Did we learn anything from Anonymous? w/ Kate Stapleton | Devconnect 2025
Continuing the publication of interviews from DevConnect in Buenos Aires, I sat down with Kate Stapleton, a former member of Anonymous and privacy advocate, now able to speak publicly after the statute of limitations expired. In this interview, Kate recounts the origins of Anonymous in early internet culture, IRC, and the Church of Scientology protests, while challenging the myth of Anonymous as a single unified movement. For safety and clarity, she does not reveal her former online handles, ...
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Transcript
One can be
canceled on this show. I'm gonna give them my best give them my best effort. If we showed them the degree to which their, you know, their rights and their privacy and their digital online identity was being eroded, you can send me to jail, it's not gonna do anything because our movement is gonna continue without me and I believe in it to the point where I'm willing to give my life for this. It's like we have been fighting all this time to expose these secrets, to expose this surveillance, to expose the way that, you you know, your rights and your privacy is being eroded. And now we've exposed it and you don't care. So where do we go from here? And what's the point? This is what happens when people don't touch grass. Go outside, take a walk, look up at the sky. Hackers touch grass. Mister Robot is, in my opinion, my very humble opinion, the most accurate show and representation of hacking culture. The terrorists are the ones that have things to hide. If you have nothing to hide, you're a good, you know, patriot and you're, you know, a good Christian, God fearing American. But
This episode is sponsored by NIM, the world's most private VPN that protects your Internet traffic and metadata. Unlike traditional VPNs, NIM uses a decentralized mix net to scramble your Internet data, hiding who you're talking to, when, and how often. You can switch between full mixed up mode for maximum anonymity or a faster VPN mode for everyday use. Pay in crypto or fiat, and even your payment stays anonymous thanks to z k powered anonymous credentials. Take back control of your online life at nim.com. Sign up today using the code blockchain socialist and get an extra month for free. Hello, everyone. I am here again at Dev Connect in Buenos Aires. I have once again been able to take advantage of Ethereum's budget, and they provided me a set where I can do my interviews. It's very nice. And I'm with Kate Stapleton, ex hacktivist, member of anonymous, digital privacy advocate, and also recently released from statute of limitations. Yes. And so can publicly talk about her experience as part of this hacker collective. So, yeah, I I I met you before and I had no idea that you think that that was in your history and your past, so I think that you'd be credible. With. You know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe you just wanna give a quick introduction for who you are. Let's start the story a little bit of how you got into anonymous and getting into programming and hacking and and all that stuff. Getting into the lore. Yeah. What's your lore? Yes. I mean, I've been coding for
over twenty years now. Oh, god. My dad's in the space. He's a cryptographer. So got into, you know, computer programming, like, basics, you know, low level c languages. And that kind of, you know, brought me into being involved in cybersecurity. And we're talking like ten plus, probably fifteen years ago. At the time, there was nothing like we didn't have bug bounties. Right? There was no organizations where you would join and like be a hacker for hire. Mhmm. And the whole thing was, like, you couldn't find me online. Right? I didn't have a resume. I didn't have a LinkedIn. Right? Like, I could only be referred to work for you if, you know, one of my clients that I worked for before kinda got, you know, got us in contact. And that's kinda how the the, you know, the hacker space used to be. It was like white hat, you know, hacking, pen testing. I did a lot of red teaming, a little bit of blue teaming. And I decided to kinda transition from cybersecurity into crypto when people started asking and, like, demanding a resume. And, like, the the space felt very, like, red tape y, very, you know, I felt like the, you know, the corporations were moving in and trying to, like, regulate it. So, like, the minute that I needed to, like, send you my LinkedIn to be hired, I was like, no. I'm out. And I was kinda looking for, like, the new fun thing and I was already, you know, obviously aware of Bitcoin. But this is kind of when Ethereum was emerging. And I was like, alright. This seems like the new, you know, Wild West. I'm gonna get into this. And ten plus years later, here we are. Cool. So then when when was I imagine the anonymous stuff happened before. Yeah. So there was kind of a convergence of, you know, being involved in the cybersecurity community and the kind of early Internet culture of being on the b board of four Chan. Right. Right. Were you a four channer? Yes. Oh, wow. I mean, that's actually where anonymous came from. Sure. Yeah. So it kind of emerged you know, we we organized and, like, chat over IRC. But this would have been in, like, '20 two thousands? The early two thousands. So, like, you know, the the b board of four Chan kind of emerged as, like, the the asshole of the Internet as we lovingly called it. But anonymous, you know, kind of came out of so the Church of Scientology had an internally circulating video of Tom Cruise and it was like a recruitment video and it was never meant to be publicly, like, distributed. It was like only for, you know, the like crazy fucking Scientology members. And someone got a hold of it. I don't know how they got a hold of it to this day. I'm sure somebody very deep in the forum knows. But he was basically talking about how if he came up on a car crash, he could save them. Right? Like, he could, like, save this person from death, but he couldn't do it publicly because then, like, the world would know. And it was like Like his secret powers? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Like, full on crazy from a crazy person. Like, that I'm like, no. That's that's real crazy. But it was this yeah. It was just like this story about, like, how he could, like, save them and heal them, but he couldn't do it publicly because then the world would know about, like, the power of Scientology. Right. Right. And so somebody found this video and started circulating it. And it was being and at the time, on 4chan, you could either there's kind of a war between the people who, like, wanted anonymous, like, throwaway accounts or wanted to, like, have their account be named and, like, kind of develop, like, credential and, like, a history. Yeah. Yeah. And the people that were sharing it, and a lot of people active on the b board, were the the the anons. Right? Like, team anonymous. And so the Church of Scientology, like, found out that we were sharing it and thought it was hilarious because it was insane and started sending cease and desist letters. Right? They started sending us, like but they didn't really know who to send it to. Right. And so they were, like, sending it, like, dear like, they would say, like, dear anonymous because, like, every person that was sharing it, they were sending it to them. Uh-huh. And it was basically, like, you know, a like an intimidation tactic, but like they know where to send it to. We were all using like anonymous accounts. So that's kind of where like it was that and also like the team like anonymous where like you don't wanna like reveal the information, you know, as you're posting on the report. That's kind of where it came from because then we decided we're like, alright. This is hilarious that they're, like, you know, sending legal letters to anonymous and they're trying to, like, intimidate the four channers, the b board four channers. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. And so then we started organizing and, like, I flew down to Los Angeles and we were, like, marching in front of the Church of Scientology. We were, like, sending pizzas to their, you know, to the address. We were, like, this is probably very politically incorrect now, but we were sending, like, escorts and, like, little people.
Again, don't cancel me this time. It was a different time. It was a different time. Yeah.
But so then, you know Real life trolling. IRL trolling. Yeah. You know? And we just thought this was hilarious. Yeah. And they were getting so angry. And I think that was the first that that's kind of the the emergence of Anonymous is we realized, like, we can collectively come online to fuck shit up, but we can also organize in person. And then the thought was, alright. You know, the Church of Scientology, like, bad bad people. But there's actual real world work that we can do that we can kind of use this momentum and use this energy for good to solve and tackle. So that was kind of the the emergence. And then you you know, you had LulzSec, you had different factions, but the whole point of anonymous is that if you this is the example we we always used to use. If you wanna go and like take a shit on your neighbor's lawn and claim it as an active anonymous, go for it. Yeah. Yeah. We we salute you. Yeah. You know? And then, you know, when law enforcement and various government organizations tried to take us down, they couldn't because there was no us. Like we were we were a collective, right? We were kind of this hive mind and you couldn't cut one head off because there was five others operating in tandem all across the world. You know? Yeah. And that was the point of it. You know? Yeah. Is that we, you know, we had a kind of collective shared interest of furthering cryptography, encryption, privacy, you know, digital sovereignty, you know, and and and ownership of your data, but no one was policing it. Mhmm. You know? Mhmm. There was people that did good, that did bad, that did weird things, but it was all part of anonymous because that was the whole point of it. Right. Right. I mean, there are some kind of, like, you know, similarities you could point to Antifa as also being a similar type of organization that there is no head There's no central organizer. Yeah. Right. Right. And that that has to be, like, that has to be how any collective activism works. Because if there's any centralized, you know, authority, that's who they're gonna go after first. You know? If there's someone that you can, like, knock off and then the the movement dies, it's not really a movement.
Right. Right. Yeah. So, I mean, let's get into I mean, are there any, like, stories you would like to share now that you have the freedom to share about them? What are some of your best stories you like to get out there about your experience being in anonymous?
I mean, I think it it's really interesting looking back, like, how young we were. Right? We're a bunch of, like, teenagers, like, hacking you know, there was, like, people, you know, in rural I think, like, Wales, rural Ireland, you know, we were just all over. And I think the the best story was just, like, all the news reports that were painting us as, like, state sponsored hackers. And we're just, like, going to school during the day, coming home, like, you know, hacking into, like, you know, government websites. But also, like, I think there's it it's funny. Like, this is back then. Right? Every website was built in, like, PHP. So it was very, you know, it was very easy to, like, compromise the front ends. And, like, until a bit later on in the movement, we were literally just there to, like, fuck shit up. And that's also kind of the the hacker culture that was clashing a little bit with anonymous at the beginning is that we kind of just wanted to, like, fuck shit up for fun. Right? We're like, let's go and, like, break everything we can and, like, cause chaos and it's gonna be really fun. And that was kind of warring with anonymous because it's like, well, we have the ability to break things. We have the ability to get into, like, government websites. We have the ability to, like, docs emails and, like, you know, find resources that we shouldn't. Let's use this for good. And so, like, anonymous was not very like, it wasn't very, like, cohesive. Mhmm. There's a lot of, like, warring, you know, fighting factions all the time. There was a lot of infighting. And it was kind of the the emergence of, like, the white hat versus black hat, you know, hacking ethos Yeah. Of, like, we have the ability to, like, break things, so why not use that for good? Right. So, I mean, there was so much really interesting discourse happening on these I r you know, IRC channels. I wish this is very, like, antithesis to the whole point, but I wish, like, someone had logged it. Mhmm. Because these were, like, very interesting and, like, pertinent questions today of, like Yep. Why should we care? Why should we use this for good? And then people arguing, like, this is why we should. This is why we should care. This is why we should use our collective, you know, knowledge and resources and ability for good. Mhmm. And ultimately, a lot of good was done. A lot of funny things were done. Yeah. I guess yeah. Story. I did have a lot of encounters with Weave, the famous troll. I recognized right away. I'm like, this is not someone that I wanna fuck with. Right. He found out, like, my family's address and was like he asked me to When you weren't doxed or anything, like No. No. No. Yeah. You found out where my family lived. Wow. And I sent this is, like, very early on. I sent him a Bitcoin. Oh, no. Which was, like, $5 at the time. Right. Right. And so I hope you crept it. But, yeah, everyone was afraid of leave. Everyone was, like, terrified. Okay.
But yeah. I mean, I'm I'm curious to talk maybe a bit about, like, the the politics internally, like, the I mean, the way it's described, I think, it what what I what I'm hearing and what I remember from reading, I recommend the book Hacker Hoaxer Whistleblower Spy Oh, good. By Gabriela Coleman, one of my favorite books on on anonymous. But, yeah, one of the things that she kinda notes a bit is that it seemed that there was not there was no coherent political ideology Not at all. Around anonymous. But it was inclusive at the same time and kind of you in the sense that anyone can kind of Yeah. Take part in the in the fun.
Yeah. So, I mean, people think of Anonymous as this, like, one big, like, hive mind, and it wasn't. Right? This is why you had, you know, factions like LulzSec that emerged. And everyone was welcome. Everyone, you know, was was more than welcome to contribute in any way that they wanted. It became increasingly political after, you know, the the Church of Scientology kind of IRL activation hack, whatever you wanna call it. There were and will always be people that were, you know, the trolls. Right? Like, very, like, racist and sexist, but for the sake of it. Right? Like Right. This isn't actually I I really doubt that they actually felt this way. They just wanted to, like, be a troll online. You know? This is where the term, like, don't feed the trolls came from because people just come onto these, like, chat, you know, these message boards and stuff and just kind of, like, try and inject chaos and try and be an asshole for the sake of it. Right. But those people, they never so like like I said, anonymous was kind of this big blob, you know, of of people doing whatever they wanted. But the people who actually organize and actually, you know, kind of move the agenda of exposing lies, you know, exposing kind of the ways to which our privacy and our data were being mined, you know, stolen and and kind of because they were the loudest, but they weren't doing the work. You know what I mean? Right. Right. Right. And that's something that I think was
expressed really well in the book Yeah. Like Gabriela Coleman wrote that, like, yeah, there's this I mean, especially I think and it came up again in, like, 2016 with the election of Trump, I think, of just, like,
a lot of liberals just kind of being, like, all these, like, online trolls are right wing fascists, whatever. They don't actually believe that. They don't have this is the thing. The people who are allowed online, first of all, they're now probably bots. Back then we didn't, you know, we had bot servers but the bots weren't posting. Yeah. But like the people who are actually, you know, like the people who are yelling online, they don't care. This is not actually how they feel, how they think. They just want attention or they just want to come in and inject chaos. They want to disrail or derail the entire conversation. They want to interrupt and they want to, you know, halt or delay the work that's being done because that's really what it's about, Right? There's people that are doing real work and important work and, you know, dangerous work. And if the media and if the narrative focuses on that Yeah. Then you run the risk of people agreeing with it. Right? And getting on board. Whereas if you focus on, alright, well, here's all these, you know, loud sexist pigs online, no one wants to get behind that narrative. And if you tie that to the bigger one of anonymous, then it's very easy to discount what we are doing. If you were actually talking about the things that we are doing, then you run the risk of people supporting it, which is not, you know, what the kind of factions that are in charge of things want. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it's also, like, you know, interesting that, like, one of the things that I remember reading about was how
kind of, like, the expectation the, like, the the assumption
I think it's also broadly, like, the assumption is always that, like, online, you're a you're a white straight male until proven otherwise. Yeah. You're a cisgendered white guy. Yeah. Like, until proven otherwise. And especially in, like, hacker culture, I think that I mean, for people outside, that's kind of what they think. Yeah. Even internally. Like, I Sure. I I will say, like, I used to give I used to go to New York a lot. I was involved in a bunch of, you know, organizations where we're kind of trying to bridge the gap between, like, you know, TradFi normies and base I used to give Tor talks as well. Mhmm. And so I was involved in a lot of organizations that would come and give talks about privacy, you know, about privacy. You know, back then, it was like, what is pretty good privacy and why you should manually encrypt all your emails with it? Because emails back then were, you know, in plain text. But I remember at big conferences, even small conferences, it was very like in vogue and like every, probably every, not every single time, but any big talk that I did, the funny thing was to yell and interrupt me and say tits out or get the fuck out. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the questions afterwards would be like, are you a virgin? Do you have a boyfriend? Like, you were just like Like in like guys in person asking this? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. Scream like people in the audience being like, titto to get the fuck out. That was like a pretty popular thing to yell. Wow. And everyone, like, laughed. And like but if I was angry like, if I was flustered, if I was angry about it, if I, like, you know, bothered patrols. Then it was like, oh, this, like, angry, you know, woman. Like so we've come a long way, but I won't discount that part of hacker culture. Sure. Because a lot of people that learn to code, you know, were marginalized. Like, marginalized I don't think that's In different ways. Yeah. Like, they they didn't fit in. Right? Like, they weren't the popular people in school. They didn't necessarily, you know, have a huge amount of friends. They weren't maybe dating, you know, in high school. So these online communities gave them a sense of community for the first time. But because of that, because they didn't fit in, you know, in the real world, when there was people in their space like women or people that, you know, they felt threatened by, they didn't like that. Right? Yeah. Yeah. It's like, this is our space. How dare you come into it?
Yeah. I think it seems that for whatever reason, you know, hacker culture brings together people generally who are alienated,
maybe. Or That's the whole point. Right? Like Yeah. The you know, and and I I and the hacker culture, you know, is what birthed Web 3.0. Like we are here because of the Cypherpunks, right? We're here because people, you know, looked at the world and they said, you know, these systems weren't built for me, right? Like I can't thrive here because the system was not built for people who look like me, who think like me, who, you know, speak like me, who act like me. And so we created our own brave new world. Right? Like, the the work that, you know, the cryptographers through the eighties, the Cypher Phunks through the nineties, you know, all of the amazing work that led us to where we are today. We're in Argentina at DefConnect, right, with a bunch of hackers, builders, you know, cryptographers, and privacy and blockchain enthusiasts. We, you know, kind of we never fit in, right? And so rather than trying to fit in and through the work of the people who said we're never gonna fit in so let's build this brave new world. But in doing so, we have to, you know, recognize that people people lost their lives. Like people gave their they went to prison, you know, they they ended their lives, they were killed. Like, we're here because of the blood, sweat, and tears, and the work of people who didn't fit in and decided rather than trying to fight against the system, we're gonna build a new one. Sure. You know? And that's very important to recognize when you're benefiting from, you know, these new applications and these, you know, this new technology. There was a lot of hard work that went into this, and it wasn't just, alright, we're gonna, you know, make a new form of money and I'll get rich. You know?
I mean, for some people, it might have been.
Yes. But it was born out of a need for activism.
Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So I kinda wanna get into we were we were talking, I think, the other day, and you made a really interesting point about the kind of nihilism or at at least what I interpreted as, like, nihilism that kind of reached Yeah. And it was I'm curious if you can take us through the journey of, like, what was kind of what what people were expecting out of anonymous Yeah. What actually happened, and then the point to right now. I think it's important to historicize that a bit so that we can Yeah. Yeah. For the people who are, whatever, learning about all this stuff now to understand that they're in the crazy that there's people that are like, look. Just Yeah. We are on we are on the long arc of history, and we are in the middle of this arc, and it started well before now.
Yeah. So I'm gonna rewind probably like ten actually, no. More than ten. Like, probably fifteen years ago or so. And this is really when, you know, anonymous was emerging as this kind of global agent of chaos. Yeah. And the driving factor behind everything that at least me, I won't say we did, but, like, me and the people that I was, you know, active with, was we were really we felt like we were at a turning point in history. And we truly, honestly believed that if we just showed people, if we showed them in a way that was undeniable and that was tangible, if we showed them the degree to which their, you know, their rights and their privacy and their digital, you know, online identity was being eroded. We were it wasn't a question to us that people would take to the streets and riot and just, you know, demand change. Yeah. And that's why anonymous was so powerful. And this is I don't speak for all of anonymous, but I feel like this is also why it it ended up fizzling out Mhmm. Is that we had this conviction to the, you know, to the point where we were willing to go to jail. And and, you know, you you look at people who went to jail, you look at people who, you know, were brave in the face of law enforcement and said, you can send me to jail. It's not gonna do anything because our movement is gonna continue without me, and I believe in it to the point where I'm willing to give my life for this. Right. And that's the conviction that we had predicated on the fact that we knew that we were doing the right thing and that if we just showed people the degree to which the surveillance, you know, state had had taken over, they would join us in the streets and demand change. And it turned out that people didn't care. That convenience was placed much higher than convenience, you know, kind of fed into apathy, which was the general notion. And then nobody cared. And that was, I think, what was ultimately the kind of, you know, the nail in the coffin for anonymous is that we were willing to give our lives for this cause that we, you know, saw with our own eyes people didn't care about. And it was, you know, we used to call we we called it, you know, rearranging deck furniture on the Titanic. Mhmm. And that was, you know, I think, at least in my opinion, that was really what, yeah, kind of caused Anonymous to to to falter and fail is that why are we, you know, willing to risk our lives and willing to risk our freedoms and willing, you know, to risk everything for a cause and for people that ultimately broke our heart. Right? Like, we we really thought that they would get behind us. We really thought that people would care. And when it was very clear that they didn't, maybe this is what killed it. We didn't know what to do. Right. We didn't know how to move forward, you know? It's like we have been fighting all this time to expose these secrets, to expose this, you know, surveillance, to expose the way that, you know, your rights and your privacy is being eroded. And now we've exposed it and you don't care. So where do where do we go from here? And what's the point? You know? Why am I risking my life for people who are not only gonna not care, but get mad at me for doing the work to expose it and talk about it? You know? Right. Right. Right. Yeah. I wonder if that had much to do with the
I guess what I feel like I remember the sentiment at the time, which I I guess was, like, a bit before Obama in my mind, like, with at least with the, you know, George Bush, the Patriot Act. Yeah. It just the this fear of terrorism or whatever kind of at least in the American psyche and I think in a lot of the West was quite high. And the conservatives were the ones who were kind of like, yes. We do need to surveil people to protect, you know, the homeland or whatever. Well, and they were also very effective in advancing this narrative of if you if you want privacy, you have something to hide. Like, that was very key to the rollout and the kind of mass adoption and mass
agreement of, you know, well, the terrorists the terrorists are the ones who want encryption. The terrorists are the ones that have things to hide. If you have nothing to hide, you're a good, you know, patriot and you're, you know, a good Christian, God fearing American. But if you have something to hide, you're you're part of the problem. And they were very, very effective at that. And to this day, it lingers. It, you know, it persists. The privacy question is, well, I have nothing to hide, you know. Why should I care? Yeah. To this day, twenty five years later, you know, we're still, you know, we're still kind of caught in that mindset.
Mhmm. Mhmm. Yeah. And I think it it is kinda funny that, like, I one thing that I notice is I feel like there's a little bit of an overlap of the types of people who say they're cypherpunks, but are kinda right wing and it, like, they will say So libertarian, cypherpunk crossover. Yeah. The, like, libertarian and also but also really into Singapore, which is also, like, a highly surveilled society Yeah. At the same time. Yeah. There's plenty plenty of contradictions that I think have not really been properly
sussed out and like properly understood, I think. It goes back to not understanding the history of how we got here. Right? If you're, you know, a very right wing conservative, but you're listening to country music. Country music was it used to be the outlaws, right? Like the Johnny Cash's of the world. They weren't voting for Trump, right? They were the outlaws by definition. They were anti establishment, anti government, right? They lived on the fringes. That's where the Cypherpunk movement came from. Is again, we saw the world and we said this doesn't work for us and we're not willing to bend and cave to what is being asked of us. We're gonna create a new world, a new system and everyone is welcome there. But if you're coming into our home with these, you know, hateful, racist, homophobic, sexist ideologies, then you're not welcome. This is not a place for you. You know what I mean? And if you're thinking, oh, well I'm a libertarian, you know, I can use all sorts of profanity and and behave abhorrently and still associate myself with this community, you can't. You know? Like, go back to your echo chamber because we're not gonna you know, we're we're not willing to amplify it. This space is not for you. You're welcome here until you cross the line, you know. Mhmm. But there's a lot more people entering the space thinking, well, you know, I'm a right whoever you vote, this is also the beauty of, you know, living in a democracy. You're allowed to vote, you know, whichever party that you want to. I don't agree with you, but I will fight to the death for your choice to do that. For the ability to do that. But if the sentiment isn't returned, then we have a problem. You know? Sure. I mean, that's yeah. The issue
yeah. I mean, the issue is sharing with with fascists at times. Yes.
And I also love it, like, Antifa is, like, been labeled a terrorist organization. I'm like, oh, the antifascists, they're the bad people? Yeah. Very interesting. The ant and then, yeah, people could declaring themselves as anti anti fascists. They're like, no. We love the fascists. Yay. Yeah. This is what happens when people don't touch grass. Go outside, take a walk, look up at the sky. Hackers touch grass.
Please leave your house. Real hackers go outside. Yeah. Yeah. I was I think also a fun fact that that you told me the other day because I was I was thinking of mister Robot. Yes.
Was that you were you were a part of the show. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So I can't really talk too much about that. You contribute to mister Robot. Yeah. I mean, yeah, mister Robot is, in my opinion, my very humble opinion, the most accurate show and representation of hacking culture. I mean, every single line of code that's shown on screen actually compiles. Yeah. They're using, you know, like, Cali, little bit of wine, parrot rather than, like, the randomly, like, vertical cascading code that you see on screen. Right. Right. Right. Okay. Matrix
numbers.
Yeah. Yeah. But no, mister Robot was a mister Robot kind of looked at the anonymous movement and said, like, what if what if it succeeded? Right? Like, what if, you know, the the kind of momentum and the mission behind, you know, what fueled the original anonymous movement? What if it what if it turned out? You know? Mhmm. But I also, you know, the huge amount of respect that I have for for miss robot is that, like, with Elliot's character. Right? A lot of people in the space were taking a lot of uppers. You know? And that was integrated into the storyline and it wasn't meant to advance the plot. He never went to rehab. He never had this, like, redeeming character arc where he, like, got clean and blah blah. Like, it was just who he was. Right? It was a very genuine representation of the conflicted people that were contributing to the space, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Because, like, this idea of this, you know, kind of and and what we all thought we were doing a good thing, but we are all very deeply flawed and nuanced people. Yeah. Of course. To put it lightly.
But I think what what is interesting about the end of the of Mr. Robot was the I mean, kind of, spoiler alert.
If you haven't watched it, go watch it. It's really good. The cryptocurrency
part at the very end of the show. Yes. When everyone got their money. Yes. So every everyone received a an airdrop now called
in cryptocurrency. The only successful airdrop ever. Yeah.
So So yeah. So I think maybe we can finish off a bit if you want to help us connect the hacker culture of that time to this current moment in the crypto space. I mean, I think there's some like, I think there are definitely a lot of people like to draw the lines, from anonymous to cryptocurrency. I think some are more valid than others or some Yeah. In in many ways, you can make the connections. In many ways, I think it's also antithetical to much of, I mean, anonymous's,
values, I would say, broadly or hacker values broadly. But, yeah, I'm curious how you see it. Yeah. I mean, the word hacker, right, like, hacking has been going on since the seventies. Right? When you could figure out the dial tones for payphones and replicate it and make free calls. Right? Like, hacking at its core just stems from a curiosity to break things, you know, with the intention of putting them back together and understanding them. Mhmm. Mhmm. Right? To figure out how does this system work and to understand how the system works. I'm gonna hack into it, break it, play around with it, put it back together in a fun new way that benefits me or that, you know, just furthers my understanding of things. Mhmm. So hacking at its core, it stems from a curiosity. Right? I wanna understand how this works. I wanna break it. I wanna play around with it. And, you know, from there, you you kind of see the emergence of, you know, hacking as as a collective. Right? Like black hat hackers, white hat hackers. The white hat hackers wanted to break things to then go to the companies and go to the, you know, the the institutions and say, well, I broke this. This is how I broke it, and this is how you should fix it. The black hat hackers were like, I just wanna, you know, fuck shit up for the sake of it and watch the world burn. You know? Both equally as important, you know, to the trajectory that we're on now. But then if you look at the cypherpunks who ultimately, you know, created you know, you had Eagle, you had DigiCash, you had all these initiatives through the nineties. And then with the onset of Bitcoin, it's also, you know, an under it it's it's a it's a desire to kind of hack currency and say, you know, I think there's a better way to do it. I think there's an you know, even if it's not better, there's a there's an alternate way to do it. And driven by fascination, a love of cryptography, math, you know, politics, we got to the point where we're like, alright. We have a solution. You know, here's an alternate way. We've hacked currency. We've hacked, you know, the monetary system, and here's a viable alternative. And so that's kinda gotten us, you know, to where we are today. And I think we should keep hacking. We should keep breaking things. We should keep making them better. You know? If if there's things that we don't agree with, if there's things that we don't understand, we should have that curiosity. We should have that kind of drive and that desire to figure out how things work and to figure out how to improve them. Yeah. And I I I hope that's where we're going with crypto, but a lot of the time we're not. We're just trying to make money and chill our bags and shamelessly profit. But there are also really, you know, great organizations and people that still care about kind of the ethos of breaking things down, you know, to their fundamental levels and then rebuilding them in a way that benefits everyone.
There's definitely something that I feel like is sorely missing. I would love to read this of something about, like, the hacker being, like, kind of a politics of reverse engineering.
Yeah. Yeah. Something like that that there's a I think there's a certain power to reverse engineering systems. Curiosity too. Yeah. Yeah. Like, back in the day, like, you weren't, like to be very clear, like, these you know, we weren't making money. Right? It wasn't we weren't driven by, like, financial gain. We are driven by curiosity and being young and thinking that we're gonna save the world. Turns out the world didn't wanna be saved, but, you know.
Yeah. Yeah. But I think understanding, like, that particular aspect, I think, helps people understand the, you know, the part of the historical trajectory we are currently on Yeah. And why maybe they might be confused about a little bit of the the nihilism. I think that's sort of prevalent or, like, a little bit of malaise is because of kind of that. There was maybe, like, idealistic and even and naive understanding of what would happen once this information was out there. Yeah. We saw this we see this with Edward Snowden. We saw this with Chelsea Manning. The reactions that we that I think a lot like, maybe Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning were expecting Yeah. Out of these revelations
simply didn't didn't happen. Yeah. And that's I I feel like like hacking culture, like, the the culture that, you know, was kind of conducive to anonymous emerging to the point that it did. It was driven on this blind face and this, you know, blind faith in this conviction. And I I I really do feel like it petered out and it kind of dissipated because the conviction was met with the reality. Right? And we just didn't know where to go from there. Yep. Yep.
I wish, yeah, someone had some answers maybe, but Devs do something. See. Yeah. Cool. Thanks, Kate, for coming on. I appreciate you spending the time and allowing us to to be the first the exclusive interview of Kate's experience in anonymous.
Yeah. Are there any, like, parting words you want want to leave for people? Yeah. I mean, I've talked a lot about, like, kind of collective nihilism and and burnout in this space, but it doesn't mean that we should stop building. It doesn't mean that there we should give up hope for a brighter future and, you know, a better tomorrow. It just means, like, we have to get back to the building phase. Right? Like, we've kind of coasted on this bear market where everything is doing, you know, going well. Everything is up and up, and we've kind of forgotten where we came from. And I feel like the path forward is to to look back retroactively and appreciate all the work that's been done to get us here and to then be reinvigorated to continue that work.
Awesome. Yeah. Great last words. Appreciate it. Thanks. Alright. Cool.