As everyone under 40 in infosec tires of the “Hackers” aesthetic plastered on everything by us tedious elder millennials, one thing that I think gets lost, particularly for younger folks, is that the movie isn’t just goofy camp. I mean, obviously, it’s heavily fictionalized, but there really *was* a hacking subculture kind of like the one depicted in it in New York in the 1990s. I barely grazed the outer periphery of it myself, and I sometimes wonder if anyone did a serious ethnography of it.
Conversation
Notices
-
Embed this notice
Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 27-Feb-2024 04:46:42 JST Glyph - Ryan Castellucci :nonbinary_flag: repeated this.
-
Embed this notice
Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 27-Feb-2024 04:46:41 JST Glyph At one point as a teenager I did arrange a physical swap of “hacking” software on floppy disks in a series of posts on a BBS using coded language. We rollerbladed to a laser tag arena and traded the disks inside. Everything I have done since then has been determinedly less cool, so I understand the yearning for the prelapsarian past, even if I recognize the impulse as problematic and reactionary. But we did lose something.
-
Embed this notice
Jim Flanagan (jimfl@hachyderm.io)'s status on Tuesday, 27-Feb-2024 04:46:46 JST Jim Flanagan @glyph there are two kinds of people in infosec: those who embrace the “Hackers” aesthetic, and those who can get off my lawn.