The Hard Way to Learn and Program

The Hard Way to Learn and Program

Aggression is the only way to accomplish anything. If you want a port,

grab it, if you want a channel, fight for it, if you want a channel off,

flood it, if you want a MOO, make yourself uncomfortably toaded over and

over again. If you want a port, play up to sysadmins, then stab them in

the back, take the machine over, grab superuser status as fast as you can

– you’ve got to do all of this with determination, aggression, and a sense

of occupied territory. Believe me, there’s no other way – no possibility

of any other way. It’s aggression that gets machines where you want them,

hundreds of them cross-connected on platforms, wired in/out, LANS, WANS,

and it’s aggression that gets them disconnected as well. Why agro? Be-

cause no one knows what they’re doing in this space – it’s too new, the

territory still in the process of being charted, taken over by corporate

greed – but not quite there yet. So there are interstices, back doors,

back channels, undernets, darknets, trojan horses at work at war every-

where and you NEED them to get going, you NEED them to get going in the

morning, you NEED them for respect for the fast buck slow dance. Go for

it! You get violent, threaten violence; you get mean, flame once or twice,

make promises you can’t keep, never intended to keep – there’s not the

HINT of a problem with this, social engineering, causeways to hell and

back just where/wherever the action is. You @create the action, you Make-

file, breakfile, do whatever it takes.

You can’t be afraid of anything. You have to vandalize, scavenge, use

whatever passwords you find lying around on slips of paper placed in the

back of porn novels where you’d most expect to find them. You’ve got to

use the same passwords everywhere you can, moving through systems. But

most of all you have to DEMAND a port because you need to connect to the

Net and be PART of it, not just email, but running your tongue along the

silver wires through the cables of light filmed and reduced to the last

degree. Listen: It’s like this. This is the only way it is. It’s not

popular. It will kill you. It will keep you going. You’ll die broke but

someone will see what you have done and marvel marvel marvel. —Alan Sondheim —The Hard Way to Learn and Program (Alan Sondheim)

Insert “blogging” or “love” or “safety” and you’ve got an essay on any human endeavor. But the geek-specific language really grabs me. I’m about to start teaching my first online-only course, and I feel like it’s really going to stretch my abilities. This post really helps get the adrenaline going!

Via MGK