The terminal window stared back at my give and take with responses of text and symbols, and after each stream of them it waited patiently for me to enter another command. It would wait forever if it had electricity to power the shell that was running, and so I thought of my next command. I was setting up a TOR onion address for my computer so that I could log into it without giving a very large attack surface to anyone who would want to try to hack me.

A TOR onion is an address through which a computer can be connected to over a network anonymously using the TOR network, which sends encrypted data between multiple computers in order to obfuscate the origin of the traffic. Why was I setting up a TOR onion? I had no real reason to be secretive, it was not a life-or-death situation like it was for some people in totalitarian countries. At least, it wasn’t a life-or-death situation yet. I was honing my skills. I knew that the forces of totalitarianism desired to rule the country I lived in, and had recently made attempts to do so. If it were the case that they would become a bigger threat, it would be necessary to gain the computer skills that would allow me to fight them while evading detection.

I put myself out in the open by writing this, it is my middle-finger to the idiots and obscurantists who so incompetently have tried to gain power in my nation, and it is my notice that they can consider me an enemy. An increasingly skilled enemy and one whom, I would like to imagine, they would dread having.

But back to the terminal. I edited a few text files, and the onion was ready. I connected through a different device and I was in. It was simply practice; there was no reason to do it except to increase my knowledge in a small manner since I had never done it before, but I did do it. It wasn’t difficult, it was just something to do. As I logged in to it over layers of digital obfuscation and encryption, I smiled the smile I usually smile when I do something successful worth smiling about. I relished knowledge; it had gotten me in trouble to relish knowledge in the past because I had failed to approach knowledge from any standpoint of humility before; there was, indeed, always things that one did not know, unforseen aspects of a situation, and nothing was foolproof, and when one got down to it, there was always the chance that the whole scaffolding of knowledge could come tumbling down.

But this worked, I could connect, the connection was obfuscated, and I had through knowledge given myself the power do something in a more secure and private manner in a world that was increasingly lacking in privacy, where the actions of the many were under the scrutiny of the few. I remember some educational show from when I was a child where there was a group of people who did various things and solved various problems, some smiling teenagers who would say “Knowledge is Power!” I do not know the origin of this phrase, it probably dates back to various philosophical traditions as the truth of it is evident: true knowledge is power. False knowledge can be power as well, but true knowledge lets one create and do things that last and that work in the long term. Building on lies and falsehoods is like building a house on air: it falls to pieces. But when you understand a topic and approach it as if you don’t already know everything, the sky is the limit.

As I stared at the blinking cursor of the terminal, I was only mildly proud: it was a minor achievement. There were many things I did not know, much that was still to be learned. In fact, the things that there were to learn grew at a rate faster than the possibility of learning them, so I would never run out of knowledge to gain, things to understand. It brought a smile to my face that dimly reflected back at me through the blackness of the terminal that prompted me for my next command.