Damn kids. They´re all alike.

But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950´s technobrain,
ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what
made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?

I´m a hacker, enter my world....

Mine is a world that begins with school... I´m smarter than most of the other
kids, this crap they teach us bores me...

Damn underachiever. They´re all alike.

I´m in junior high or high school. I´ve listened to teachers explain for
the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it.
"No, Ms. Smith, I didn´t show my work. I did it in my head...

Damn kid. Problaby copied it. They´re all alike.

I´ve made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool!
It does what I want it to do. If it makes a mistake, it´s because
I screwed it up. Not because it doesn´t like me...

Or feels threatened by me...
Or thinks I´m a smart ass...
Or doesn´t like teaching and shouldn´t be there...

Damn kid. All he does is play games. They´re all alike.

And then it happened... A door opened to a world... Rushing through the
phone line like heroin through an addict´s veins, an electronic pulse is
sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought...
A board is found.

"This is it... This is where I belong..."

I know everyone here... even if I´ve never met them, never talked to them,
may never hear from them again... I know you all...

Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They´re all alike...

You bet your ass we´re all alike... we´ve been spoon-fed baby food at school
when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip through
were pre-chewed and tasteless. We´ve been dominated by sadists, or ignored
by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach us found us willing
pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the dessert.

This is our world now... the world of electron and the switch,
the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without
paying what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn´t run by profiteering gluttons,
and you call us criminals.
We explore, and you call us criminals.
We exist without skin colors, without nationality, without religious bias..
And you call us criminals..
You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us,
and try to make us belive it´s for our own good...
Yet we´re the criminals...

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of
judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like.
My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you´ll never
forgive me for...

I´m a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop the individual, but
you can´t stop us all... After all, we´re all alike.

- The Mentor