lee felsenstein just finished his keynote and it was hopeful in an era that feels at times dystopian to many of us.

he related our current era in computing to the mainframe days of the 60s
and early 70s. back then, tools were black boxes whose access was
restricted to only a small cult of users who were "relieved of the need to understand operation." on top of that, the hardware was so resource-heavy
and expensive that it was inaccessible to almost everyone.

of course, as people like felsenstein started to develop "micro" and
"personal" computing systems in the 70s and 80s, the reigning "powers that
be" just kept doing what they always did: restricting knowledge of their
own systems (both hardware and software) to as few people as possible at
the greatest possible expense.

as felsenstein said repeatedly in the talk, the mentality from those in
power was "this you shall not know," and of course history is repeating
itself today. he made reference to bill gates' "open letter to hobbyists"
that warned developers to "stop sharing the goddamned code" (my
paraphrase). that "knowledge for me, but not for you" mentality is alive
and strong today, where the people developing LLMs are training them on
other people's IP and then turning around and sending cease-and-desists to
the developers of indy reverse-engineered projects (OpenClaw for instance).

so what does lee felsenstein think we should do about it? well, luckily we
are hackers. we are those fringe, disempowered outcasts of society whose primary concerns, according to felsenstein, are virtuosity, the respect of
our similarly outcast peers, and the liberation of captive information.

what can we do in response to oppressive systems that are putting up rules
to restrict our access to knowledge and power?

felsenstein says, "we can violate the rules, which is our specialty."