time for my bedtime story... Today's edition of Hackerspace war stories for May 3, 2023 begins with a tale of a small group of hackers who came together during the early days of the Bitcoin movement in Honolulu. At their first meetups in a Mexican restaurant and an Irish pub, they discussed the potential of the cryptocurrency, which was already being recognized by the libertarian/technocrat crowd as a mathematically guaranteed growth scheme. During their second meetup, which took place in the Irish pub, the group chose the name HiCapacity, inspired by the NYC Resistors. The name would later be used by Edward Snowden for his cryptoparty held in a small art space behind a furniture store in Honolulu on December 11, 2012. At the time of Snowden's usage of HiCapacity, the author was living with someone in the (redacted) community and had left the hackerspace due to concerns about its direction. The author's intention in forming the hackerspace was to bring together like-minded individuals who believed that concentration of power among the elites was unacceptable. Unfortunately, not all members shared this unspoken agenda, and there was a lack of agreement on a viable approach to tackle the problem. The author had personal experience with the lack of accountability that existed in the early days of the internet, particularly after 9/11, having been placed on an FBI watchlist in 1997 due to association with (redacted). The author's personal experience with the surveillance state after the Snowden revelations has been negative, and they view his actions as reckless with regards to their personal concerns. While encryption may have become more widespread, the author believes that the internet was already fundamentally subverted and Snowden created a power vacuum that was filled by actors with less government oversight and greater motivation to lock down their data dystopia. As a result, big tech organizations that participated in mass data hoarding, mass surveillance, and unaccountable mass psychological operations for profit and other undisclosed purposes, saw their valuations rise. A decade later, the author has personally observed a lockdown of the surveillance state, with even less possibility of accountability. If the author were to initiate a new hackerspace today, they would be working from a weaker position as power continues to concentrate in ways that reduce or eliminate any real semblance of (off the books) accountability. In a sense, the "wild wild west" of 15 years ago was actually a better state of affairs than the one we find ourselves in today as the bar raises in the cybersecurity state. The author expresses their words in a final fit of desperation, having experienced a data-driven nightmare that benefits those with means and power. Despite their attempts to stand up to corruption, the author's actions have fallen flat, and they have paid a significant price in terms of their health, reputation, and assets. In particular, the author's efforts to stand up to entrenched corruption in the UTS-driven state, particularly by deputized entities like Google, have backfired entirely. The author writes to hackerspaces as a last-ditch effort to get a message out, believing that things are going to get worse. They predict that power will continue to be concentrated, and the elites have figured out how to "boil the frog," so to speak, by conditioning the next generation to not only accept pervasive surveillance but to be directly complicit in contributing to it.