Hacker culture and politics in postmodern fact and fiction
Autumn 2023
(Warning! This text may spoil the following movies: The Matrix, Pi and Fight Club.)
We explore… and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge… and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias… and you call us criminals.
Setting the scene
In popular culture, a hacker is nearly always depicted as a person who, using an alias, breaks into computer systems – which is also true of many famous real world hackers. The breaking in is usually illegal but morally defensible within the framework of the story, or in the case of famous real world hacker heroes, within the political narrative used to rationalize their actions. But hacking can also mean programming in general. Hackers of the latter variety usually become heroes because of their contributions to the advancement of computer technology: Steve Wozniak and Ken Thompson, for example. These are all examples of good hackers.
There are of course bad hackers, too. In fiction, bad hackers often exist merely as a shallow source of conflict, an obstacle for the hero hacker to outwit and overcome. Outside fiction, bad hackers are increasingly described as operatives of foreign governments or dangerous extremist organizations. These bad hackers are rarely portrayed as being part of hacker culture – especially not in real life, where this particular distinction is needed to identify heroes in order to successfully craft or affirm political narratives of various kinds.
To serve the positive connotation, hacker culture needs to be fairly broadly defined. It usually encompasses various in-group markers and qualities that the bad hackers lack – most often a set of morally pure values with a countercultural, often progressive twist. Early real world political markers of hacker culture were distrust of the (deep) state, safeguarding personal privacy, free speech advocacy and an opposition to predatory capitalism – a heritage from the counterculture prevalent at the time and place of its birth, the US in the late 1960:s. This has since been echoed in many a hacker tract, factual as well as fictional. WarGames (1983) pits a mischievous boy next door against the hubris and excess of the military-industrial complex. Sneakers (1992) features a group of aging hippies doing battle with foreign as well as domestic political actors, and The Lone Gunmen (2001, originally from The X-Files) are at constant odds with both megacorps and US intelligence agencies.
Through the increased ubiquity of networked computers and the gradual reframing of hackers from criminals to freedom fighters, the connotation of the word hacker itself has gone from largely negative to largely positive. In the word hack‘s capacity of describing a clever solution to a problem, it’s even trickled outside the realm of technology and blessed us with life hacks in general and specific ones like kitchen hacks in particular. Hence, new words must be constructed: bad hackers are now instead cyber terrorists or cyber criminals.
Fact becomes fiction becomes fact
During the last few decades the hacker has, both in popular culture and public perception, become something of a figurehead for what’s commonly called the progressive movement. Perhaps due to the very nature of being at the forefront of technology, hackers have often been depicted as liberal, libertarian or progressive. There are some fairly apolitical hackers in fiction, but in general, you’ll be hard pressed to find a conservative one.
The best example of the progressive hacker is, without a shadow of a doubt, found in the production of filmmaker siblings the Wachowskis. The original three movies in their The Matrix (1999) franchise are, as we will see, seminal works in creating a framework for the hacker as a post modern, progressive archetype. Its latest motion picture installment Resurrections (2021) and the Wachowski TV series Sense8 (2015-2018) build on top of this. Both works feature the archetype: The Matrix most notably in the the form of Neo – a hacker messiah – and Sense8 in the form of Nomi – a transgender hacker hero.
Other examples of the hacker archetype in a more down to earth, but still decidedly progressive setting can be seen in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy of books (and subsequent film adaptations). Here, we’re presented with tough-as-nails female hacker Lisbeth Salander, fighting both her inner demons and their origins: a society corrupted by patriarchal conspiracy.
Another Wachowski movie, V for Vendetta (2005) has leaked back into real world hacker culture: so-called hacktivists (hacker + activist) have co-opted the movie’s Guy Fawkes mask as their symbol. This phenomenon in turn trickled back into pop culture when Mr Robot (2015-2019) portrayed a hacktivist group using similar face masks in their video messages to the general public. Then again, the face mask ploy has appeared before in real world hacker culture: A 1987 TV signal hijacking was dubbed “the Max Headroom broadcast intrusion incident” after one of the (still unidentified) perpetrators, hidden behind an eponymous Max Headroom mask. This is another example of how hacker fact and fiction blends together to form an indistinct mythology.
A handle on reality
Hacker fiction and hacker reality has, for a long time, fed off each other in this intricate symbiosis. Take, for example, the alias or handle: a way to stay anonymous from the law while still being able to retain bragging rights for a hack. Early phreakers (landline phone hackers) are now the stuff of legend – perhaps in part thanks to fanciful monikers such as Captain Crunch and The Cheshire Catalyst. The first software cracks (removal of early DRM/copy protection schemes), from as early as 1980, were performed by the likes of copy/cat, Mr. Z, The Pirate and The Bandit.
The concept of hacker aliases soon found their way into popular culture. Blind phreaker and audio expert Whistler in Sneakers is a good example, no doubt inspired by previously mentioned ur-phreaker Captain Crunch. In the movie Hackers (1995), junior hacker Joey Pardella frustratedly exclaims, “I need a handle!” Neal Stephenson’s character Hiro Protagonist from his novel Snow Crash (1992) is another example. Stephenson went so far as to suggest that in the future, everyone’s who’s hip has a handle – not just hackers. In a sense, he was right: Plenty of people are now better known by their Twitter or Twitch usernames rather than their given names. In the Wachowski’s Matrix universe, given names almost carry the connotation of slave names: when freed from the Matrix, everyone goes by their hacker alias.
Real hackers, in turn, have often picked their handles from movies and literature, with a preference for fantasy and science fiction: there are many various Striders, Bilbos and Gandalfs among early game crackers. When hacker related popular culture started appearing in earnest, the circle swiftly closed. After the publication of William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and the rest of his sprawl trilogy, the handles Case and Count Zero became popular, and WarGames gave birth to several Joshuas.
Apart from handles, Gibson’s writing has enjoyed great influence in shaping hacker mythology. He helped popularize many concepts and aesthetics used in the Wachowskis’ works, including the idea of “jacking in” to a network using sensorially immersive brain/computer interface, and cyberspace – the online world – as a visually striking virtual reality governed by hackable code. The now cliché goth aesthetics of the female hacker (including Lisbeth Salander and The Matrix’ Trinity) was if not created, then surely deeply influenced by Gibson’s Molly Millions (who is strictly speaking not a hacker), and later Esther “Invisigoth” Nairn in The X-Files episode Kill Switch, co-written by Gibson in 1998.
Hacktivism, Inc.
Mistrust authority – promote decentralization
The previously mentioned Guy Fawkes mask is used by a movement called Anonymous, which seems to be more of a loosely co-optable name used to attribute various kinds of activism online as well as offline, as opposed to for exampl
