War Games. The Net. Antitrust. The Lawnmower Man. Virtuosity. Heck, even Jurassic Park. All of these movies are about, or have large components of, hackers and most of them - if not all - are (or have been at one time) universally reviled as laughable caricatures that make a mockery of the culture that they attempt to depict.
And of course, the queen mother of ‘em all - Hackers.
Almost universally reviled from the day it first premiered in the theater, Hackers has a reputation for being the most over-the-top, goofy, and dumbed-down depiction of “hacking” ever committed to celluloid. It is SO over the top in its “style over substance” goals that it has actually been listed as a “comedy” by Amazon Prime Video, even though it was never intended to be. To wit:
There was so much just outright wrong with this movie from the outside - from the fashion, the hammy over-acting, the settings (particularly Cyberdelia), the depictions of the “hacking” activity, the plot itself, and the idea that apparently, rollerblading was the hacker’s preferred method of transportation in any urban setting. It was this wrongness that led the actual hacker community to distance themselves from it like a plague (Mr. The Plague, if you will) and denounce it entirely.
The thing is, this movie was supposed to be a love letter to the hacking community. It was meant to paint the picture that hackers weren’t the problem, but rather the corporations and law enforcement that had demonized and criminalized them. In the end, not only do the hackers take down the evil corpo (or at least some of the bad elements within it) but they clear their names legally and show how absurd law enforcement had become.
But real hacking - and corpo espionage and sabotage, for that matter - is boooooooooring. It is not exciting at all. Nobody wants to see a bunch of pallid, pimply-faced teenagers hidden away in their dark bedrooms subsisting on Cheetos and Jolt cola while they set their computers to running cracking programs that take hours (or days) or take apart their telephones to see how they work. Actual hacking and software development is 99% tedium punctuated by a few moments every now and then of elation (or terror) once the 100th or 1,000th try finally succeeds. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, wants to watch 2 hours of a bunch of geeks doing their thing on their computers.
So Iain Softley & Co. made it look so much more exciting and interesting. They had to build a story around it that was interesting that people would watch. They even got Emmanuel Goldstein to consult on the film for the “hacker’s perspective”, and the movie is littered with references, in-jokes, and actual hacking techniques in an effort to celebrate real life hackers of myth and legend. Names, characters (that were based either on actual people or combinations of actual people), legit hacking techniques, cultural references, the inclusion of the Hacker Manifesto, even the fact that the exterior shots of the high school that Dade attends is the actual high school in NYC that many of those young hackers attended and where their collectives got their start - it was all in there to those that knew where to look. Sure those hacking techniques were out of date and not useful at the time, and the computer “code” was just graphically rendered as fractals, but they didn’t want to give away any actual tricks to the audience, now did they?
And the hackers out there would do well to be reminded that the movie wasn’t for them, even if the references were directed at them. It was a way to give them a little wink and a nod to say, “hey, I know this isn’t what things are really like, but I want you to know that I’m basically turning you into a legendary super hero like you already perceive yourself to be in the minds of the ‘normies’ out there that watch this movie.”
And that’s why I have grown to love Hackers - because it’s a depiction of how I wish things were. The lives that all of the main characters lived in the movie is what I secretly want my life to be like instead of the mundane and banal life that I actually have. I had to look past all of the glaring inaccuracies to see the love to the scene beneath it and realize that had it not been for all that glitz and Hollywood movie magic, very few people (if anyone) would have actually seen it because it probably would never have even been made.
I’ll tell ya, when I’m feeling really down on society or capitalism, or bored with the actual, real-life computer work that I’m forced to do to make money in order to live, or at a loss of what to do on the computer in my free time, more often than not I turn to a run-through of Hackers to get me amped up and moving, because it’s so damn fun! Everything from the music, to the “cyberdecks”, to the imminently quotable lines (no matter how ludicrously wrong or out of date they are - “RISC architecture is going to change everything” or “it’s got a killer refresh rate”), all the way to the knowing nods and wink-winks of cultural references and in-jokes (and the music! Oh, the MUSIC!) makes for a bit of hacker-flavored escapism that’s hard to beat and gets my hacktivist blood pumping every time.
This movie isn’t about realism. Think of it as a “golden age of comics” superhero story where the hackers are the superhuman saviors of the world and information that the rest of the “cattle” will never even know about. It’s a fish story where the fish on the line gets bigger every time the story is told and the fight increases to grander and grander proportions until it is on par with Moby Dick its-fictional-self.
So take a step back, check your righteous indignation over the lack of realism at the door, and just follow the advice of The Plague when watching this movie:
The Plague:
There is no right or wrong. There’s only fun and boring.
And while we’re not talking about a 30-year prison sentence here, we need to admit to ourselves that real-life, everyday hacking “sounds pretty boring to me” and to the rest of the non-hacker audience. So let the “normies” get an inaccurate picture of what hacking is really like; it only serves to feed into the mythical legends that most of us have built for ourselves, and keeps their attention in the wrong places so we can keep doing what needs to be done when it comes to freeing that sweet, sweet information.
In other words, “lighten up, Eugene”.
