[3] Considered a cornerstone of hacker culture,[4] the Manifesto asserts that there is a point to hacking that supersedes selfish desires to exploit or harm other people, and that technology should be used to expand our horizons and try to keep the world free.
When asked about his motivation for writing the article, Blankenship said, I was going through hacking withdrawal, and Craig/Knight Lightning needed something for an upcoming issue of Phrack.
This was post-WarGames, the movie, so pretty much the only public perception of hackers at that time was ‘hey, we’re going to start a nuclear war, or play tic-tac-toe, one of the two,’ and so I decided I would try to write what I really felt was the essence of what we were doing and why we were doing it.
A poster of the Hacker Manifesto appears in the 2010 film The Social Network in the Harvard room of Mark Zuckerberg.
Amplitude Problem's 2019 album Crime of Curiosity, featuring The Mentor himself, YTCracker, Inverse Phase and Linux kernel maintainer King Fisher of TRIAD is dedicated to The Hacker Manifesto.