For a marginalised generation that grew up with just three networks and a rotary dial, the early internet felt like the fulfillment of a promise. For the first time, we were creating mass media ourselves. Websites coded by hand, bulletin boards, IRC channels, early blogs full of animated Gifs that looked terrible and said something real and personal.
There was a genuine, almost naive belief that decentralization would hold, that a network built by everyone couldn’t be owned by anyone.
So, when Hackers was released in 1995, the internet was still mostly a VR-powered McGuffin in movies like The Net or Virtuosity. The world wide web (or the information superhighway as the news always called it) was set dressing for technophobe paranoia, a convenient new way for screenwriters to put characters in danger without understanding the technology at all. Meanwhile, those of us who actually used the thing at 28.8k could already feel a revolution brewing.
Iain Softley’s Hackers was the first film that got the feeling right.
Not the technology, Lord no, but the whole vibe. The sensation of being young and online in 1995, of knowing something that adults and institutions didn’t, and understanding that this knowledge had a kind of power.
Hackers belongs on the same video shelf as Pump Up The Volume. In Allan Moyle’s 1990 film, Christian Slater played a kid seizing the airwaves from his basement because the adults running his school were corrupt, complacent, and completely uninterested in hearing from anyone under thirty. It held the idea that the only frequency worth trusting was the one outside the institution’s control. This felt like the voice of our generation. Hackers took that same defiant middle finger and plugged it into a modem. The medium changed but the message remained the same: own your channel, speak for yourself, and never trust the people who own the signal.
And set the whole thing to a scorching soundtrack.
With the dot-com gold rush, the language shifted from “access” to “acquisition,” and seemingly overnight every two-bit garage startup had a pitch deck and a venture capital meeting. The early web’s scrappy independence got buried under piles of stock options and IPOs, and by the time the bubble burst, nobody seemed to care – and the internet started getting fenced around brands.
Napster was one of the first real corporate boogeyman before the peer-to-peer crackdowns. Sixty million people sharing music freely, no gatekeepers, no toll booths, just running exactly the way the open web was supposed to work. The industry’s response was to sue teenagers and kill it. Thanks Lars. Then Apple launched iTunes and installed a cash register at the door, and every platform since has followed the same logic: let the kids prove the concept, then buy it, monetize it, and lock it down. And not necessarily in that order.
After September 2001, privacy suddenly became an inconvenience to governments, and the generation that might have rallied behind “hack the planet” mostly stood aside while the tools we celebrated were silently repurposed for mass data collection by large corporations. We may have been rattled a bit at first, but by the time the rattling stopped, we were happy to let every detail of our online activity get transformed into market research. But we got a bit of convenience in return for our conformity, and we didn’t need to code our own blogs anymore. By the time of Web 2.0, sites like this one removed any need to understand the technology or get our hands dirty with CSS.
Even if, for a while at least, social media felt like the promise had come back around. Everyone had a voice, everyone was connected, the old gatekeepers were finished. Except they weren’t, and the new ones were just better at hiding. By the time anyone clocked that an algorithm was making the same low-common-denominator editorial decisions that network executives used to make, we’d already moved in and handed over our passports.
I was a web developer in the late nineties. I watched this from inside the machine, building large data-driven sites, then optimizing search results, then running a corporate internet marketing division for over a decade. I was there for every meme, every trend, every pivot from liberation to monetization. Content was king and Google swallowed the internet wholesale one keyword at a time. I watched “information wants to be free” become “data is the new oil” and I knew exactly what that meant because in some small way, I helped build the infrastructure that made it possible.
So yeah, as a generation, we ‘Xers grew up with three TV networks (sometimes four) telling us what to think, what to like, so we fought to break that stranglehold, and we won. We smelled like teen spirit. And then we cycled right back to a handful of billionaire-owned platforms doing the same thing through a bunch of algorithms that feeds us exactly what we want to hear. Spin doctors run wild, disinformation and truth are practically indistinguishable, and most people can’t tell the difference because the feed was designed that way. We let the echo chambers replace the commons, and we stopped asking questions because scrolling past is easier than pushing back.
We knew, in our heart of hearts, that the people controlling information were not to be trusted. Somewhere between the stock options and the algorithms and the comfortable silence of a curated feed, we gave that up. Now the generation that screamed about seizing the airwaves is dismissing the next wave of kids for doing the same thing we used to do.
Hack the Planet? I really thought we meant it at the time.
And now?
Now you’re reading this post because something about it interrupted your doomscroll, a feed served to you by an algorithm, on a platform owned by one of those companies because a machine decided you might engage with it.
We weren’t great with the follow through, were we? -Pop
Hackers arrived on home video today in 1996, after a September 15th, 1995 theatrical release.