12.07 — The underlying movement#

Three possible trajectories for anyone in the 1999-2012 hacker scene: (1) stay black hat and end up in prison (at best), (2) drop off entirely, (3) rebuild oneself alone through Research. The Holy Book speaks of the third. That’s where Ocarina comes from.

1. The key passage from the Holy Book#

From Hell to where we are today.
Saved by Research, by good values, by thankless work. Not the kind that makes you shine. The kind passed down by those who know how to detect a potential and save it before it’s too late.

NO ONE saved us, we saved OURSELVES.
Thanks to what SCIENCE says.

We could have been thirsting for blood, instead we became thirsting for skills. We are people who dedicated their lives to these screens, to this science, while you harassed teenagers in Dota chats or did who-knows-what, always showing off, always proving you’re the prettiest, strongest, smartest, most dominant.

We may be retards, but we’ll stay online until the end!

We are a real FAMILY!
And we NEVER sleep!

It’s the Holy Book’s most autobiographical passage. It defines a category: “those who left the black hat scene without selling out, without cynically pivoting, but by _converting to scientific research_”.

2. Trajectory#

Phase 1 — Hell (≈ 1998-2013)#

“Hell” refers less to criminality than to the social and psychological environment: isolation, paranoia, permanent violence, profound loneliness, loss of loved ones. Many did prison time. Even more dropped off. A few took their own lives (see 06-yung-innanet-vxug.md).

Phase 2 — the conversion#

The turning point for the minority that gets out “through the top”:

• Discovery of real science: algebra, type theory, formal logic, λ-calculus.
• Reading the Researchers rather than tech magazines: Knuth rather than Wired, Pierce rather than JavaScript tutorials.
• Self-taught academia: often without an official degree. Papers, MOOCs, online communities, conferences.
• Reformulating the ethic: from “hack for fun” to “truly understand to truly build”.

A conversion without rupture: you don’t disavow the previous years, you change use of the same skills.

Phase 3 — the thankless work#

Saved by Research, by good values, by thankless work. Not the kind that makes you shine. The kind passed down by those who know how to detect a potential and save it before it’s too late.

The "thankless work": extremely clean code, strict types, endless refactors, rigorous tests, documentation almost no one will read, hours of near-monastic isolation. That’s Ocarina. It’s the opposite of hype, of being disruptive, of the 10X engineer.

It’s also under-radar mentoring: “those who know how to detect a potential and save it before it’s too late” suggests an informal transmission chain, outside institutions, where people who made it pull others toward them.

3. “NO ONE saved us, we saved OURSELVES”#

• No institutional academic mentor (HEC, Polytechnique, MIT). Self-taught.
• No social reintegration program. No psy.
• No enlightened family support (often: families that didn’t understand the context or just didn’t know).
• No employer who “spots the talent” and takes the years needed to train it — the author positioned himself after self-training.

What’s NOT being claimed:

• Total independence. The next sentence ("those who know how to detect a potential and save it") suggests there were elders within the scene itself.
• Contempt for education. Research is explicitly the savior.

It’s a "alone with others like me", not solipsism. It’s the crew from 04-zoneh-irc-efnet.md maturing with its members.

4. “We NEVER sleep”#

Ritual phrase of the hacker scene since the 1980s BBSes. Appears in:

• 2600 e-zines.
• Hacktivist scene slogans ("the internet doesn’t sleep, neither do we").
• 2000s cyber-criminal aesthetics.

The Holy Book picks it up as-is. Ethic of permanent work, refusal of the work/life split, identity fused with the technique.

5. “We are retards”#

Ironic inversion of an accusation. The word “retard” was used against this scene (by teachers, parents, normies, other engineers) for years, in the sense of: socially handicapped, asocial, marginal, autistic.

The author picks it up as a banner — identity reclamation, exactly like Nerd is reclaimed by Nerdcore (see 03-ytcracker-nerdcore-digital-gangster.md).

“We may be retards, but we’ll stay online until the end!”

“You called us retards; we accepted it, it doesn’t faze us; but look where we are _now, and where you are._”

6. “FAMILY”#

We are a real FAMILY!

A virtual and organic family, well beyond Ocarina. The family that made Ocarina possible.

Belonging criteria:

• Having lived through the 1999-2012 scene (or having studied its history with respect).
• Having converted that experience into real academic / scientific skills.
• Refusing the big-talk, refusing hype, refusing to sell bullshit.
• Holding to an ethic of thankless work.

7. Those who “harass on Dota”#

while you harassed teenagers in Dota chats or did who-knows-what, always showing off

Dota 2 is sadly famous for this, like many MOBAs.

Here, the author points to the other category.
Those who had the same sociological base (cheap “geeks” in high school, ending up on IRC or Dota) but channeled their energy elsewhere:

• Online harassment, doxing for fun, building hunt lists, claiming to harass kids, the disabled, the vulnerable.
• Cyberbullying, swatting.
• Online political envenoming (alt-right recruited very effectively in this demographic).
• First-degree crypto bros (not scientific crypto, cash grabs).
• Low-tier influencers (cf. what Tugan Bara finally denounced fervently during the Covid crisis in the French-speaking scene — 10-infopreneurs-tugan-bara-ai.md).

The Holy Book splits the scene in two: the makers and the destroyers (who are parasites). This split isn’t neutral — it holds historically. The same generation produced YTCracker (Bryce Case Jr., now a cybersec consultant at huge companies) and professional doxxers.

These are two distinct trajectories that split into two tribes, as implicitly described in Kent Beck’s Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change (XP): those who spend their lives stabbing each other in the back, and those who have a sense of community and mutual aid.

8. Lineage with Ocarina#

Ocarina is the software projection of this trajectory. Its design betrays its history, evidences a heritage.

9. Deep respect for the end user#

A developer adopting Ocarina without knowing this context will likely adopt a subset of the ethic:

• He’ll scaffold his first project extremely fast.
• He’ll use ROP because it’s elegant.
• He’ll like the mypy strict rigor.
• He’ll appreciate auditability.
• He has the whole ecosystem of skills and contents indexed directly for LLMs as well as for humans, to be fully independent.
• He has what it takes to fully adapt his tool to his own expertise by extending it with AI rather than fighting with “geek tricks”.

It’s a transmission without pain.

With this context, the scream becomes readable: it’s the voice of someone who survived, who saw too many friends not survive (see 06-yung-innanet-vxug.md), and who can no longer stand slipologues telling him how to code while they know nothing and only produce “garbage”. The scream is an act of identity reclamation that many of his contemporaries failed to make.