AMMC #1: Hackers
Welcome to Active Matrix Movie Club, a celebration of tech cinema. The long term plan is to run regular, quarantine-friendly, group movie nights for paid subscribers where we watch the movies in the newsletters. The short term plan is for you to sign up.
HACKERS (1995)

35 minutes and 10 seconds into Hackers, a pixelated heat scan of a man appears on a computer monitor, delivering a ransom demand. He is the visual manifestation of the Da Vinci Virus. He will sink your oil tanker. He is played by model and occasional actor Enzo Junior.
Hackers turns 25-years old this September, meaning I have been fascinated by Enzo Junior for 25 years. I have so many questions about playing a computer virus. How do you prepare to play a computer virus? Was it method? Do you, like, walk around offices destroying important-looking manila folders?
When hackers turned 20, I wrote a big piece for the newspaper where I worked on the cultural history of the movie. All kinds of cool people gave me perspective on what the movie meant to them - real hackers and screenwriters and sociologists - even director Iain Softley. I did not get to talk to the person I wanted most of all.
Enzo Junior never called me back.
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It’s easy to forget that Hackers (tagline: “Their only crime is curiosity”) was not the first big hacker movie of 1995. That honor goes to The Net, released two months earlier. But only Hackers had staying power. Famous (lowercase) hackers quote Hackers. No one quotes The Net, though it did get a TV adaptation for a single season on a USA Network in the midst of their running four seasons of bike cop drama Pacific Blue.
The Net fizzled away for a number of reasons. Demographics is a big one. Hackers is not a movie for adults. If you ask Iain Softley, the movie is aimed at tweens, a group that had started to take to the lowercase-n net by 1995. The Net was made for grown-ups who wouldn’t get online until those very kids were the adults.

Fun fact: The name of the racist TV show Dade hacks into the TV network to turn off is “America First”
But the big one, I think, is the difference in tone. The net in The Net was one good guy, thousands of bad guys, and one pizza restaurant that let you order online. The net in Hackers was deliberately stylized in psychedelic colors to symbolize its mind-expanding powers. Hackers in The Net moonlight as a global network of assassins. Hackers in Hackers spend their free time as activists and Angelina Jolie. The net in The Net socially isolates Sandra Bullock to the point she has no one to turn to in her hour of need. Hackers ends with our ragtag heroes saved by a global onslaught of hackers willing to help a perceived group of peers they’ve never met out of a sense of community.
In a sense, while both Hackers and The Net were marketed as suspense movies, Hackers was really more of a Harry Potter movie. A bunch of kids are given secret magicks to control the world, and they do, until a bad guy with similar powers takes them on. That’s a lot of the fun of the movie, but in retrospect, it’s also a weird artifact of a time that would allow it.
Hackers persists, in part, because it treats hackers as subculture rather than a criminal modality. They are a cool in-group who can peacock in front of the normals. Hackers wear hacker clothes. They go to a hacker nightclub. They drink hacker soda (Jolt), speak hacker slang and watch hacker TV shows. They have codenames. They’re desirable. Kate “Acid Burn” Libby’s original make-out partner isn’t a hacker and doesn’t like hacking. His only skill, the characters say, is “looking slick all day.”

Fun fact: After the movie came out, MTV News got scammed by someone who showed them a fake day in the life of a hacker, complete with a covert handoff of a floppy disk. It caused a little consternation among real hackers (the HOPE hacker convention held a panel called “How Did It Happen?”).
A less slick version of that hacker community existed and still exists - generally swell folks who converted isolation and interest in technology into one of the first global internet communities, connected by pre-web bulletin boards and cheating the phone company. Universities didn’t teach information security until the last five years. For a long time the only route into the field was to have pink hair or serve in the military.
But while Harry Potter had a ton of social constructs to constrain boy (and other) wizards - expulsion, magic police, accidentally turning into a cat - everything the hackers do in Hackers is dangerous, against the law, and (to a limited degree) reproducible in the real world. That’s a whole lot of trust in the good intent of all Hermiones Granger.
Softley reflects that in his generally bonkers hacking visualizations. The acid-trip animations are often derided as inaccurate, sometimes viewed as cyber camp, and while both are true, both miss the intent. Like sex or street fights, there’s no entertaining way to accurately show hacking in a movie. Watching a real person hack a real computer is sort of like watching someone solve a jigsaw puzzle using a spreadsheet. Instead, Softley creates a visual metaphor for hacking as a psychedelic problem-solving exercise.

There’s an innocence to thinking of hacking as a purely intellectual exercise for most of the people involved. It’s the same innocence that lets you think all people are good. Hackers reflects a 1990s techno-utopianism that didn’t bear out; a belief that left alone at fringes of the digital frontier, hackers didn’t need societal and legal oversight to determine right and wrong.
A lot of things changed between then and now. There are more opportunities to experiment without breaking laws and more norms about how to do so without endangering other people. Blue-collar criminals and government hackers emerged outside hackers’ tight-knit, self-regulating community. But don’t discount the fact the first wave of hackers simply grew up. It’s only kids who think it’s cool to give teenagers unlimited power.

Technically, the crime is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Viewed from a modern lens, the movie’s heavy, Special Agent Richard Gill, was right in the soundbite he keeps giving the media, even if he isn’t right about everybody: “Hackers penetrate and ravage delicate public and privately owned computer systems, infecting them with viruses, and stealing materials for their own ends.”
When a 17-year-old was charged recently with an incredibly dangerous hack of Twitter to run a bitcoin scam, people were quick to say Twitter should hire him rather than charge him. That, too, is Hackers’ legacy - that youth and skill forgive any action as precociousness. Call it a boy wizard fallacy.
While Hackers got the community right, The Net got the rest of the world right. In the long run, hackers’ only crime wasn’t curiosity.

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