As everyone under 40 in infosec tires of the “Hackers” aesthetic plastered on everything by us tedious elder millennials, one thing that I think gets lost, particularly for younger folks, is that the movie isn’t just goofy camp. I mean, obviously, it’s heavily fictionalized, but there really *was* a hacking subculture kind of like the one depicted in it in New York in the 1990s. I barely grazed the outer periphery of it myself, and I sometimes wonder if anyone did a serious ethnography of it.
At one point as a teenager I did arrange a physical swap of “hacking” software on floppy disks in a series of posts on a BBS using coded language. We rollerbladed to a laser tag arena and traded the disks inside. Everything I have done since then has been determinedly less cool, so I understand the yearning for the prelapsarian past, even if I recognize the impulse as problematic and reactionary. But we did lose something.
@glyph there are two kinds of people in infosec: those who embrace the “Hackers” aesthetic, and those who can get off my lawn.
@jimfl I feel like this encapsulates the sentiment behind one of my best tweets ever https://twitter.com/glyph/status/1386416001969840132
@acb aaaaaand thank you for reminding me why we need to leave the past in the past
@glyph “We rollerbladed to a laser tag arena" I don't know that I've ever felt so much nostalgia crammed into so few words
@glyph can somebody please make this movie so I can watch it? it can even be a short. a machinima. i'd still watch it.
@keengrasp to the extent that I want to be truly famous, it is mostly so that stuff like this will happen because I have a critical mass of audience members to the point where one of them is a bored and underemployed CGI artist
@glyph @keengrasp no, yeah, it's the most fun part of follower count lol
@glyph @keengrasp and, in the spirit of your original remarks, perhaps the most socially beneficial part as well
@glyph @keengrasp Hmm, I might be that underemployed animator--have you written the story out? I've got a technique in hand looking for a project, having written an encoder a while ago for an '80s BBS vector graphics format (NAPLPS)
@n1ckfg @keengrasp this is amazing but I do not have anything written up. What kind of detail would you need? I’d be willing to put in some work here, but I’ve never done any screenwriting (and a depressingly small amount of fiction)
@glyph Cool! I think it's just a matter of getting the prose story down on paper in full detail, not worrying about structure or dialogue yet. Personally I think that screenplay formatting only starts to become important when casting actors, and for my own stuff I usually use a narrator. Animators work more from storyboards anyway
@glyph "things largely got better, but we lost something along the way" is a feeling I often have when looking at computer history.
Like, more secure, more accessible, more helpful are good things to strive for! But yeah, we lost things along the way, like trading floppies on roller blades or the comprehensibility of the whole computer, or just FTPing a pile of gifs and having an acceptable website.
@astraluma@tacobelllabs.net @glyph@mastodon.social tbh, from the major companies themselves I'm not even sure computers have got more helpful. Or if so, then they're consistently backsliding of late.
@katievm @astraluma I can’t speak to your own personal utility but my general sense is that when most people sit down and work through all the hidden infrastructural benefits that computers provide to us, we discover that this is a cognitive bias; hedonic adaptation basically. For example, for myself, there’s a whole area of stress in my life (physically managing huge piles of paper for things like rent payments, bills, jury duty, taxes) that the modern internet has functionally eliminated
@katievm @astraluma this is not to dismiss the very real problems that they create or push back against any efforts to make improvements, but we should reflect on the benefits periodically so as to feel good while we do that work
@glyph@mastodon.social @astraluma@tacobelllabs.net Yeah, I see your point. The strings that came attached to all these make me always want to dispense with them, but that's a separate (if not unrelated) problem.
Why the hell has UI gotten so bad lately though?
@glyph They did hang out with the 2600 crew in NYC when researching it, but AFAIK the rollerblading was entirely from the costuming department and not informed by that. I'm talking to Ian Softley in a couple of weeks, I'll ask!
@glyph william gibson eat your heart out
@glyph !!! what a fun thing to have done :D
@glyph I used to have a bandolier full of floppy disks.
@glyph It's never too late to grab a fistful of promotional USBs and make the capitalism a little more late-stage.
I have a bit of nerve damage, so I got permission to carry a laptop (Dell Latitude X200, A PIII thin enough to make the much later MB Air sweat)
I had this software that would let you implant songs into Java powered flip phones. At the time, you could only get ringtones from your cellular provider. Only a few people had the USB cable for their phone (back then it was all proprietary) but I was popular with those that had their cable.
@glyph you are one of the coolest motherfuckers I know; you know that?
@glyph I am just a bit too old for that - when I was a teenager we used to take the train into London to hang out at a govt funded Microelectronics exhibition centre where they had computers you could play with and Prestel, and later when we had PETs joined the Harrow Computer Group which was mostly retired engineers in suburban houses and me and my 2 mates. There wasn't yet a BBS scene that we knew about, it was typing in listings from computer magazines.
@glyph @bitprophet Yeah, the "tech" looked like goofy movie fantasy even when the movie came out, but the cultural bits were *spot on*.
I could have walked by any one of those characters in the halls at early DEF CONs and not batted an eye.
@drwho @RangerRick @glyph @bitprophet I mostly knew the trailer park variants that didn’t always have all their teeth, but yep the Hackers movie aesthetic is what my friends and I aspired to, to the point that's what I assumed working in tech would look like.
Imagine my disappointment.
@randomgeek @RangerRick @glyph @bitprophet There was a certain amount of roller skating in data centers going on at the time. I recall one particular outage at Telerama..
@glyph https://catalog.lib.uchicago.edu/vufind/Record/5717962 is too recent for that right? Perhaps following references might find such research, or asking Gabriella Coleman directly if she knows if anyone has done such a thing.
@glyph this sounds like something the 2600 crew might be able to give an answer about.
@auditorydamage @glyph This was also my first thought!
@glyph
This is an essence of what I would consider as an ultimate « cool » back in the early 90’s.
Absolutely unattainable then and there in the devastated east-European depression.
@glyph whenever I read things like this I think "Hey, I'm not tired of it!".
Then I realise that's not my demographic any more. And that's ok. Generational groups can have their own things and they can be different.
However there's a younger generation following behind them who from what I can see have a "bring it on" attitude to that aesthetic
@glyph If there were a DnD expansion (or whole-cloth tabletop RPG) made at the time based on "hacker culture" it probably would have looked like the movie
@glyph We had a little of it in 412 and 724. Lot of us were ravers in the pb-cle scene, used to hand out flyers for our BBSes at parties. I might still have the maps and codenames for all of the payphones in those NPAs that we made. And a whole lot of shenanigans on the Pitt and CMU campuses..
@glyph @SiteRelEnby I wasn't even in the NYC scene, but I did interact with them on IRC at the time.
@glyph I'm reasonably confident that such an ethnography has not been done. I looked very hard for them for my Master's thesis (which, admittedly, was a few years ago now). There was something similar done I a sociology MA thesis about the Chicago computer scene, and there's a self-pub book about the German warez/demo scene.
Incidentally, my friend group in Freshman year at uni were late-90s hackers from around the country. NY, CA, OH, MI... we've all "bought in" (ref "SLC Punk").
@glyph Not serious ethnography by any stretch of the imagination, but that subculture was what I focused on for my cultural anthropology class in college.
@glyph I experienced this scene only via reputation / via the early internet. For me in rural Nebraska, the thought of it was a vision of urbanity and freedom that sustained me at a distance.
I'm nostalgic about the film precisely because I didn't experience it.