Our Audacity
We've admittedly never known when to quit. People have been advising us to since even before we got started. You may be somewhat familiar with the thought process: play it safe, don't make waves, lead a comfortable and uneventful life. It just wasn't for us - and, we know, not for many of those reading this.
We've faced all kinds of struggles and challenges throughout our existence, many of which could have tipped the balance if we weren't fairly stubborn and we didn't have support from so many in the hacker world. The steady decline of the print market, the loss of bookstores, distributors who disappeared with our money more times than we can count, and, of course, increased printing costs. To even survive without the help of advertisers is a testament to the loyalty and the strength of our readers. You make the impossible happen - and have for some time.
Then there's HOPE. This unique project has brought together many thousands from around the world for 12 truly amazing conferences in New York. We've seen it expand steadily over the years, as we've seen the attendees and the hacker community grow, mature, and flourish. We don't have the space to list the many uphill battles involved in organizing these things, but what we see after each event has always filled us with tremendous pride.
Hackers On Planet Earth started as yet another crazy idea of how a European-style gathering of hackers should also be able to happen in the States. Before our first conference, the largest hacker get-togethers were just that: get-togethers mostly of people who already knew each other. And those were great and extremely important in helping to construct what followed. In fact, it was the cancellation of one of those intimate gatherings (Summercon) in 1994 that led to the birth of HOPE as a one-time replacement. From that point, the landscape started to change and big hacker conferences began to spread and thrive. Today, DEFCON in Las Vegas regularly gets over 20,000 people to show up, yet for the most part has managed to stay true to the hacker spirit that's been there from the beginning. And HOPE made its own history, expanding the horizons of what constitutes hacking, bringing in speakers like Jello Biafra, Daniel Ellsberg, and the Yes Men to join hacker legends like Steve Wozniak, Kevin Mitnick, and Richard Stallman. Concepts and goals like hacktivism, The Tor Project, hackerspaces, and SecureDrop all had early audiences at HOPE conferences, and enthusiastic ones at that. In addition to the tech, we mixed in discussions of justice and empowerment. Over the years, we've managed to give the stage to well over 1000 speakers. We saw the community grow, become more inclusive and representative of gender, and open a continuing dialogue on how to do better. Instead of running from the controversy, we openly embraced it - and found that it made us stronger. And the best part was that most of our attendees really seemed to get that.
Of course, the apparent loss of our hotel has really thrown a wrench into things. From the beginning, all but one of the HOPE conferences has been held at the Hotel Pennsylvania in Manhattan. Being right in the middle of midtown certainly had its advantages. But when we were recently confronted with a tripling of the price we were paying, we knew that HOPE couldn't remain there, at least not without fundamentally changing what HOPE was. We never wanted to price ourselves out of the reach of many of our attendees. Accessibility has always been one of our passions and losing that would be a really bitter pill to swallow.
When we broke the news in late July, we expected to hear messages of support. But we were absolutely floored by the amount. What's more, we were unprepared at how many people wanted to support the conference regardless of where it was. A significant number actually said they would prefer it if we weren't located in Manhattan, where everything tends to be more expensive. All kinds of ideas have been sent to us, including alternative venues, conference formats, and logistical ideas we had never even thought of before. In short, the hacker community helped to rejuvenate our passion and motivated us to really spare no effort in figuring out how we could make this work.
It's easy to forget sometimes, even when you're in the midst of it, how amazing things can continue to happen when the right people are working with you. We're used to being told that something is impossible - and then doing it anyway. That's how we've felt about all of our conferences so far, because everyone knew it simply wasn't possible to pull something like that off. But we've never been particularly practical or big fans of constricting rules and conformity. This annoys the hell out of some people, but we're fairly used to that reaction to most of the things we do. Plus, it's always good to be annoying the right people.
As we go to press, we're not yet at the stage where we know what's going to happen in the summer of 2020, which is when the next HOPE conference was supposed to be held. By the time this issue comes out, we should have a good idea one way or another what the future of HOPE will be. So we're setting a date of Monday, October 21st, 2019 to share this information with the world. We will post an announcement at www.hope.net and www.2600.com on that day. And while we can't say for sure at this point whether this will be good or bad news, we can say that we've got the very best people working on this and that we have the support of so many others around the world. And when you've got all that on your side, it's very hard for magic not to occur.