of hackers for years to come. Of course,
it wasn’t just Mitnick’s case that became fodder for the popular imagination. The many CFAA prosecutions fueled by post-“WarGames” anti-hacker
mania—including the prosecutions of
Herbert Zinn (aged 17 at time of arrest)
and Robert Morris (aged 23)—would,
over the next decade, become part
and parcel of the entire hacker movie
genre.
“Hackers” (1995), which opens with
the conviction of a minor under the
CFAA, is obviously inspired by media
reports about these early hacker prosecutions. But the arrests and prosecutions within the film borrow particularly heavily from Mitnick’s own
story. (For example, in the film a lawyer
claims his client is an addict in order
to secure a lighter sentence. Mitnick’s
own defense advanced the claim that
he had a computer addiction.) In addition to drawing on Mitnick’s court
case, “Hackers”—whose writers interviewed members of the l0pht, an influential hacker collective, while creating
the script—also borrows true-to-life
details. In one scene, a law enforcement agent reads “The Hacker Manifesto” verbatim to his colleague.
Today, the over-the-top aesthetic of
the movie—especially the ludicrous
computer interfaces the characters are
supposed to be hacking—is subject to
mockery. But “Hackers” crystallizes
themes and tropes about the Hacker
Myth that persist today. Aside from
the ever-present depictions of dimly
lit rooms, glowing computer screens,
loud music, and unusual haircuts
(most recently featured in “House of
Cards”), the key feature of these myths
is who hackers are supposed to be.
Here and elsewhere, hackers are subversive young outsiders who are prone
to destructive acts.
Yet the “outsider” designation is
largely artificial. Hackers are rarely
depicted as members of marginalized
groups, but are instead characterized
as young white men “disrupting” the
establishment of older white men—the
outsiders look suspiciously like young-
er versions of the insiders. “Hackers”
comes closest to diverging from these
media representations by featuring a
relatively diverse cast of hackers. But
the protagonist, held to be a prodigy
and the most skilled of the group, is
still a young white man.
These stereotypes are familiar, but
this was not always the case. Software
programming was perceived as a feminized occupation as late as the 1960s.
But at some point popular conceptions
shifted. The percentage of women
versus men majoring in computer science peaked in the 1980s, only to fall
through the 1990s and 2000s. The stereotypes that accompany the Hacker
Myth can be found within early, nonfiction, putatively descriptive works
like Steven Levy’s 1984 book,
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution,
and the Jargon File’s 1991 “profile” of
hackers, which reads, “Hackerdom is
still predominantly male… is predominantly Caucasian with strong minorities of Jews (East Coast) and Orientals
(West Coast).” Yet reality shifted closer
to these descriptions after their publication.
The hackers, the myth, the hacker
movies that embody the myth—what
came first? What caused what? Like
Kevin Mitnick’s tangled relationship
with “WarGames,” it is hard to identify
what is fact, what is fiction, and what
is fact made significant in a hindsight
informed by a barrage of later media
representations. But regardless of how
the Hacker Myth originated, what we
can say is that the myth is clearly set
within constraints of race, age, and
gender, and these constraints persist
through popular culture and internalized expectations.
The hacksploitation genre decayed
through the 1990s and 2000s. If Matthew Broderick is a happy-go-lucky
kid prone to a spot of boyish trouble
in “WarGames,” Jonny Lee Miller is a
Whether the Hacker
is a hero or a villain,
he always has the
same over-driven
personality, and he
always looks the
same: young, white,
male.
troubled punk with a heart of gold. The
moral valence that hacking takes on in
“Hackers” is positioned delicately be-
tween Broderick’s innocent, inadver-
tent intrusions and the darker depic-
tions that proliferate through the rest
of the decade. Characters like Broder-
ick’s, embodying naiveté and benign
curiosity, more or less vanished from
the genre, replaced by sociopaths (“The
Net,” “Live Free or Die Hard”), enemy
combatants (“Goldeneye”), desperados
(“Swordfish”), and a dramatized por-
trayal of Kevin Mitnick as a thrill-seek-
ing scofflaw in 2000’s quasi-factual
“Takedown.” As the Hacker Myth ages,
the Hackers have aged too, but the boy
genius hackers have reemerged in the
media within the specific context of
Silicon Valley.
“The Social Network” (2010) har-
kens back to the wunderkind type de-
picted in “WarGames” and “Hackers,”
right down to the protagonist’s pri-
mary motivation for his feats of tech-
nological prowess: to impress girls.
Silicon Valley at that point was already
thoroughly imbued with the Hacker
Myth. Tech company founder mytholo-
gies focused on stories about tinkering
with computers at a young age, empha-
sized “outsider” status with anecdotal
evidence of antisocial behavior, and re-
ified rebelliousness with frequent ref-
erence to the “college drop-out” label
(at times shakily applied—Bill Gates,
who lacks a college degree, nonethe-
less did attend Harvard for three years
and took enough courses to graduate).
“The Social Network” did not intro-
duce the Hacker Myth to Silicon Valley,
but it cemented a certain picture of the
Hacker in popular imagination that
has bled out into reality. A few years
after the ludicrous big-screen depic-
tion of drunken hackathons and Palo
Alto party houses, “brogrammer” cul-
ture in San Francisco entered into full
s wing. Fratboy immaturity has become
a (mostly) unwelcome, but not unsur-
prising aspect of tech conferences and
other events, now and then blowing up
in the media, as was the case with the
infamous 2013 TechCrunch Disrupt.
Frustrated advocates for women
in technology have sought to change
a hostile culture through a number
of measures, including the creation
and enforcement of codes of conduct