#hacker aesthetic

[iolite-moodboards]

penelope garcia for @seraph-draws-stuff ♡

[crowleyco]

⨯ . ⁺ ✦ ⊹ ꙳ ⁺ ‧ ⨯. ⁺ ✦ ⊹ . * ꙳ ✦ ⊹

𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞'𝐬 𝐚 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝐨𝐧 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐬𝐥𝐞𝐞𝐯𝐞, 𝐢'𝐥𝐥 𝐭𝐚𝐤𝐞 𝐢𝐭 𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐢 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐡𝐨𝐥𝐝 𝐢𝐭 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐲𝐨𝐮...

𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐫𝐮𝐧, 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮'𝐝 𝐫𝐮𝐧 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐥𝐚𝐰.

↷ᴊᴀᴋᴇ ᴍᴏᴏᴅʙᴏᴀʀᴅ.

[purple-parker]

The Dark Lord + Punk

[Requested by Anon]

[X] [X] [X] ... [X] [🌑] [X] ... [X] [X] [X]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Open Circuits

I'm kickstarting the audiobook for "The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation," a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and make a new, good internet that picks up where the old, good internet left off. It's a DRM-free book, which means Audible won't carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

Every trip to Defcon – the massive annual hacker-con in Las Vegas – is a delight. Partly it's the familiar – seeing old friends, getting updates on hacks of years gone by. But mostly, it's the surprises, the things you never anticipated. Defcon never fails to surprise.

I got back from Vegas yesterday and I've just unpacking my suitcase, and with it, the tangible evidence of Defcon's cave of wonders. My gear bag has a new essential: Hak5's malicious cable detector, a little USB gizmo that lights up if it detects surreptitious malicious activity, even as it interdicts those nasty payloads:

https://shop.hak5.org/collections/omg-row2/products/malicious-cable-detector-by-o-mg

(In case you're wondering if it's really possible to craft a malicious USB cable that injects badware into your computer and is visually indistinguishable from a regular cable, the answer is a resounding yes, and of course, Hak5 sells those cables, with a variety of USB tips:)

https://shop.hak5.org/collections/omg-row2/products/omg-cable

But merch is only a sideshow. The real action is in the conference rooms, where hackers update you on the pursuit of their obsessions. These are such beautiful weirdos who pursue knowledge to ridiculous extremes, untangling gnarly hairballs just to follow a thread to its origin point.

For the second year in a row, I caught a presentation from Joseph Gabay about his work on warshopping: slicing up shopping cart wheels and haunting shopping mall parking lots during resurfacing to figure out how the anti-theft mechanism that stops your cart from leaving the parking lot works:

https://www.begaydocrime.com/

And of course, I got to give one of those presentations, "An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification," to a packed house. What a thrill! It was livestreamed, and if you missed it, you'll be able to catch it on Defcon's Youtube page as soon as they upload it (they've got a lot of uploading to do!):

https://www.youtube.com/@DEFCONConference/videos

After my talk, I went back to the No Starch Press booth for a book signing – which was amazing, so many beautiful hackers, plus I got to share a signing table with Micah Lee. As I was leaving, Bill Pollock slipped me a giant hardcover art-book, and said, "You're gonna love this."

I did. The book is Open Circuits: The Inner Beauty of Electronic Components, by Windell Oskay and Eric Schlaepfer, and it is a drop-dead gorgeous collection of photos of electronic components, painstakingly cross-sectioned and polished:

The photos illustrate layperson-friendly explanations of what each component does, how it is constructed, and why. Perhaps you've pondered a circuit board and wondered about the colorful, candy-shaped components soldered to it. It's natural to assume that these are indivisible, abstract functional units, a thing that is best understood as a reliable and deterministic brick that can be used to construct a specific kind of wall.

But peering inside these sealed packages reveals another world, a miniature land where things get simpler – and more complex. Inside these blobs of resin are snips of wire, plugs of wax, simple screws, fine sheets of metal in stacks, wafers of plain ceramic, springs and screws.

Truly, quantity has a quality all its own. Miniaturize these assemblies and produce them at unimaginable scale and the simple, legible components turn into mystical black boxes that only the most dedicated study can reveal. Like every magician's trick, the unfathomable effect is built up through the precise repetition of something very simple.

A prolonged study of Open Circuits reveals something important about the hacker aesthetic, a collection of graphic design, fashion and industrial design conventions that begins with this realization: that the crisp lines of digital logic can be decomposed into blobby, probabilistic lumps of metal, plastic, and even wax.

It reminds me of George Dyson's brilliant memoir/history of computing, Turing's Cathedral, where he describes how he and the other children of the scientists building the first digital computers at the Princeton Institute spent their summers in the basement, hand-winding cores for the early colossi their parents were building on the floors above them:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/03/12/george-dysons-history-of-the-computer-turings-cathedral/

You can see my hacker aesthetic photos in my Defcon 31 photo set:

https://www.flickr.com/search/?sort=date-taken-desc&safe_search=1&tags=defcon31&user_id=37996580417%40N01&view_all=1

In this video, Eric Schlaepfer illustrates the painstaking work that went into decomposing these tiny, precise components into their messy, analog subcomponents. It's pure hacker aesthetic, and it's mesmerizing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byKyJ0b04Lo

But Open Circuits isn't just an aesthetic journey, it's a technical one. After all, Oskay is co-founder of Evil Mad Scientist Labs, one of the defining places where hardware hackers gather to tear down, pick apart, mod, improve and destroy electronics. The accompanying text is a masterclass in the simple machines that combine together to make complex assemblies:

https://www.evilmadscientist.com/

Defcon is a reminder that the world only seems hermetically sealed and legible to authorized parties with clearance to crack open the box. From shopping cart wheels to thermal fuses, that illegibility is only a few millimeters thick. Sand away the glossy outer layer and you will find yourself in a weird land of wax-blobs, rough approximations, expedient choices and endless opportunities for delight and terror, mischief and care.

Back my anti-enshittification Kickstarter here!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/14/hidden-worlds/#making-the-invisible-visible-and-beautiful

[askstrangeweird]

Every once in a while I can make art I really like... Hope you like it too!

[sunflower-gamerguy]

Coding stimboard cuz I like how it looks

[magnetictapedatastorage]

adapted from a capture of DELIRIUM BBS in 1994.

[allwhiterain]

Matthew Lillard and Angelina Jolie as “Cereal Killer” and “Acid Burn” in Hackers (1995) directed by Iain Softley

[scipunk]

Johnny Mnemonic (1995)

[ysm-room]

Not my work, this time.

Just dropping here some of my favorite Matthew Lillard pictures. Where he looks cute as fuck, hot as hell. Perfection...One may say. Which one is your favorite?

[2-dsimp]

Yujin is 21, so he's old enough to drink in plenty of countries right? So, what type of drunk is the hacker? Is he more clingy and attention needing than usual? Does he behave with no sense and forgot how to use a door and accidently closes an open door on himself and not know how to get out? That last question is totally not based off my own pet doing that often to herself lol I just think a drunk Yujin would be funny to see, and rather cute if a bit annoying lol. Totally fine if he doesn't drink though. -just a rambling anon

Tw: suggestive

Honestly the hacker is very unpredictable when drunk, he can be melodramatic to happy go lucky or everything in between. Though be warned, he does have his horny switch, which can be activated if someone mentions milk. Since he’s got a heavy lactation kink.

[atlabstrakt]

Angelina Jolie as acid burn - Hackers (95) ❤️‍🔥

[misfitbimbosblog]

Can officially check off meeting the one and only MATTHEW LILLARD AHHHHH. He was literally the moment like this’ll forever be my Roman Empire 🤍🥺

[carbon-fiber-internal-organs]

[numbpilled-themes]

cyber candy - kawaii.exe

f2u neocities theme

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[cakesty]

oi, meu amor! Poderia fazer um moodboard do Vinnie hacker ulzzang agradeço desde já!

aqui está, espero que goste ❤️‍🩹

Vinnie Hacker moodboard