It’s been 20 years since Hackers came out. At the time, the public for the most part was unfamiliar with hacking and hacking culture. It was a revelation of sorts, totally ridiculous, yet also prescient. Two decades later we have just witnessed the best hacking thriller television program ever made: Mr. Robot.  While it’s unfair to judge the two against each other – Mr. Robot is better for myriad reasons – it’s interesting to see the evolution in awareness concerning how we view hacking and also certain social issues relevant to hacking.

20 years ago we lived in another world

Hackers opens with the house of 11-year-old Dade ‘Zero Cool’ Murphy (Johnny Lee Miller) being raided by police that are carrying rather excessive firearms. What was the young hacker going to retaliate with, a spoon? Back in 1995 we would probably have believed anything was possible, from a computer genius who could hack The New York Stock Exchange. Most of us would have likely given credence to the young genius being able to hack a machine gun; such was the average person’s understanding of computer technology and the internet back then. But that was Hackers, madcap, and not quite self-aware enough to understand how relevant it would become.

The writer of the film Rafael Moreu, reportedly spent time with real hackers. Emmanuel Goldstein (pen name, and character in George Orwell’s 1984), founder of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, was the creative advisor for Hackers. His magazine still often writes about pressing social issues such as security and surveillance. The film was obviously in good hands, but while Goldstein (aka Eric Corley) would have been the person to lend it some realism concerning hacking, Hackers does tend to go into overdrive, or overkill, a little too often – it’s worth mentioning, with an excellent soundtrack.

A hacker interviewed about the film, name withheld, called it, “Outrageously terrible in the best way.” In the same interview another respondent talks about the many flaws in the film’s believability, “I think one of the most unrealistic parts is taking a floppy that you wrote on a machine, putting it in another one, and all of the files had no read errors.”

But testament to the film’s realism, which inserts itself not very often, in the next scene Dade employs some social engineering by gathering information over the ‘phone from a more-than-happy-to-help security guard at a TV station. The TV station aired some nasty, racist programs, and so we are introduced to a hacker with a conscience.

Hackers got other things right, too, including the fact people and businesses would often use simple, predictable passwords. But as right now it’s reported that 123456 is a hot choice with internet users, the kids in Hackers tell us it was words like, “Love, secret, sex…and God”. Have we become more lazy since 1995?

While the group of hackers is busy passing around indispensable books, such as the NSA’s big red book of Trusted Networks, the ill-starred chain smoking kid tells us how he hacked a bank’s network. The problem though is that we just have to take his word for it; there is no on-screen evidence of the breach. “I’m in this network,” he tells the group, “…I’m throwing commands around…I figure out it’s a bank.” And according to the hacker, the consequence of him chucking about commands is some bank in heaven knows where spits $700 into the street. Where did he commit the hack? On his home computer. This leads to him getting jailed, but jail isn’t really jail, it’s just Hollywood.

20 years ago hacking was like taking DMT

Computers are fantastic things, but they’ve never looked as fantastic as they did in Hackers. While the hacking is going on, each character enters something similar to a Tron-like environment, where software is psychedelic and the entire experience might best be compared to a rather heavy DMT trip.

But as we know from Mr. Robot, the opposite couldn’t be truer. Hacking can be painstaking work, and would be impossible to make it look visually exciting in a Hollywood movie. In fact to watch real hacking live you’d probably need to join Elliot and take a hit of morphine. That’s why Mr. Robot relies on the realism of the hackers themselves, their internal and external conflicts, emotional problems, not just what they do. We, the audience have grown up; we’ve become more self-aware and require more nuanced, developed characters. We’ve got them. There is hope.

In 1995, however, our teenage tech geniuses follow very hollow 80s-90s stereotypes. The kids all seem to belong to some sort of caricatured cult, each devout to their Warriors-esque style. Each person is eccentric, and might be compartmentalized as ‘nerd’, ‘ freak’, or the new ‘cyberpunk’. The master hackers meanwhile sometimes look like Jedis and at other times unconvincingly go everywhere on skateboards (baddies) or rollerblades (goodies). We must assume Emmanuel Goldstein had no input here.

Just as in Mr. Robot, Hackers also employs some eccentric, gifted Asians to collaborate in bringing down the corporate beast. In hackers it is the camp duo Razor and Blade that come to the rescue, while in Mr. Robot it is Whiterose, the churlish transgender leader of the Dark Army that is the demigod of hacking. The insuperably smart Asian seems like a familiar trope in films about tech. The beast in Hackers, however, is an effete dope with very little chance of even breaking his own skateboard, never mind spilling oil into the sea. The bad guys in Mr. Robot meanwhile are very believable, and have equally believable agendas.

20 years ago hacking for social justice was an idea without a cause

The hackers in both stories do, kind of, stand for similar principles. In both films there are black and white hackers, the white hats meddling in networks and exploiting tech naivety for the common good, and the other guys doing it just for money.

“Hacking is more than just a crime, it’s a survival trick,” says one of the guys in Hackers. They call themselves the, “Samurai of the New World Order,” and the public are called, “the cattle”. Nietzsche likewise called us the herd. The father of public relations Edward Bernays called us the same thing. Only if introspection and deep analysis of culture, politics, and society, doesn’t quite take off, we have hackers to give us glimpses of truth. Unfortunately, Hackers the movie didn’t really tell us anything important. It did at least show us there were people who could. And would, 20 years on.

Elliot from Mr. Robot tells us with similar skepticism, “There’s a powerful group of people out there that are secretly running the world… no one knows about the guys who are invisible.”

The problem with Hackers is that its hackers aren’t just unaware of what they are doing half the time, it’s that they don’t seem to even know why they are doing it. There’s no modus to their operandi, it just seems like a lot of dicking around for supposedly a good cause. If there’s a New World Order running things, the film is not exactly sure what it is. One of the cops chasing the hacking group muses on hacking for the social good and calls it, “Commie bullshit”, but it’s never certain what the bullshit consists of. It’s not like they are erasing debt or anything, or fighting for wealth equality.

Mr. Robot has hit a nerve during a time of mass surveillance, austerity measures and bank bail-outs. If Hackers is a bunch of kids with the right idea and no goal, Mr. Robot is the matured version of those kids. Hackers highly implausible Scooby Doo ending leaves us at a loss really. Bad guy gets arrested. Dade gets his girl, Kate (Angelina Jolie), and disaster has been averted. Hollywood had to have happy endings in those days, and we for the most part lapped it up. But the public, we, the former herd, are growing frustrated with unrealistic happy endings. We want to see our time, our lives, our troubles and strife documented fearlessly, in a way that doesn’t insult our intelligence.

Photo credit: USA Network; Ingrid Richter via Flickr