Originally written at the end of Arcade, our first “Universal You-Ship-We-Ship” program which ran during the summer of 2024. This is the first of three essays intended to introduce newcomers to some of the philosophical underpinnings of Hack Club.

What is Hack Club?

In the last 8 weeks, as ~8k new people have joined our Slack Channel, we’ve put a lot of effort into explaining what Arcade is (and in some ways, we still haven’t done a great job there). However, we’ve put almost no effort into explaining what Hack Club is. Understandably, a lot of new people have assumed that Hack Club is Arcade. Some have even asked us if the Slack will be shut down at the end of the summer! In fact, Hack Club was already 8 years old when Arcade started.

So what is it? It’s actually not easy to define Hack Club. It’s a lot of different things, with many separate projects running under the umbrella of one foundation. Some of the components that make up Hack Club are:

A global network of after-school clubs
A large online community, here on Slack
A collection of “You Ship, We Ship” programs (Blot, Sprig, OnBoard, etc)
An irregular series of temporary virtual programs (Arcade, Summer of Making, Winter Hardware Wonderland, etc)
A handful of HQ-run events every year
Several hundred community-run events every year
A large fiscal sponsorship program
An internship and gap-year program for the teenagers who run the show here
A physical headquarters slowly taking over the town of Shelburne, Vermont

And here are here are a few descriptions we’ve used to summarize all that over the years:

Hack Club is a community of teenagers who build things with technology
Hack Club is building projects with your friends
Hack Club is a nice place where nice people do nice things for each other
Hack Club is a long-term bet that the best technical education program for teenagers can be built by other teenagers
Hack Club is the community that its founders wished they had in high school

To take it one step further, we could try to summarize all those summaries like this: Hack Club is hacker culture for teenagers, institutionalized.

So why do we want to do that? Why are we building an institution to support hacker culture? Because hacker culture is built on the values of the hacker ethic, and we think those values are important. I considered trying to explain why, but… if you’re here, chances are you don’t need me to. Despite the importance of hacker ethic, there are very few institutions dedicated to propagating it, and even fewer for teenagers specifically. We want to fill that gap.

I could end this essay here, but I’d like to cover one final definition of Hack Club, grander and more ambitious than all the others: Hack Club is the hacker-oriented arm of the public education system.

To unpack that, let’s zoom way out and consider that the 20th century witnessed a remarkable change in the problems faced by humanity: for most of history, our greatest challenges have been imposed by nature. Disease. Hunger. Shelter. Today, however, a remarkable share of our greatest challenges are problems we created for ourselves. Climate change. Pollution. Obesity. Nuclear proliferation. Ecosystem collapse.

The 20th century was defined by the industrial revolution, when we just needed people to build new complex systems from the primitive blocks of nature. Today we need something more: we need people who can manipulate, adapt, extend, and sometimes even dismantle the complex systems we’ve already built. We need people working within established systems in ways that go beyond their original design and architecture, because in their present configuration those systems are literally killing us. Across all levels of government, technology, agriculture, education, we need people with a different skillset and mindset than what you learn in a school system designed for the industrial revolution. In a word, we need hackers… and schools today are simply not set up to produce hackers. For all the ways the world has changed in the last century, schools have barely changed at all.

Hack Club is a way of hacking the education system to produce more hackers. That’s our mission… and we need your help. Look around our website, slack channel, or any event with our name on it. Wherever your gaze may fall, odds are you are looking at something that was partly or wholly created by a high-schooler. Hack Club was founded by a sixteen-year-old who dropped out of high school because he knew that his school couldn’t offer the skills or community that he needed. We hope you will stick around after Arcade is over, because if we’re gonna build the hacker-oriented arm of the public education system, we’re gonna need a lot of hackers.