Man, how awful is it to see people broken by the realization that they are no longer young. Why are you being cantankerous, newly-old person? It’s totally OK not to be 17 or 23, things are still amazing! Kids are having fun! You may not really understand it, but just roll with it! The stuff you liked when you were 17 isn’t diminished by your creeping up on 40!
This has been making the rounds, a lazy, disappointing article from Wired about the things we supposedly “learned about hacking” from the 1995 almost-classic, Hackers. It’s a pretty unoriginal softball of an article, going for a few easy smirks by cherrypicking some characters’ sillier idiosyncrasies while making the author sound like his birthday landed on him like a cartoon piano.
We need a word for this whole genre of writing, where the author tries far too hard to convince you of his respectable-grownup-hood by burning down his youth. It’s hard to believe that in fifteen years the cycle won’t repeat itself, with this article being the one on the pyre; you can almost smell the smoke already, the odor of burning Brut and secret regrets.
The saddest part of the article, really, is how much it ignores. Which is to say: just about everything else. There’s plenty of meat to chew on there, so I don’t really understand why; presumably it has something to do with deadlines or clickthroughs or word-counts or column inches or something, whatever magic words the writers at Wired burble as they pantomime their editor’s demands and sob into their dwindling Zima stockpile.
I’ve got quite a soft spot in my heart and possibly also my brain for this movie, in part because it is flat-out amazing how many things Hackers got exactly right:
- Most of the work involves sitting in immobile concentration, staring at a screen for hours trying to understand what’s going on? Check.
- It’s usually an inside job from a disgruntled employee? Check.
- A bunch of kids who don’t really understand how severe the consequences of what they’re up to can be, in it for kicks? Check.
- Grepping otherwise-garbage swapfiles for security-sensitive information? Almost 20 years later most people still don’t get why that one’s a check, but my goodness: check.
- Social-engineering for that one piece of information you can’t get otherwise, it works like a charm? Check.
- Using your computer to watch a TV show you wouldn’t otherwise be able to? Golly, that sounds familiar.
- Dumpster-diving for source printouts? I suspect that for most of my audience “line printers” fit in the same mental bucket as “coelecanth”, and printing anything at all, much less code, seems kind of silly and weird by now, so you’ll just have to take my word for it when I say: very much so, check.
- A computer virus that can affect industrial control systems, causing a critical malfunction? I wonder where I’ve heard that recently.
- Abusive prosecutorial overreach, right from the opening scene? You’d better believe, check.
So if you haven’t seen it, Hackers is a remarkable artefact of its time. It’s hardly perfect; the dialog is uneven, the invented slang aged as well as invented-slang always does. Moore’s Law has made anything with a number on the side look kind of quaint, and there’s plenty of that horrible neon-cars-on-neon-highways that directors seem to fall back on when they need to show you what the inside of a computer is doing. But really: Look at that list. Look at it.
For all its flaws, sure, Hackers may not be something you’d hold aloft as a classic. But it’s good fun and it gets an awful lot more right than wrong, and that’s not nothing.