What You’re Not Being Told

There was a time when hacking meant something — the thrill of exposing bullshit, dismantling power from the inside, digging up secrets. Now? It’s either nation-state spy games or teen scams. The soul of old-school hacktivism is gone.

✅ A Short History of the Fade

• SiegedSec, the “Gay Furry Hackers,” made headlines attacking NATO, labs, and political targets. Then they disbanded—because they couldn’t take the heat.
• Lapsus$—once notorious for breaching Microsoft, Nvidia, Uber, and more—collapsed after a wave of arrests in early 2022. Their leader ended up in a psych unit.
• Scattered Spider, a crew of mostly teens, hired themselves out to ransomware. But since major arrests in mid-2024, their activity dropped… although their TTPs still haunt companies.
• Meanwhile, state-affiliated groups like Russia’s Laundry Bear or China’s Volt Typhoon quietly infiltrate infrastructure—but they’re not about truth-telling or protest, they serve intelligence agendas.

Each collective imploded, splintered, or pivoted to crime or espionage. The rogue idealists? Barely a ghost of a memory.

🔥 Now? We’ve Got AI Scammers Masked as Hackers

• Attacks now revolve around AI‑powered phishing, vishing, deepfake voice scams, and silent infiltration of corporate systems, not gut‑punch activism.
• Ransomware attacks dropped 43% in Q2 2025, even though new groups like Qilin and Akira popped up. So it's not ambition—it’s lower stakes and more stealth.
• Iranian and Israeli cyber ops are trading hits. Appliances of war are digital, strategic—and hidden.
• AI‑assisted tools are available to any teenager with access to GitHub and a desire to get rich quick.

Guess which side wins when hacking is reconceptualized as contraband, not disruption.

🌍 Why We’Re Too Damn Comfy

Because most of us are stuck in Netflix‑scroll mode.
Except for a few cybersecurity wonks, nobody’s even talking about it.
Computers got smarter—not us.

We’re too soft. We plug into systems built to surveil us, consume for us, and dumb us down to data points.
We let state actors go unchallenged. We surrender to corporate spying.
We absorb news bite headlines without rage.

Meanwhile, hacks that actually mattered—calls to accountability—are erased.
Protest sites defaced briefly; then forgotten. Companies extorted. Whistleblowers shut down.

Nobody follows up. Nobody scales it up. We shrug. We mute the outrage. We go back to our phones.

💥 The Point?

I miss hackers who mattered. I miss actions that tore facades down. I miss conviction worth risking everything.

Now we’re left with:

• AI‑enabled scams
• Corporate infiltration
• Geo‑political spyware
• Kids chasing crypto paydays

All while the idealists either got locked up or turned corporate.

And the rest of us? Too whipped to care.

TL;DR

• Real hacktivism mostly dead. Groups collapsed. Motives turned criminal or state-led.
• Cybercrime moved underground: AI‑driven, money-motivated, low‑visibility.
• Society got lazy. Surveillance won. We accepted evil as norms.

I want someone to stand up. To interrupt the pipeline. To code disruption—without ransom, without state agenda.
But that someone isn’t coming. Because we’re too fried, too beaten, and too uninterested.

Still—hope exists in remembering. And maybe one day we wake up before everything valuable is erased.

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Posted by someone who remembers the thrill.