Hacking at Leaves - A Doc, But Even More So

by Peter Blok

I first met Johannes Grenzfurthner years ago at HOPE, back when the Hotel Pennsylvania elevators rattled like modems and the hallways smelled of solder and coffee.  Since then, he has been one of the constants, always there, always stirring things up, always reminding everyone that hacking is not just about devices but about systems.  He has, as so many others too, become part of the HOPE ecosystem itself.

When his new documentary Hacking at Leaves premiered at HOPE XV in 2024, it did not feel like an outsider project dropping into our world.  It felt like an internal diagnostic.  HOPE and 2600 are not just referenced in the movie; they are embedded in its code.  You see them on screen.  You hear them in the dialogue.  We are literally part of it.

The movie begins as a mock-patriotic documentary pitch.   Johannes argues with a personified Uncle Sam on an old CRT monitor, promising to make a positive film about makerspaces and the American spirit.  That premise collapses quickly.  What follows is an audio-visual exploit: a hacked documentary that splices the DIY optimism of hacker culture with the brutal hardware of colonial history.  The story moves from a hackerspace in Durango, Colorado, to the legacy of the Navajo Nation, tracing how extraction of minerals, of data, and of people follows the same operating logic.

As the pandemic hits, the Durango makerspace shifts from tinkering with gadgets to producing DIY medical gear for nearby communities.  Their improvisation mirrors another reality just over the state line, where Navajo families face the COVID wave with almost no infrastructure, limited water access, and decades of environmental damage left by uranium mining and government neglect.  The contrast is painful and revealing.  The hacker ideal of "fix it yourself" collides with a history in which self-reliance was systematically taken away.

An anonymous anarcho-syndicalist Navajo hacker appears as a counter-commentator someone Johannes says he first met at HOPE in 2012.  This figure links the ethics of open access and mutual aid with the realities of Indigenous survival.  They describe life on the reservation as a constant negotiation with scarcity and control, a world where every act of communication, repair, or connection already counts as hacking.  The same instinct that builds community mesh networks also keeps remote families connected to water, food, and history.

Hacking at Leaves turns the hacker's gaze back on the hacker scene itself.  It revisits the familiar genealogy of the Whole Earth Catalog, CCC, L0pht, and HOPE, and reframes it as a cycle of creation and capture.  DIY culture is celebrated, but the film keeps showing how easily it is domesticated: how "makerspaces" become DARPA incubators, how "innovation" becomes extraction with better branding.  Uncle Sam keeps demanding a clean, heroic narrative, and the film replies with static and laughter.

It is messy, funny, angry, and packed with references: (((Žižek))), (((Jello Biafra))), Navajo hydrologists, punk history, (((Carl Sagan))), even RoboCop.  The editing feels like a distributed denial of service attack on linear storytelling.  Grenzfurthner does not explain; he connects, overloads, and redirects.  Watching it at HOPE was like watching a live packet capture of our own culture - what we were, what we became, and what is left after the hype wave passes.

And then, true to form, he released the entire film for free into the wild on the Internet Archive.  No paywall, no DRM, no licensing restrictions.  Just a public upload, an open port.  It is a fitting gesture for a movie that treats access itself as a moral act.

For me, the film hits close to home.  It is not a nostalgic look back at the "good old hacker days."  It is a confrontation with the question of what hacking means when every exploit eventually gets patched or monetized.  Hacking at Leaves does not offer answers, but it gives you the right discomfort.