Communist Hackers

Hackers are some of the most petite-bourgeois and untrustworthy people on earth, but the revolution will need the help of hackers to carry out their communications, operations, organization, and more. What role do you think hackers will have in the real revolutionary communist party, and how many of them do you think are possible to recruit and educate on Marxism (rather than "Free software" liberalism or petite-bourgeois, CIA-poser anarchism)? Do you think it will be possible to receive technological assistance from existing communist states and parties, like Cuba, DPRK, and the CPC? What kinds of apps and websites should communist hackers be building?
Please share your thoughts on the matter.

Other urls found in this thread:

stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html
marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/
gen.lib.rus.ec/
ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-0001-introduction-to-computer-science-and-programming-in-python-fall-2016/
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

The computers cannot stop the masses.

Uh… ok? Care to say something actually meaningful/

nice slogan, now how about you actually elaborate an argument against the OP

...

I'm not opposed to free software, I'm opposed to the liberal, utopian ideology of RMS, as well as the corporate-friendly vision of all the major free software projects. In communism, all software should be open sourced by law.

We all agree. But the only way we're going to fight the bourgeoisie in the future is exactly how cyberpunk depicted the situation. It's all going to be online.

Hackers as in "lol bro I took down your Minecraft server" or hackers as in the original definition?

That is utterly fucking retarded.

I mean any programmers, IT people, engineers, etc.

We already have a whole board for questions like this:
>>>/gnussr/


Do your research on Cybersyn, and read towards a New Socialism. Computers are necessary to build any functioning socialist society in the 21st Century.


It's not all going to be online, a lot of IRL activism, and fighting is going to be necessary, but granted, most of the *spontaneous* political organisation of the lower classes happens on the internet, whether building a vanguard out of this shit is also going to start in Cyberspace remains to be seen.

Please read Lenin and avoid saying ignorant nonsense such as this.

Using computers for planning purposes =/= hacking computers for revolution somehow

I've never heard about communist hackers, it's an anarchist field.

gross

Free Software is about freedom, not transparency.

I have read Lenin, how's about you learn to use his method of analysis, and read something written in the last fucking decade, to get an idea of how his ideas apply to the modern world, rather than just regurgitating his tactics wholesale without regard to the context that led him to develop those plans.

And just to elaborate on that "most of the spontaneous organisation happens online" point:
1)(A series of 4chan raids spawned the Anonymous, which spawned OWS, which paved the way for Bernie Sanders, who (while a SocDem himself), has made it socially acceptable to be a straight-up socialist again in the US for the first time in years
2)A different series of 4chan raids spawned Gamergate, which spawned the Alt-Right, which got Trump elected President
3)Black Lives Matter started off as a hashtag on twitter
4)The Egyptian Revolution of 2011, (as well as most of the rest of the Arab Spring), was primarily organised nebulously through social media.
5)A lot of Eastern Ukrainians are organising against the west, and a lot of Western Ukrainians are organising against Russia using VK (basically Slavic Facebook), using the site to spread information to their mates on the other side of the divide, which is royally fucking up both sides battle plans.

None of those movements did anything IRL until they'd been building up steam online for months, or years beforehand. There was a time when the internet played little to no role in social organisation, those days are gone. Virtually everyone communicates with their mates primarily through the internet, and gets their news primarily through the internet, so it only makes sense that spontaneous social movements would start up primarily through the internet. Knowing how to build a movement through Social Media today is what having your own Newspaper printing press was in Lenin's day, without it, we cannot possibly achieve our goal.

There's already been a lot of work done by left or libertarian leaning tech people to make tools that can help people organize, communicate, avoid censorship and etc. Not to mention various anti-establishment hacker groups under different flags who have attacked corps, leaked data.

What more do you want exactly?

You're actually retarded. You can be a programmer, a person in IT or an engineer and not be a hacker. I've met a couple of programmers before that can think logically and can program well, yet are not hackers. Read this:
stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html
This is a very well written article on what hacking is, read it.

Literally a bunch of CIA ops run by Google employees.

Bernie didn't make anything happen, the entire election only reflected existing trends and tensions. Moreover, being a straight-up socialist is still extremely taboo, and if you go to any Democratic Cops of America meeting you'll know what I mean, they are literally scared of talking about communism.

They didn't get him elected.

Another CIA op, a genuine proletarian revolution CAN'T organize on US-owned social media.

Propaganda is not organization, it is the activity of an organization.

Let's pretend anything you described was a genuine revolution. Then that'd be vanguard activity, not the spontaneous activity of the masses. The only real spontaneous uprisings of the masses lately in the USA have been Ferguson (pre-BLM) and the NODAPL movement. They didn't take place online. The communist vanguard is so non-existent that both of these spontaneous movements had no guidance, no assistance, and were quickly brought under the fold of liberal, billionaire-funded orgs.

Stallman is literally autistic and half his definitions are totally ad-hoc nonsense. Any programmer or tech worker attempting to aid communist revolution would by definition end up hacking, because we'll be starting from scratch and need a lot of stuff made up on the fly.

Citation fucking needed.

Free software is just a guarantee that the source is available. Yes, I am aware that ancaps pioneered the term "open source," but it genuinely doesn't matter when I'm talking about making programs open source by law. A law requiring programs to be open source goes much further than Stallman's corporate appeasement!

works for google

works for google

Good luck.

read the fucking posts you're responding to.

Most of what they say is just plain wrong.

These groups are a joke and likely honeypot. They haven't accomplished anything.

Can you explain what you mean when you say that most of what tech people making communication tools say is wrong? Take something like signal messenger. It's an encrypted messaging application that anyone can use made in large part by Moxie Marlinspike who seems to have at least some leftist sympathies. What exactly is wrong about any of that?

Free software is a guarantee that the programmer does not control the user. Availability of the source code is not enough, it has to fulfil the four "freedoms:"
1. to run the program anyway you want
2. to study and modify how the program works
3. to be able to share the software with whoever you want
4. to be able to share your modifications to the software
You can publish the source code but still deny any of these.

I'll never understand why my fellow tech professionals (hackers included) turned out to be mostly right-libertarian. How can you suck corporate dick when cyberpunk culture is almost entirely anti-business?

Just look at lainchan or arisuchan, it's full of traditionalist """cyberpunks"""

These liberals say "Use TOR, use Signal!" as a mantra and try to promote the use of their (spy agency and corporate-funded) tools as much as possible. They say they want to help "activists," but all their tools ever get used for is regime change operations and liberal diversions. The reality is that these tools have many downsides, they generate metadata, and their implementations and platforms (TOR browser, your Windows desktop, your smartphone) have vulnerabilities as well. Even in the ideal situation where these tools have some use to us (and there are other tools of at least equal use, such as PGP), they are not a cure-all, they don't magically create communism or a revolutionary party, they are not a comprehensive OPSEC praxis.
Ask yourself, does Hezbollah use Signal and TOR? Do the Naxalites? What do you imagine they would use it for? And how about existing socialist and anti-imperialist states like Cuba, DPRK, Syria, etc. Where's their TOR site? How do I chat with their reps on Signal?
The organization of the revolutionary party is not the same as the activity of the revolutionary party, they are two closely-linked and interdependent things, but there are different procedures. Lenin pointed out that the masses shared and spread Bolshevik propaganda so much among themselves that the police were overwhelmed and couldn't prevent its spread by arresting any small handful of people. The reason they couldn't arrest the Bolsheviks was because the Bolsheviks operated in strict secrecy.
Do modern communists want communist propaganda on twitter, facebook, google, etc? Yes, as much as possible! Though, as communism becomes more popular, these capitalist social media platforms will respond accordingly and begin deploying automatic censorship (google already is blocking socialist and antiimperialist sites from its search results). Communist propaganda activities must be as flexible as possible, reaching as many communities online AND OFFLINE as they can. But they can't organize on social media.

And how exactly would any of that be a problem if copyright was abolished and source code was mandated public property?

Lain is a nice place; haven't visited the latter. Hilariously however, they're pretty common on torrent sites, especially private trackers.

Yeah, also anime subbers (such as commie), though a lot of it seems to be semi-ironic.

They're literally petite-bourgeois. That's it. That's why they're all ancaps and liberals.

TOR and signal are both well audited tools that do a quite good job of what they're designed to do. TOR has several issues and should not be trusted for complete anonymity but is still one of the best options. And yes I'd imagine hezbollah would use either signal or a similar program for secure communications between operatives. Of course its better if you can develop the code yourself rather than use something from a 3rd party that may or may not be compromised but most organizations don't have the resources for that. For a little while there was a Holla Forums tech collective talking about doing some development but it fell apart pretty quickly.


Lot of koolaid drinking among the silicon valley tech crowd about how their companies are going to change the world for the good and the governments aren't agile enough to do the same.

< Fuck the commies, they'd censor everything and killed 600 gorillion people

Libertarians are a strange bunch.

This is what I'm talking about, the myopia. The core protocol is audited, so the metadata it generates doesn't matter, the fact that most people are using these tools on their smartphones or Windows/Mac laptops (tracking devices) doesn't matter.

LMAO, how did Hezbollah ever exist before TOR and Signal came to save the Lebanese? What a joke!

Most of what had been said about prostitutes, applies to hackers (or any IT specialists).

???

Am I wrong in guessing that you are affiliating with the International Committee for a Fourth International, or the IYSSE?

Look you might be aware that the OS's are backdoored in various ways, maybe you're even familiar with ime and some of the other backdoors in hardware. I'm not as familiar with phone hardware but from what I've been told the situation on mobile is much much worse from a privacy perspective. And yet any organization of substantial size is going to need to find a way to communicate with phones and computers. Hezbollah uses phones and computers, not for everything of course but I guarantee you they use them.

Yep, you're wrong. I want nothing to do with Trots.

Ah, sorry:

tl;dr: IT specialists are not inherently Petit-Bourgeois. Those who work in large companies/on big projects are almost universally Proletariat (it is not the computer that is MoP there, but the organization/infrastructure/wages that keep them working).

Hmm…

It's true! But this is exactly what I'm talking about. There's no "solution" that consists of installing someone's app and then just using it. Revolutionaries need tested and proven procedures for compartmentalizing and handling their internet/phone activity itself, as well as their secret communications. And their plans must ALSO have backup plans. The fact is that in any war, both sides will at times slip up, or gain the upper hand. So part of the task of revolutionary organization is also making the organization itself not impervious (an impossible ideal), but resistant to infiltration and decapitation, and able to adapt and recover when compromised.
Lenin:
"In our case, on the other hand, the rapid alternation of legal and illegal work, which made it necessary to keep the general staff - the leaders - under cover and cloak them in the greatest secrecy, sometimes gave rise to extremely dangerous consequences. The worst of these was that in 1912 the agent provocateur Malinovsky got into the Bolshevik Central Committee. He betrayed scores and scores of the best and most loyal comrades, caused them to be sentenced to penal servitude, and hastened the death of many of them. That he did not cause still greater harm was due to the correct balance between legal and illegal work. As member of the Party's Central Committee and Duma deputy, Malinovsky was forced, in order to gain our confidence, to help us establish legal daily papers, which even under tsarism were able to wage a struggle against the Menshevik opportunism and to spread the fundamentals of Bolshevism in a suitably disguised form. While, with one hand, Malinovsky sent scores and scores of the finest Bolsheviks to penal servitude and death, he was obliged, with the other, to assist in the education of scores and scores of thousands of new Bolsheviks through the medium of the legal press."

Lenin's story illustrates perfectly how a revolutionary party must not only practice secrecy, but also engage in activities that force infiltrators and police to work FOR communism (IE counterproductive to their goal) in the period before they are found out. And it shows that even the most successful organizations will have to deal with breaches and moles. The idea that there is a magic bullet for security is antithetical to all real life revolutionary OPSEC.

Could you please tell me how anything I'm saying is a Trot talking point? I have literally never read a WSWS article that has anything to do with this topic.

No.

Yes.

I don't think any of the people making those apps would claim they are the sole solution or will protect you from bad opsec.


I mean they're wage laborers. Depends on whether you think high wages and pay partially in the form of stock options makes them petite-bougeoise I guess.

This is exactly the idea they promote. Moreover, most of them are liberals and (liberal) anarchists, and many are literally on CIA, NSA, DIA, etc payroll. There is absolutely no reason a communist should take their advice without intense criticism and investigation.

Those who get stock probably are PB, but those are far and few between. Modern IT industry does not consist out of start-ups from 90s and early 00s.

My fav one

read a fucking book.

They were hired by google after retard.

Idiotic adventurism, likely a honeypot org.

Hired for their service to capital.

All you're doing is shouting liberal and anarchist at positions you don't understand. I'm not even sure who you could be referring to besides RMS, and he's mostly apolitical aside from technology and internet where he is decidingly leftwing and talks about how corporations control you through unfree software and how you should use free software in order to be actually free and away from possible corporate control. It's not a liberal talking point it's just a truism most people don't realize. Why are you shitting on useful and tested tools like TOR, Signal, Linux etc. in favor of some metaphysical "communist" software?

You sound like a bitchy leftcom.

What's the best resource to learn computer shit from scratch, for free preferably?

What are you most interested in doing, famrade?

You haven't named a single communist, all you bring up is "left leaning" and "left wing" hackers who are liberals.

I like how you slipped Linux in there, and I haven't even brought up any criticisms of Linux at all. You're a dishonest weasel.

No, I'm a Marxist-Leninist. Learn the difference:
marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/

How much do you know? I'll give a general guideline:

get textbooks here:
gen.lib.rus.ec/
usually I just google "best textbook for [x topic]" and download the most promising stuff.

Welp, looks like someone jumped the gun. Regardless, in terms of actual reading materials, I was going to suggest the ones from O'Reilly. They've got books on pretty much every topic, and they're generally very friendly once you sit down and read.

If you're absolutely, totally new to programming, but decide to install Linux, the
first PDF is excellent for learning how to use Bash, the language used by the Terminal.

Otherwise, I'd strongly recommend starting with Python. It's the learner-language of choice for most educators, but it's also extremely powerful in its automation and scripting capabilities. The second PDF ought to serve you well.

Yes, this is a good choice user. I think Python, and then standard C are a good pairing, because they give a combo of high-level abstraction (Python) and lower-level, tricky memory and pointer shit (C), without much distraction or cruft in either language. Also, user should use command line and text editor for his programs.
Also, bash scripting might not really make sense in terms of syntax or real-world usage unless you're already doing programming projects and have some kind of purpose in mind. You absolutely should not be writing standalone programs in bash, it is only glue for chaining programs together.

Oh yeah and use this and the accompanying textbook/lectures/assignments:
ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-0001-introduction-to-computer-science-and-programming-in-python-fall-2016/

Is this achieved or even achievable in the current capitalist state of the world? No? Until then free software is the closest we can get to ensure proles have access to the best tools.

lol retard, really, all hackers are PB? hacking and programming are simply job skills, no different than plumbing or laying tile, just with more math. What about all those DPRK hackers, are they 'pb' as well?

Read the fucking posts.

You're an illiterate moron, read Marx and Lenin before talking.

Hired in 2016.

Hired in 2014.

Is it really that costly to admit a direct counterargument?

see

Where did you come up with this bullshit? A career hacker working for The Man or ripping off ordinary people, or creating some stupid app that produces ad revenue, obviously petty-pork. But computer is a tool, just like a hammer or factory or what ever, and it is just as easily used for common good instead of porky things.
I dont understand why you decided to begin with that stupid off-hand remark. Explain yourself!

This. OP is a fahgoeth.

It's just a fact, most hackers are ancraps or liberals. They make shitloads of money so they don't give a fuck about anyone else.