Hacker Perspective: princess greybeard

Hacker was a bad word for most of my 50 years on this planet, despite all the positive connections I was able to form: to differ from the assumed average in putting what is often described as a playful mindset into practice when tinkering and exploring stuff; making connections where usually no plugs are assumed to be; taking handbooks rather as an introduction, not the last word on something; etc.

Such traits describe me too, yet I learned the hard way that such approaches can freak people out, leading to emotions coming into play, replacing rational thought.  How to answer questions like "Why do you ask?" or "What are you reading for?" without making it all worse?  I don't know.

To help a colleague with issues due to setup problems on a computer might be appreciated - until, reliably, somebody concludes: "... but that knowledge could also be misused...."  Run.  You'll have until the conclusion: "Hacker!  We're all going to die now!!!"

I called myself a hacker twice in my 35 years of work life, and won't recommend it, unless you've already signed up with another employer.  It was as bad an idea as mentioning a cursory interest in basic chemistry, long before 9/11.

An attempt to explain what seems to be the problem with the quest for knowledge: If knowledge means power and power is at the same time admired and feared, the same goes for knowledge.  Nullifies itself, thus true.  Q.E.D.  My mental image for "proven through disproof" is an implosion (please take me with you!).

My main source of trouble was and is that I can't live with "because that's the way things are," or, to use a quote from around 1930: "This lesson I was taught by others: might makes right,' made by Carl Panzram, serial killer, amongst other things.  This statement for me is a pointer to when things had already derailed.

I'm driven by curiosity, an interest in the world around me.  I also had to learn that it can be O.K. to be wrong.  I'll replace any disproven statement with a better version, hopefully before anybody notices my error.

"Valid through invalidation" being a beloved strategy explains to me why for most of my life I retreated under a rock on the dark side of the moon, population: me.  A thought experiment: if you're looking for an adventure, spiced up with an option of "extreme death," try to evangelize "all in group Y (here: hackers) are good, except some bad apples - which is forgivable."

The hacker world also experienced attempts to create ethical standards (don't laugh!) of which I too am guilty of having spread.  Like: "judge one only by one's actions, not by one's gender, etc." - until I connected "one's freedom fighter is another one's terrorist" with that idea.

My first encounter with the word hacker was when I just had the basics of reading and writing down.  English is my second language, for which I hadn't had my first lesson back then.  I loaded the listing of data held on an audio tape (look it up!) and to my shock found a file named "Happy Hacker."  Though having no specific idea what the word actually meant, and knowing that the tape had come with a printed magazine purchased from a newsstand, "hacker" meant that all was lost, beyond hope, for the machine, me, everything.  It didn't occur to me that pulling the power cord might save what remained of us all, so, numb with shapeless fear, I executed that file in hopes of some kind of mercy killing ending it all, including me.  What came next was the start screen of a game which took its title from the sprite one controlled that used a pick axe to break open or close the ground, thus making paths available to move forward and shorten enemies' tracks.  Having already learned that nothing is over until it is over, and no one could know for sure when that was, I wasn't much relieved.  Nothing bad ever came from that, as far as I know.  I haven't dared to tell anybody until now, nearly four decades later.  You're welcome.

Around that age, I also got a book about coding in BASIC, written for kids, which I loved.  Sadly, at some point, I neither could progress nor find the error I made in some program described therein.  Asking somebody at school or, God forbid!, bothering an adult was a no-no, as their usual answer was "Don't touch it, so you can't break it!"

It still irks me, when adults quote a child's "cute question" but don't take it seriously.  Categorizing curiosity as growing pains, nothing to worry about.  As long as it doesn't get annoying... you know the drill.

I, a childless, somewhat adult, got stumped by some unfiltered questions from a child, too, which I still always welcome.  Sometimes I couldn't answer it because I honestly didn't know - and the kid could handle it!  But, most often, I made myself guilty of not daring to utter an answer, to avoid another lecture in what their relatives deemed the kid was "able to understand at that age."

As a kid, I once dared to ask a parent of mine when I would be old enough to get an answer.  I got a hearty laugh and a "We'll tell you, then," which led me to the local library, my safe haven.  There I found answers, but not for my coding problems, as they, wisely, spent no money on books that were almost outdated on delivery.

The snippets of code I found in magazines I had access to usually were above my head, e.g. controlling a robot's arm through assembly code.  So I resorted to playing games.  Much later, I was able to afford magazines from my pocket money.  Then the machine died.

Changing over to DOS put me back into the same position, which killed what remained of my ambitions.  I got back into coding decades later, trying to understand a UNIX command.  This led me into assembly language and out of coding again.  Not because I found it too difficult, but due to the encounters with the festering ulcers that code in active use often is.  If IT security is a process, then it's back-filling bottomless pits.  Those lidless stares...

Having stupid jobs kept myself afloat and bought me time to do what I really love: being creative.

Sequences from animated films are among the most vivid of my earliest memories, and stop-motion animation, as choppy as it may be, still "gets" me more than computer animation for some reason.  When digital cameras became affordable, I dabbled in stop-motion animation, where hacking is about the only way to get anything done.  One has to create almost everything from scratch such as mannequins and items to be used by them, as well as find solutions for such things as lighting a small set (before white LEDs were available), and deal with fluctuations in the power grid that dimmed or brightened the lights.  None of that ever got online.  Really.

To become a better camera operator, I started taking pictures at a series of mainly experimental music events.  The artists often were in a meditative state, and I learned a lot about lights and their placement when trying to capture the mood, as well as how to not be annoying to either audience or artist(s) with my camera.

The circus always fascinated me, with the magicians being my favorite part.  How did they do it?  Again, the quest for knowledge.  For a while, I made glove puppets and marionettes.  Much later, I performed on and behind a stage in a re-creation of a circus sideshow.  I played "The Geek," the least desired, yet only role I would take on stage.  Having been an outcast for most of my life, I saw my chance to return the favor.  I didn't need a microphone.

A circus side-show can be a disgusting demonstration of what people are capable of doing to each other.  That was my linchpin: lure 'em in and see what they could stomach.  Maybe make them question themselves and their motivations.  As this was an adults-only show, we went pretty far and were sold out often.  I'm still proud of the logos and posters I did for this and other events, thereby further developing my skills for making trick films.

I had a plan (smirk!) to keep a balance between wage work and creating my art and my music, and gradually replacing the stupid jobs with income from my art.  But I fell for the idea that a better education might get one access to better paid jobs, requiring less of my lifetime.  I was so naive to think that actual knowledge was required.

It cost me years trying to achieve, among other things, my higher school certificate through evening classes to catch up on things I had missed in bad schools, where emotionally abusive teachers were the norm, of whom only one went to jail for sexual abuse of a pupil.

I still see the purpose of the educational system I grew up with more as providing job opportunities and a place to park one's children in order to have more time for wage work.  Learning was optional: "The Markets" require unskilled workers too, as, noted in the Wannsee Conference Protocol (1942).

Yet I always loved learning.  Even the smallest hint can add details to the view of one's surroundings, lifting the fog a bit more.

Two years in a physically demanding full-time job with an additional 20 hours per week of evening class turned out to be my limit.  Switching to educating myself changed everything!

Taking the time to go really deep on what I wanted to understand, I unearthed nearly all the answers I sought.  Remembering the situations in which I realized that I wasn't stupid still turns my stomach - the large chunks of lifetime spent stunted by low self-esteem.  Bullies react to that like sharks to blood in the water, over incredible distances.

To understand a basic natural law of physics, I go back to the first attempts to capture it in a formula.  Those were rough and simple sketches, which through further research got more refined.  The core of it is still there (quantum physics was a shock for all of us, but I had to start somewhere).  Finding answers buried deep under unnecessary complexity still infuriates me.  Back then, the frustration over all the lifetime taken by "parrot or perish" really got me - I had to take long walks to calm down before being able to continue.  This was personal!

Working full-time and educating myself in my free time left no air for much else.  Letting a hammer fall on my consciousness from time to time to forget who I was and be able to continue was a strategy.  Don't do that.  Being too blocked up to vent through creating art in those times only added to the internal pressure.

To cut this short: it was all for nothing.  In post-factual times, where "alternative facts" trump; where "Truth™" depends on an individual's mood, social status, or gut instincts; where we mess with our heads for LOLs; where "divide and exit" is the go-to strategy, facts became vapid.

I got fired from most jobs, paid or unpaid.  The reason was usually social interactions.  Small talk equals hell in real life for me.  One person or more and I become tense and talk in an affected way, which puts people off.  Avoidance of eye contact gets mistaken as lying.  I also can't unsee any flaw in my output, so I sought to achieve the best results possible.  I, myself, never knowingly bothered anybody to keep up with my standards.  This is a burden I saddled myself with, thus I have to carry it on my own.  I had to learn that others didn't see it that way, for whatever reason(s).

I got fired from working as an unskilled worker, despite having successfully completed an apprenticeship in a field I won't work in even if my life depended on it.  I failed to keep alive music bands and rehearsal rooms.  I loved doing support work over the phone for telcos and such, yet didn't get along with the chaos behind the scenes.  How did they not sink?!  My latest attempt, becoming a clock and watch maker, ended when my boss laughed in my face: "Your only chance is suicide," resulting in my fourth burnout in series.

Being diagnosed with autism and ADHD at the age of 42 (yes, really) explained a lot.  Again, mainly through research I had to do on my own.

Being diagnosed late in life, sadly, is pretty normal.  Many don't reach their 30s due to depression and resulting physical ailments and mental disorders acquired from our social environments.  Autism presents no danger to anyone.  People do.

Most of the autistic people I met are more creative than what I assume to be the average, with all of them being very interested in many things around them and highly creative - making music, tinkering with tech (to make music), sewing clothes, being painters, playing in amateur theater groups, working as stagehands, building stage props.  Some even attend hacker conferences, too.

"Artist" can be read as a nicer term for being broke, which funnels one back into jobs that grind one down.  Of those people on the autism spectrum I came to know, many have more than one professional qualification, yet often are long-term unemployed due to the same challenges I faced.  Trauma-bonding, anyone?

Judge one by one's actions?  Those who use their skills to cause harm to others most often suffer from a fear of losing control, disguised as greed, bullying, being con-men, hucksters, extortionists - you know them.  Personalities shallow as a decal, a gnawing void inside that needs to be fed like a drug habit 24/7.  Those bad apples can cause serious harm, not only to themselves.  There are therapies for that.  They all start with being honest to yourself.  Hardly any of them have the guts required, and they know it.

Not becoming such a bastard takes even more grit.

Will it pay off?  Should that matter?!

I'll end with an anecdote on hacking that changed my view of the world in one short sentence: When traveling through rural parts of Asia, I went to a shoemaker's workshop to get my rather cheap sandals fixed.  While having them patched up, I was asked about my experiences there so far.  So I expressed my deep admiration for the people's skills in fixing stuff, like refilling disposable lighters several times, without one of them ever leaking.  "They have to," the shoemaker dryly remarked, not missing a beat.  That shut me up, realizing how ignorant that sounded, and I still feel that way every time I retell that story.  When being creative is a must, not an option, one's worldview can change thoroughly.

princess greybeard still is somewhere out there, alive and well, in love with a squirrelspirit, taking care of wildlife, creating art, figuring things out, and sharing knowledge - except the bits about frogs... oh dear, here it comes again!