It's been 40 years since #EmmanuelGoldstein launched the seminal, essential, world-changing @2600: The #Hacker Quarterly. 2600 wasn't the first #phreak/hacker zine, but it was the most important, spawning a global subculture dedicated to the noble pursuit of technological self-determination:
Cake day present to me: Lifetime sub to @2600 , which I, despite having picked it up the first time at a Midwest Waldenbooks as a teenager, didn’t know was a thing (the lifetime sub part). This brings me joy; thanks @pluralistic pointing out that it exists!
Believe it or not, I actually used some phone phreaking techniques back in the day when I was in sales to hack phone systems so I got to the person I wanted.
@pluralistic@2600 man, I’m pretty sure I have that issue laying around somewhere. Been loving 2600 for decades, only just got my first subscription for my birthday last year.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
2600 has published hundreds of issues in which digital spelunkers report eagerly on the things they've discovered by peering intently at the things no one was supposed to even glance at (I'm proud to be one of those writers!). They've fought legal battles, including one that almost went to the Supreme Court:
They created a global network of meetups where some of technology's most durable friendships and important collaborations were born. These continue to this day:
When WBAI management lost their minds and locked the station's most beloved hosts out of the studio, Off the Hook (naturally) led the rebellion, taking back the station for its audience, rescuing it from a managerial coup:
But best of all, 2600 gave us #HOPE - both in the metaphorical sense of "hope for a better technological tomorrow" and in the literal sense, with its biannual #HackersOnPlanetEarth con:
For decades HOPE had an incredible venue, the Hotel Pennsylvania (memorialized in the phreak anthem "PEnnsylvania 6-5000"), a crumbling pile in midtown Manhattan that was biannually transformed into a rollicking, multi-day festival of forbidden technology, improbable feats, and incredible presentations. I was privileged to keynote HOPE in 2016:
But after the 2018 HOPE, the Hotel Pennsylvania was demolished to make way for the Penn15 (no, really) skyscraper, a vaporware mega-tower planned as a holding pen for luxury shopping and empty million-dollar condos sold to offshore war-criminals as safe-deposit boxes in the sky. The developer, Vornado (no, really) hasn't actually done all that - after demo'ing the Hotel Pennsylvania, they noped out, leave a large, unusable scar across midtown.
But HOPE wasn't lost. In 2022, the ever-resilient 2600 crew relocated to Queens, hosted by St John's University - a venue that was less glamorous that the Hotel Pennsylvania, but the event was still fantastic. Attendance fell from 2,000 to 1,000, but that was something they could work with, and reviews from attendees were stellar.
Good thing, too. 2600 is, first and foremost, a magazine publisher, and these have been hard years for magazines. First there was the mass die-off of indie bookstores and newsracks (I used to sell 2600 when I was a bookseller, and in the years after, I always took the presence of 2600 on a store's newsrack as an unimpeachable mark of quality).
Of course, many of those subscriptions came through Amazon's Kindle, because nerds were early Amazon adopters, and because the Kindle magazine publishing platform offered DRM-free distribution to subscribers along with a fair payout to publishers.
But then Amazon enshittified its magazine system. Having locked publishers to its platform, it rugged them and killed the monthly subscription fees that allowed publishers to plan for a steady output. Publishers were given a choice: leave Amazon (and all the readers locked inside its walled garden) or put your magazine into the #KindleUnlimited system:
Kindle Unlimited is an all-you-can-eat program for Kindle, which pays publishers and writers based on a system that is both opaque and easily gamed, with the lion's share of the money going to "publishers" who focus on figuring out how to cheat the algorithm. Revenues for 2600 - and all the other magazines that Amazon had sucked in and sucked dry - fell off a cliff.
Which brings me to the present moment. After 40 years, 2600 is still at it, having survived the bookstorepocalypse, the lunacy of public radio management, the literal demolition of their physical home by an evil real-estate developer, and Amazon's crooked accounting.
Once again, HOPE has been scheduled for its new digs in Queens, July 12-14. Last week, HOPE sent out an email blast to their subscribers telling them the news. They expected to sell 500 tickets in the first 24 hours. They didn't even come close:
The cartel that decides which email gets delivered, and which messages go to spam, or get blocked altogether, mass-blocked the HOPE 2024 announcement. Email may be the last federated, open platform we have, but mass concentration has created a system where it's nearly impossible to get your email delivered unless you're willing to play by Gmail's rules:
For Emmanuel Goldstein, founder of 2600 and tireless toiler for this community, the deafening silence following from that initial email volley was terrifying: "like some kind of a "Twilight Zone" episode where everyone has disappeared."
The enshittification that keeps 2600's emails from being delivered to the people who asked to receive them is even worse on social media.
Social media companies routinely defraud their users by letting them subscribe to feeds, then turning around to the people and organizations that run those feeds and saying, "You've got x thousand subscribers on this platform, but we won't put your posts in their feeds unless you pay us to 'boost' your content":
Enshittification has been coming at 2600 for decades. Like other forms of oddball media dedicated to challenging corporate power and government oppression, 2600 has always been a ten-years-ahead preview of the way the noose was gonna tighten on all of us. And now, they're on the ropes. HOPE can't sell tickets unless people know about HOPE, and neither email providers nor social media platforms have any interest in making that happen.
A handful of giant corporations now get to decide what we read, who we hear from, and whether and how we can get together in person to make friends, forge community, rabble-rouse and change the world. The idea that "it's not censorship unless the government does it" has always been wrong (not all censorship violates the First Amendment, and censorship can be real without being unconstitutional):
You can subscribe to 2600, in print or electronically (I signed up for the lifetime print subscription and it was a bargain - I devour every issue the day it arrives):
2600 is living a decade in the future of every other community you care about, weird hobby you enjoy, con you live for, and publication you read from cover to cover. If we can all pull together to save it, it'll be a beacon of hope (and HOPE).
I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by #WilWheaton! Pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback:
@pluralistic This really speaks my language, not only as a lifetime subscriber to 2600, but also for still running my own mail server to not having to deal with crap like this.
@pluralistic Thanks for the reminder. I still have a shelf of 2600s bought one-at-a-time from Shinder's News in the 80s & 90s, and a few more I bought after they closed, but I never subscribed. Time to change that!
@pluralistic that reminds me.... I haven't gotten my copy recently, I may have let my subscription lapse. I'll re-up today after work.... 2600 is one of the constants in my 30 year internet life and they are fantastic!
@pluralistic@2600
Back in the early 2000s someone bought a domain name like FuckFord.com or FuckChevy.com and had it redirect to the other company's webpage. The @eff (I think) had an online fundraising campaign to raise money for the defendent.* For $250, I supported a landmark case for #FreeSpeech, got two #2600 t-shirts and a lifetime subscription #2600.
I still have every issue I ever received for my lifetime subscription.
*If you know the details and/or have links, I'll edit this.
@pluralistic@2600 I used to have stacks of 2600 lying around. I'm ashamed to say I have no idea this day where they are. But if I find them, I will certainly give them away.
During (I think it was) the Snowden era, a politician said something about "the 26ers". I thought, it was a hint about this magazine and that the term "hackers" was meant by it. But I later learned, it has a different meaning there.
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