Acer aspire ES1-521 : Cannot turn on wifi after switch to linux

I recently switched to linux (mint 18 KDE) after the windows install on my became corrupted (read: I cannot go back into windows to fix this issue). The wifi refuses to work, sudo rfkill list confirming that phy0: Wireless LAN is Hard blocked: yes. My computer has a wifi key, fn-f3, but this does nothing.

is there another way to enable the wifi card? on windows I had no issues (until the whole thing failed).

the laptop is an Acer Aspire ES1-521 (i don't know if they make other versions, but it uses an AMD A8)

I have no wired connection where I am, so I cannot connect the laptop to the internet to fix issue. I have another computer that I can download stuff to and transfer via USB.

I am moderately familiar with computers in general, and linux.

I solved this issue by adding

blacklist acer-wmi

to my etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf. Then a quick reboot and everything was up and running!