Keeping Hacker Culture Alive
by c7five
It was the summer of 1990. I was 15 years old. I spent most of my time navigating Chicago area BBSes like "Temple of Pong" and "Lunatic Fringe." I'd chat with local hackers, read message board posts on how to make free phone calls or get "unlimited" tokens at the arcade. We'd have regular meetups where I'd need to sneak out of the house after my parents went to bed and hitch a ride to an IHOP. Over pancakes, I'd engage in discussions about government surveillance, the latest warez, and learned more about how being curious shouldn't be a crime.
People would also bring back issues of 2600 to these meetups. I'd flip through the pages and marvel at how I was holding center of the hacker culture universe in my hands. For a kid who spent most of his time in the digital world, the physical copy of 2600 was magical. I'd save up the money I would get for cutting my neighbor's lawn and hop on my bike to ride ten miles one way (not an exaggeration, I just mapped it out to be sure) to the nearest Barnes & Noble. It was always a bit of a hunt because the rumor was that the store managers didn't like hackers and they would always hide copies of 2600 behind the teen or gardening magazines. I probably made this trek eight or ten times in high school. Even as a teenager, learning about hacker culture was important to me because it was helping me discover who I was and wanted to be.
Fast-forward 16 years after I graduated high school, I was thinking about the hacker culture in Chicago and how it was fractured and meetups were inconstant at best. I started to wonder why there wasn't a true hacker conference in Chicago like HOPE in New York City and decided I'd start one.
I had zero experience with running on a conference, so much of what I did was learned or through research. In the fall of 2009, I, along with some local hacker friends, announced the first THOTCON would be held in the spring of 2010. The name is taken from the first area code in Chicago, 312, or THree One Two CON.
From the very start, we wanted this event to be a hacker conference, not a security conference. We didn't want any vendors to influence the topics, the speakers, or ever try and censor a talk while holding a sponsorship check over our heads. We wanted a conference where speaking with handles or highly controversial topics was the norm. We don't broadcast or record our talks, so there is nothing that can be censored in the future.
Next May 30 and 31 will be THOTCON 0xD. This is our 13th conference which, after China COVID-19, is only held every other year. The first batch of tickets went on sale October 1st (2024) and the remaining will be sold on January 1st (2025).
If we sell all the tickets, there will be nearly 2,000 hackers at an undisclosed Chicago location (greetz FBI). The call for papers will also open on October 1st. Please consider speaking or attending THOTCON 0xD and helping keep hacker culture and conferences alive in the world.
Thanks for reading!