A Tale of Many Hackers

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...

Had those immortal words not been penned so long ago, we believe we might have spoken them for the first time after the summer of 2014.  It has been a true roller coaster.

Any year that a HOPE conference takes place in is always an extremely energetic one.  We spend the winter and spring organizing and coming up with new ideas in the hopes that the summer will be a fun and memorable occasion for thousands.  And it always is.

But we had a real monkey wrench thrown into the works when an all too familiar scenario presented itself.  Our biggest distributor - Source Interlink - decided to leave the world of magazine distribution and take all of our earned payments for half a year with them.  At the time of their closure, they were holding invoices of around $100,000 in our name, money that they had been collecting from everyone buying our magazines in stores around the country.

We've been down this road before and it's yet another challenge that publishers are forcibly burdened with.  It's almost driven us out of business at least once before.  This time, considering the perilous nature of today's publishing industry, it was particularly ill-timed.

But there's something else which makes this chain of events especially frustrating.  Source Interlink didn't actually go out of business.  In fact, if you were to call them, you would hear a recording saying that they were "thriving."  That's because they adopted the corporate tactic of splitting their company in two and pretending that there was no connection between them.  Then, if one of the halves started to do poorly, they could shut it down, not pay any of their debts, and screw over their employees, all completely legally, and all the while staying in business with the other more profitable half.  That half of Source Interlink publishes popular magazines like MotorTrend, Hot Rod, Surfer, and Snowboarder, among many others.

But while this may be a clever legal maneuver to avoid responsibility for their debts, we believe it is as wrong and against the spirit of the law as outright theft.  To counter the argument that these were two completely separate and independent companies, consider:

• Both entities shared the exact same IP on their respective websites.
• Both had the exact same mailing address.

On the very day that Source Interlink (distribution half) decided to shut its doors, Source Interlink (publishing half) decided to change their name to The Enthusiast Network (TEN).

All of this is very clear evidence that the two supposedly separate companies were working very closely together.  Imagine how closely together they were working behind the scenes and the steps that were taken to ensure that none of their magazines were screwed over by their actions.

There's not much more we can say or do about this, other than to present the facts and hopefully let the marketplace judge The Enthusiast Network for their business practices.  It won't help us any, but we are secure in the knowledge that we would never disrespect our supporters by slithering out of any commitment we have to them.  Whether it's the paper edition of 2600, the electronic edition, Club-Mate importing, the HOPE conferences, or any other new project you support and we embark upon, we will always take full responsibility for them and fulfill all of our obligations with their combined strength.  This, we believe, is simple corporate morality.

The project this year that wasn't at all harmed by outside influences was clearly HOPE X.  Thanks to the hard work and volunteer efforts of hundreds, along with the thousands of people who attended, HOPE X was likely our most successful conference to date.  That success reflects directly on the community and how it's matured and become incredibly relevant to the global dialogue.  Our last minute surprise talk by Edward Snowden underlined this quite well.  But so did the wide variety of talk submissions we received throughout the year from individuals with great ideas and expert analysis on the topics of privacy and surveillance.  These are things we've been talking about for decades and the rest of the world has finally taken notice.  These are the people to listen to and we are so incredibly proud to have been able to offer the forum in which they were able to be heard.

We didn't expect the mass media to really get this and that's fine.  We're used to it.  As we have seen many times in the past few years regarding many different subjects, when the mass media misses a story, the rest of us pick it up and use our skills and ingenuity to get it out to the public anyway, using resources like Livestream and social media.  Each time this happens, the mass media becomes a little less relevant and this new type of "self-service media" becomes a bit more accessible and important to the mainstream.  We have more people in the conversation now who are paying attention than ever before - and it's all because we've retained and refined control of our technology, rather than allow it to simply be used upon us.

This kind of thing makes some of us uneasy because it's not what we believe the hacker world is defined as.  We would be correct.  The hacker world cannot be defined as anything this specific.  It's incredibly broad and diverse.  The best we can do is represent some diverse bits of it, but even a hacker journal will only be able to scratch the surface.  That's why it's a mistake to assume that hackers are all about complex computer code or even confined to computers at all.  We're not necessarily hacktivists and we don't by default know the intricacies of telephone networks.  Hackers can be technical or politically aware in one direction or another - or none at all.  They can be all sorts of things, but what's indisputable is that they are interested in how things work, willing to experiment, and open to sharing what they discover.

The subject matter is always changing and we'd all be wise to pay attention.  Our magazine is different than it was in the past, and HOPE X wasn't the same conference that we had even two years ago.  Yet it's all very familiar.  This is what progression of thought and ideas looks like.  It's a ride we all should be on.

As always, we intend to weather the storms and enjoy our collective accomplishments.  Despite the occasional precariousness that comes along, we are quite secure in the belief that we're not doing this alone and that we are all going to be there to support, to listen, and to brainstorm.  We hope this sentiment is widely felt throughout our unique community.