenets he called the hacker ethic - that access to computers and to anything that might teach you how the world works should be unlimited, that information should be free, that authority should be mistrusted and decentralisation promoted, that a hacker should be judged by hacking and not by degrees, age, race or position, and that computers could make art and could make life better. Phrack reprinted the list in 1995, which tells you how completely the underground had adopted a description written about people who would not have called themselves underground at all. Everything below is a response to, or an extension of, that list. ## The Conscience of a Hacker, 8 January 1986 Loyd Blankenship was a member of the Legion of Doom's second generation, writing under the handle The Mentor, when he was arrested in early January 1986 for being, as he later put it, inside a computer he should not have been inside. On 8 January he wrote about 450 words in the first person, and Phrack published them in September that year as the third file of issue 7, under the title *The Conscience of a Hacker*. The scene renamed it the Hacker Manifesto almost immediately, and it has been on T-shirts and in films since. The essay's structure is an argument disguised as a confession. It opens from the outside - another one got caught today, it's all over the papers - and then moves inside the arrested kid's head: the bored schoolroom, the teacher who explains a thing for the fifteenth time, the discovery of a computer that does what it is told and does not judge, and then the discovery of the network, where a person is known by what they think rather than how they look. The pivot is the sentence everyone remembers, a five-word admission that reframes the charge: my crime is that of curiosity. The close addresses the reader as one of us, which is the manifesto's real trick - it was written to a scene that already existed and gave that scene a way of describing itself to the world that was better than the world's description of it. The afterlife has one turn worth knowing. Blankenship went to work for Steve Jackson Games in Austin and wrote its cyberpunk role-playing supplement; the manuscript the Secret Service seized in the March 1990 raid on the company - the raid that led to the founding of the [Electronic Frontier Foundation](https://ronutz.com/en/learn/electronic-frontier-foundation) - was his. The author of the manifesto was, four years later, the reason a game company was searched as a hacking operation. Read the original at [phrack.org, issue 7, file 3](https://phrack.org/issues/7/3). ## The GNU Manifesto, 1985 A year before the Mentor, Richard Stallman published a manifesto that shares none of the underground's vocabulary and all of its premise. The GNU Manifesto, printed in *Dr. Dobb's Journal* in 1985, announces a project to write a complete operating system compatible with Unix and free for anyone to copy, modify and share, and explains why: that a programmer who is asked to sign a nondisclosure agreement is being asked to betray the people he could help, that software hoarding wastes the effort of everyone who has to rewrite what already exists, and that the golden rule requires sharing a program you like with the people who like it too. It then answers, one by one, the objections it expects - who will pay programmers, what about competition, what about quality - and proposes the answers that became the free-software movement and, through it, most of the infrastructure this site is written on. It belongs beside the Mentor's essay because it is the same argument from the other side of the law. Levy's tenet that information should be free is, in Blankenship, a defence of trespass; in Stallman it is a licence, a foundation, and forty years of working code. Unlike every other text here, the manifesto carries its own permission for verbatim copying, and the Free Software Foundation keeps it, with Stallman's later footnotes, at [gnu.org](https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html). ## The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, 1988 Timothy May, a physicist who had retired from Intel, wrote a page and a half in 1988 and read it to gatherings that year, and again in September 1992 to the first meeting of the group that would be named, by Jude Milhon, the cypherpunks. It opens by rewriting the first line of the Communist Manifesto - a spectre is haunting the modern world, the spectre of crypto anarchy - and argues that public-key cryptography, anonymous remailers and digital cash will make it possible for individuals to communicate and trade without the state being able to see who is talking to whom or to tax what changes hands, and that this will alter the nature of corporations and of government interference in the economy as thoroughly as printing altered the medieval guilds. It concedes, in its own words, that the same tools will serve criminals, and says the technology will come regardless. It is the most explicitly political text on this page and the one whose predictions can most easily be checked. Some came true in forms May did not foresee; the bitcoin literature adopted him as a founder, and the tension he named between privacy and accountability is the tension every regulator of cryptography still argues over. The text is kept at [activism.net](https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/crypto-anarchy.html). ## A Cypherpunk's Manifesto, 9 March 1993 Eric Hughes, who founded and ran the cypherpunks mailing list and built the first anonymous remailer, wrote the movement's short creed on 9 March 1993, two months before three masked cypherpunks appeared on the cover of the second issue of *Wired*. It is seven paragraphs, and its first sentence is the one the whole argument rests on: privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. It distinguishes privacy from secrecy - a private matter is something you do not want everyone to know; a secret is something you want nobody to know - and argues that the power to reveal oneself selectively is a condition of a free society, that governments and corporations will not grant it, and that it therefore has to be built. The closing move is the one that mattered: cypherpunks write code, and publish it, and do not much care whether anyone approves. The manifesto was written in the year the Clipper chip was announced and the year Bernstein was told his encryption paper was a munition; the [EFF article](https://ronutz.com/en/learn/electronic-frontier-foundation) records how those fights went. Hughes's claim that a wider public acceptance of cryptography was necessary for the movement to succeed was borne out by the Clipper chip's own defeat. The list peaked at around seven hundred subscribers, of whom, by May's estimate, a tenth actually wrote. The text is at [activism.net](https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html). ## A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, 8 February 1996 John Perry Barlow wrote his declaration in a hotel room in Davos, at the World Economic Forum, on the day the United States enacted a telecommunications law whose Communications Decency Act provisions made indecent material on the network a federal offence. It is sixteen paragraphs addressed to the governments of the industrial world - you weary giants of flesh and steel, in the line everybody quotes - and it tells them that they have no sovereignty where the network's people gather, that their concepts of property, expression, identity and movement do not apply there, and that the network's people will build their own social contract. It was sent by email and copied across the web within days, which was, in 1996, the point. It has aged worse than the others, and its author said so. The network turned out to be governable, mainly by the companies that built it, and the governments it addressed have compelled suppliers, ordered blocks and installed splitters ever since - the [Room 641A story](https://ronutz.com/en/learn/electronic-frontier-foundation) is the same organisation's later and less optimistic chapter. As a record of what the network's first generation believed it had built, it remains the clearest document there is. The EFF keeps it at [eff.org](https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence). ## Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, July 2008 Aaron Swartz wrote a single page in Eremo, Italy, in July 2008, arguing that the world's scientific and cultural heritage, published in journals and books, had been locked behind paywalls by a handful of corporations; that sharing it was not immoral but a moral imperative; and that people with access - students, librarians, scientists - had a duty to take it and give it to those without. Its first two words are Levy's tenet turned into a charge: information is power. In 2011 Swartz was arrested for downloading millions of articles from JSTOR through MIT's network, and the manifesto was reported to have been cited by the prosecution as evidence of intent. He died in January 2013, facing trial. It belongs here as the last of the line and as the one whose consequences were harshest. The Mentor was arrested and wrote his manifesto afterwards; Swartz wrote his first, and it was used against him. The distance between those two facts, twenty-two years apart, is a measure of how much the law had learned to read. ## Reading them together Set side by side, the texts make one argument in five registers. Levy describes an ethic; Blankenship confesses to it; Stallman turns it into a licence; May and Hughes turn it into cryptography; Barlow turns it into a declaration of sovereignty; Swartz turns it into a duty. What changes is not the premise - that information wants to be shared and that the institutions holding it are not entitled to decide - but the price of saying so. The Mentor paid with an arrest and became a T-shirt. Barlow paid nothing and was proved wrong. Swartz paid everything. A practitioner reading them now, employed by an industry that grew out of the culture these texts describe, is entitled to ask which of them the industry still believes, and the honest answer is: the licence, most of the cryptography, and very little of the rest. ## Sources - [Wikipedia, Hacker Manifesto: written 8 January 1986 by Loyd Blankenship, The Mentor, of the Legion of Doom's second generation, after his arrest; first published in Phrack; found on T-shirts and in films](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_Manifesto) - [Hackaday: Blankenship was arrested in 1986 when he got caught inside a computer he should not have been in and wrote the essay out of frustration; it was widely distributed and adopted by readers identifying with its message](https://hackaday.com/2013/11/04/hacking-and-philosophy-the-mentors-manifesto/) - [Island in the Net: written 8 January 1986, first published in Phrack volume one, issue 7, in September 1986](https://islandinthenet.com/hacker-manifesto/) - [Wikipedia, Loyd Blankenship: hired by Steve Jackson Games; author of GURPS Cyberpunk; the essay's citation in Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyd_Blankenship) - [The original, Phrack issue 7, file 3](https://phrack.org/issues/7/3) - [Phrack 47, 1995: the reprint of Steven Levy's hacker ethic from Hackers - access should be unlimited and total; all information should be free; mistrust authority; hackers should be judged by their hacking](https://phrack.org/issues/47/8) - [Wikipedia, Eric Hughes: co-founder of the cypherpunk movement with Timothy May and John Gilmore; author of A Cypherpunk's Manifesto; creator of the first anonymous remailer; coined "cypherpunks write code"; on the cover of Wired's May/June 1993 issue; argued that wider acceptance of cryptography was necessary, as the Clipper chip's defeat confirmed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Hughes_(cypherpunk)) - [Coinstory: May's Crypto Anarchist Manifesto of 1988; Hughes's manifesto of 1993 and the tagline cypherpunks write code; Jude Milhon coined the name; the list peaked around 700 subscribers with about a tenth active; Swartz's Guerilla Open Access Manifesto of 2008](https://coinstory.tech/book/chapter-03-cryptoanarchy-cypherpunks-and-civil-rights-in-cyberspace/) - [EPFL Graph Search: Hughes, May and Gilmore founded the group in late 1992, meeting monthly at Gilmore's Cygnus Solutions; the list started in 1992 and had 700 subscribers by 1994](https://graphsearch.epfl.ch/en/concept/37314) - [The Cypherpunk's Manifesto, dated 9 March 1993](https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html) - [The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto](https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/crypto-anarchy.html) - [A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, at the EFF](https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence) - [The GNU Manifesto, at the Free Software Foundation](https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html)