Here at Wired, we talk a lot about the evolving relationship between technology and culture. In order to help our readers keep up with the fast-paced changes of our increasingly digital world, we've decided to analyze the valuable lessons about technology contained within the most educational material that we as a society have ever produced: Hollywood films. Today's subject: 1995's Hackers, a classic story of intense coding, romance, and the all-consuming importance of the payphone.
The Plot
Hackers is quite possibly the finest representation of the '90s that has ever been committed to film, and I love it with an intensity that most people reserve for spouses and children. Seriously, of all the tattoos that I've chickened out of actually getting, the one that I got closest to was a full sleeve dedicated to this movie, complete with a scroll winding through with "Crash And Burn" in script, a reproduction of the front page of the Aug. 10, 1988 New York Times, a yellow 3-inch floppy disk, and of course, Angelina Jolie and Jonny Lee Miller exchanging a longing look based on the poster to Gone With the Wind. (Miller would, of course, be the Scarlett O'Hara.) Fortunately for my left arm, my dedication to irony is not quite strong enough to go through with it.
Hackers tells the story of Zero Cool, alias Dade Murphy (a name that could only sound more like the '90s if his parents called him Pog Skateboard Ninja Turtle Jr.), who wrote a virus and caused "the biggest crash in history" at the age of 11, which made the New York Stock Exchange drop 7 points and got him legally banned from using a computer or touch-tone phone until his 18th birthday.
Seven years later, the barely legal Dade moves to New York, rechristens himself as Crash Override, and falls in with a bunch of rollerblading, system-hacking teens who all look like underwear models and busty Romulans.
Crash and the Boys (including Acid Burn, the aforementioned Romulan played by Angelina Jolie) end up running afoul of goateed superhacker The Plague, who skateboards around the offices of an oil company as their resident cybersecurity expert – and plans to bilk the company out of millions with a computer worm.
When Crash's dimwitted pal Joey hacks in to the company's supercomputer and downloads a copy of the worm (which looks like a 3-D video of equations rotating against a background of Doctor Who's opening credits) he becomes a target for The Plague and his sidekick Penn Jillette, who sic the Secret Service on him by claiming the worm could capsize the company's oil tankers, which they believe even though it sounds an awful lot like the plot of Superman III.
What follows is a series of hacker battles that are totally amazing, mostly because they are represented by a camera physically moving through a monitor and into a neon cityscape of circuitboards and glowing data so that they have something to film besides people loitering around payphones. Arrest records are falsified for blackmail purposes, oil tankers are capsized in order to frame rad teens, and Angelina Jolie breathily extols the virtues of the P6 chip – it's three times more powerful than the Pentium – while Miller tries his hardest to not sound like Matthew Broderick with a Slim Shady dye job (and fails miserably).
Eventually, Crash and Burn put together a worldwide hacker squad and use the payphones in Grand Central Station to hack the heretofore unhackable Gibson supercomputer, exposing the Plague's plan and proving that upon messing with the best, he must now die like the rest. The bad guy gets arrested, Crash and Burn go out on a date where 1995 Angelina Jolie wears a garter belt and stockings while making out with him in a pool, and dimwitted Joey grows up to be Eliza Dushku's hunky brother in Bring It On, so everybody gets a happy ending.
Incidentally, in a review in Entertainment Weekly when the movie came out, critic Owen Gleiberman claimed "What's most grating about Hackers, however, is the way the movie buys in to the computer-kid-as-elite-rebel mystique currently being peddled by magazines like Wired." So yeah: you're welcome.
The Tech
1995 was right around the time when I first started using computers on a regular basis, but I never had anything like the stuff they use in this movie. That makes sense, though, considering that I have only recently become elite by watching this movie for the 18th time.
The good guys mostly use laptops that look heavy enough to require at least one (1) Matthew Lillard to carry around, pulling off their hacks with the "insanely great" speed of a 28.8 bps modem. This is all done by hooking up to a public phone in order to make it more difficult for their cybercrimes to be traced back to them, and there's plenty of detailed information here on how to go about just that. I'm sure it'll come in handy if I ever go back in time to an era when payphones actually exist.
The bad guys, however, have the nigh-unhackable Gibson, an entire room full of glowing LED towers and a keyboard that looks like it's covered in luminescent Gatorade caps instead of keys, with room for two people to sit side by side and defend against malicious attacks tag-team style. The Gatorade caps are, of course, completely unlabeled, because Power Users and Sysadmins can't afford to take their attention off the screen for a second, lest Crash Override's Cookie Monster virus open the way for a Rabbit that you can only take out with a Flu Shot.
Apologies all around if these super-elite computer hacking terms are getting a little too intense to follow, but that's what happens when you hear a wake-up call for the Nintendo generation.
P.S.: Matthew Lillard actually said those words out loud to another person and got paid for it.
UPDATE 2/14 3:30 PM EST: It turns out that the Cookie Monster virus was actually based on a real thing. It still sounds pretty fun.
What We Learned
–When using a computer, one should always wear sunglasses that reflect the image of your hands on the keyboard.
–Advanced computer users smoke two cigarettes at the same time while also eating French fries. In hacker circles, this is called "Unix."
–"Ultra Laser" is apparently not a very good Hacker name. Keep in mind, however, that this value judgment is made by a young man who refers to himself as "The Phantom Phreak."
–The most devastating computer virus a hacker has ever created is "Cookie Monster," which puts up a picture of Cookie Monster and you have to type the word "cookie" to feed it. This actually sounds kind of fun.
–You should never screw like you type, which is a shame since I type all night long, usually while thinking about Batman.
