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