Unclear and Present Danger - Hackers (feat. Laura Hudson)

Episode Date: March 31, 2024

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle, John and special guest Laura Hudson (formerly of Wired and The Verge) watched the 1995 cyber-thriller “Hackers,” directed by Ian Softley and starring Jonny Lee Miller, Angelina Jolie, Fisher Stevens and Lorraine Bracco, with supporting roles for Matthew Lillard, Penn Jillette, Wendell Pierce, Marc Anthony and Felicity Huffman.“Hackers” centers on Dade Murphy, alias “Zero Cool,” who made hacking history 7 years before the events of the film when he crashed 1,507 computer systems and was banned from owning or operating computers and touch-tone telephones until his 18th birthday.On his 18th birthday, he finds himself living in New York with his mother and attending a new high school, where he falls into a crowd of teen hacker. There’s Ramon, the Phantom Phreak. Emmanuel “Cereal Killer” Goldstein, Paul “Lord Nikon” Cook and Kate “Acid Burn” Libby, Dade’s hacking rival and romantic interest.One night, one of the youngest hackers in the group, Joey, breaks into a supercomputer owned by a large energy company. He is noticed and arrested by the US Secret Service, which is working with the company’s security officer. Unbeknownst to the Secret Service or anyone else for that matter, the security officer — Eugene “The Plague” Belford — has essentially orchestrated a scheme in which Joey and other hackers are to be blamed for a virus he created, whose purpose is to extort millions from the company into a private account. Thus begins a race: Belford is desperate to get the only evidence of the virus, downloaded by Joey before he was arrested, and our teen hacker heroes are trying to clear their names and get to the bottom of this conspiracy. The tagline for “Hackers” was, of course, “Hack the planet!”You can find “Hackers” to rent or buy on iTunes and Amazon. Our next film is the 1995 cyberpunk thriller, “Johnny Mnemonic.”Connor Lynch produced this episode. Artwork by Rachel Eck.Contact us!Follow us on Twitter!John GanzJamelle BouieUnclearPodAnd join the Unclear and Present Patreon! For just $5 a month, patrons get access to a bonus show on the films of the Cold War, and much, much more. Our latest episode of the patreon is on the 1964 nuclear war farce, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”

Hidden beneath the world we know is the world they inhabit. Dave? Yeah, Ma? What are you doing? I'm taking over a TV network. Finish up, honey. Get to sleep. They're hackers. Hackers penetrate and ravage private and publicly owned computer systems. Hack the planet.

Hack the planet! It's not just something they do. Sure this sweet machine's not going to be. machine's not going to waste. Are you challenging me? It's who they are. I win. You wear a dress on our date. And if I win, so do you. They can crack any code. And get inside any system. Hello? Mr. Gill, according to our records, you're dead.

I'm what? But this time... Come here, look at this. It's some kind of virus. Unless $5 million is transferred to the following account i will capsize five oil tankers they just hacked the wrong guy games over whoever wrote this needs somebody to take the fall he's about to commit the perfect computer crime you've created a virus that's going to cause a worldwide disaster and they're about to take the blame a hacker planning the virus it's the perfect cover don't be in framed can we be allies i don't play well with others oh wow we are fried Okay, let's nail it.

No, you're not good enough to beat me. Yeah, maybe I'm not. But we are. They're the only ones who can prevent a catastrophe. I know how to stop this guy. They'll trace you like that. Are you nuts? Come at me!

Unlike any, the world has ever seen. Never send a boy to do a woman's job. Hackers of the world, unite. Cops on the building. I need more time. This is the end, my friend. United Artists welcomes you to the new world. Please!

Hackers. Welcome to Unclear and Present Danger, a podcast about the political and military thrillers of the 1990s and what they say about the politics of that decade. I'm Jamel Bowie. I'm a columnist for the New York Times opinion section. I'm John Gans. I write the substack newsletter on Popular Front. And I'm the author of the forthcoming book When the Clock Broke, whose subtitle I still have not remembered.

And I will say in one second so you can hear the whole title of it. When the Clock Broke, Conman, Conspiracists, and How America Crafted Up in the early 1990s, which is coming out not too long from now in June. Just a few months. Just a few months. We're getting there. This week on the show, we have a guest. Laura Hudson is a writer and editor who formerly worked at Wired and the Verge.

Welcome to the show, Laura. I am so happy to be here for this episode in specific. Yes, yes. We have a movie that you are very excited to talk about. I'm excited. I think we're all excited to talk about this movie because it's a wonderful and rich text for the decade. This week we watched the 1995, I call it a cyber thriller, Hackers, directed by Ian Softly, British director of like actually some note, and starring Johnny Lee Miller, definitely not an American, Angelina Jolie, Fisher Stevens, and Lorraine Barraco, with some supporting roles for Matthew Lillard, Penn Gillette, Wendell Pierce, a very young Mark Anthony, and also Felicity Huffman shows up really randomly. The cinematographer for hackers, who I'm just going to note this because this is interesting to me, was the movie was shot by Andras, Andra, Andrei, Sekula, a Polish cinematographer who's work with Tarantino a bunch.

So his work includes Reservoir Dogs and Full Fiction. He also shot American Psycho. And he shot a movie that I legitimately quite like Cube 2, HyperCube. is not the one where they're all like in some sort of labyrinth puzzle thing and they all die that's exactly right oh okay okay okay there's two of these movies there's two of these movies there's cube and then there's cube two two hypercube okay is it cute two or cube squared it's actually cube squared okay okay it's technically cube squared or that would be you're in like a tesseract kind of thing multiple dimensions it's very silly it's like it's like a

dumber saw, and I kind of like the saw movies too. So there you go. So dumb saw in hypercube where I'm like, great, great elevator pitch. I love it. If saw is too intellectual for you, check out cube. So hackers centers on Dade Murphy, played by Johnny Lee Miller, alias Zero Cool, who made hacking history seven years before the events of the film when he crashed 1,507. They always specified that it's 507. Computer systems. It was banned from owning or operating computers and touchstone telephones until

his 18th birthday. We meet him again. And I got to say, real quick. I mean, I'm not going to do this too much. But I had forgotten that this movie opens with like a SWAT rate of an 11-year-old. And it's really funny. On his 18th birthday, which is when we meet him again, he finds himself living in New York with his mother and attending a new high school where he falls in.

with a crowd of team hackers. There's Ramon, the Phantom Freak, P-H-R-E-K, Emmanuel serial killer Goldstein, Paul, Lord Nikon, Cook, and Kate, acid-burn, Livy, dates hacking rival

and romantic interests. One day, one of the youngest hackers in the group, Joey, breaks into a supercomputer owned by a large, I guess, oil company, energy company,

he is noticed and arrested by the U.S. Secret Service, which is working with that company's security officer Eugene the Plague Belford, unbeknown to the Secret Service or anyone else, other than Lorraine Bracco's character, who I guess is like the CEO, it's unclear what her role is. Marketing. Unbeknown to the Secret Service or anyone else, but her, Eugene, the Plague Belford, has basically

orchestrated the scheme in which Joey and the other hackers are going to take the fall for a worm he created and the worm his purpose is to extort millions from the company. into a private account. And this begins sort of the race, the main part of the plot, as Belford is desperate to get the only evidence of the worm downloaded by Joey before he was arrested. And our teen hacker heroes are basically trying to clear their names and get to the bottom of this conspiracy.

The tagline for hackers was, of course, hack the planet. You can find hackers to rent or buy on iTunes and Amazon. You can also listen to the hacker's soundtrack, I believe. it's so good on apple music and spotify you can find a pair of rollerblades at juniors sporting good store and you can find neon clothes at hot topic i still assume it exists hackers was released on september 15th 1995 so let's check up in new york times for that day all right this is a very 90s had uh well there are actually some some consequential i was going to say this is a boring 90s thing but that's not quite right um so here we have one of the main headlines bosnia serbs agree to pull back heavy artillery

from sarajevo nato suspends bombing campaign for three days the bosnian serbs have agreed to withdraw their heavy guns out of firing range of sarajevo ending at least temporarily nato's two-week bombing campaign against them the american official said today the outline agreement side by radivan karadzic the Bosnian Serb leader and General Raqo Mladic, their military commander gives the Serb's six days to withdraw the approximately 300 guns that have bombarded Sarajevo steadily since April 6, 1992, the official said. In return, NATO will suspend its bombing for three days with the promise to refrain from further air attacks if convinced the Serbian guns are being moved. If the Bosnian Serbs would draw their guns beyond the 12.5 miles demanded by NATO, the long siege of Sarajevo would be considerably east. and the shelling that has terrorized the city's 300,000 inhabitants stopped. This would account to a considerable achievement for America diplomacy,

which only moved into high gear in the Balkan six weeks ago after years of hesitancy and hangaring over the destruction of the former use of Yugoslavia. Well, yes, the NATO intervention in Yugoslavia has begun. It is getting results. This was a big part of American foreign policy in the period. It was multilateral. There was multilateralism. The policy seemed to, I mean, now there is some, well, there was always descending voices on the purposes and the efficacy and also the legality of the NATO intervention.

But at the time, it appeared to many people to be a really successful example of American and Western foreign policy. And so, yeah, I think not too long after this, I think in 1996, there would be the date and Accords that it would end the war. Let's see what else we got. Oh, yes. A GOP announces planned to overhaul Medicare system. A few details on savings. Affluent would pay more, but proposal steps back from any HMO mandates.

House Republican leaders unveiled their proposal to redesign Medicare today, but it was surprisingly short on details and none of the expected financial incentives for elderly people to join health maintenance organizations or other private health plans. The package is supposed to cut the projected Medicare spending by $2,000, 270 billion or over 14% over the next seven years, and Republicans had hoped to achieve much of the savings through greater use of HMOs and other forms of managed care. They said affluent beneficiary should pay much higher premiums, but they acknowledged that they were still struggling to achieve their savings.

They need to meet their self-imposed goal. Jamel, what happened here? I don't know very much about the history of the health care debates in the 90s. Yeah, so Clinton proposes his health reform in 93. major health reform package. By this point, it's basically completely faltered. It's not getting out of Congress. I forget the exact details of the Clinton plan,

but it's centered on managed care. I mean, it's basically sort of like HMOs kind of emerging. Right. I'm centered on managed care and as well as the extension of health insurance. I don't know a ton about this Republican Medicare proposal. My sense is that, like, a lot of Medicare proposals that Republicans have pushed over the years, it is part of a way to kind of unravel the program over time by creating, like, different benefit tiers, by, like, raising taxes, that kind of thing, kind of undermining political support for the program

by targeting different beneficiaries with different costs. but I don't know a ton Here in the article It says they said Affluent and Beneficiary It should pay much higher premiums They said They're not offering financial incentives

For joining HMOs I mean It's worth saying that The news article makes it sound like there's a bit of incoherence here And that was just kind of true Republican health policy generally You'll often hear something like

Oh well the Affordable Care Act was the Republican health plan from the 90s, but like there wasn't actually a Republican health plan around this time. What there were, where there was a proposal from John Chafee of Rhode Island who had his kind of like, you know, similar to the structure of the ACA Clinton plan alternative, but like there was no, no Republican supported that. That was like a handful of Republicans were like, we'll sign on to this. But most were like, we don't like this. There were the beginnings of efforts to sort of establish like universal catastrophic coverage, which ends up being the Heritage Foundation's plan,

which is like you basically force every, you make everyone have catastrophic health coverage, but you don't have any other regulation, which is kind of a recipe for disaster. But like Republicans didn't really have an approach here. It just like wasn't a thing that they necessarily cared about. They just wanted to stop the Clinton plan. And so all the stuff you see emerge is sort of like, can we grant, we feel like we have to have some concrete alternative or something to justify opposing the Clinton plan. So we can say, that's not good, this is good, even though we don't really intend to actually

do anything. What's notable, of course, is that in a year sense, Republicans don't even feel the need to offer an alternative anymore. It's just sort of like, we oppose this. We're just going to destroy it. Yeah. Yeah. I have a weird feeling looking at this New York Times page that I actually read this New York

Times at age 10. It has an eerie deja vu experience to it. Like, I just remember, like, becoming aware of some of these things for the first time around this age and just like this article, foes in Angola still at odds over diamonds. I mean, this is like the first time I ever even thought about this part of the world. I just, this is something strange is coming back here. along the steep banks of the Luachimo River here barefoot runners thread their way between 15 feet deep mining holes hauling sackfuls of dirt down the river's edge there are men wearing only bikini reef stand in the water turning it coffee colored as they wash and sift the clay soil inspecting the leftover stones for the glimmer of a diamond

everywhere are teenagers on patrol with AK-47s the people in charge wear government uniforms a little north of here the scene is the same only instead of the government rebel united controls united soldiers control the area a fragile ceasefire holds in many parts of the southwest african country where a superpower fire and civil war lasted more than three decades and killed more than a half a million citizens um this is interesting because i mean the angolan civil war is complicated and i'm not going to get into all of this but it was part of the cold war um the united states back to United, Cuba and the Soviet Union back the government of Angola, who had kicked out the Portuguese, was the rebel movement that kicked out the Portuguese. You know, it's interesting

because the conflict no longer, the ideological basis of the conflict obviously falls apart, but then it becomes sort of mercenary and in pursuit of, you know, material wealth. So I think that that was a lot of things that you see in this era, you know, after the end of history, the kind of hangover of conflicts that were related to the Cold War. But now the warlords, the factions involved were just like patently self-interested and dropped all, you know, larger ideological context for their fighting. So I just think that's an interesting little piece of news. Anything else? Laura, do you see anything? As a non-sports person, I have a question that says New Jersey wants to build some stadium for the Yankees.

Did they do that? No, they did not. So that was a big thing in the 90s, the possibility that the Yankees would move to New Jersey, like the Giant State. It upset a lot of people. It upset me, and I'm not a Yankees fan. I just thought I didn't like the idea of a team leaving New York, of the Yankees leaving New York. I just thought it was wrong. And I was dead.

I, I know you guys will not believe me, but I absolutely think I read this newspaper because this, I just remember this piece of news. I validate your feelings. You're having a very strong reaction. I think it's real.

I think it's real. It might have something to do with the movie we're watching, which also brings up weird deja vu, Proustian kind of things. But the, yeah, that never happened, thankfully.

I mean, I hate the Yankees, but I think they belong in the Bronx. I remember this Columbia arrest raised price of cocaine in New York City because it was the first time it, it like occurred to me, like the laws of supply and demand occurred to me because I was like, oh, yeah, of course the price would go up if there was less. That's where I learned about supply and demand from cocaine. Yeah, from cocaine. Okay. I think I think we're good for this. So let's head back over to our movie. Laura, what is your history with the film hackers?

I watched it in 1995 when for most of the year I would have been 14 years old. Yes, you're doing the math. I'm old. I was very much into the internet when I was young. I got on pretty early. I was installing modems in computers when I was like 11 or 12. I was on like Usenet, Prodigy, CompuServe. And then, of course, when AOL learned the picture, what was that, like, 92, 93, I was on that.

So, like, I was into, I was not a hacker, obviously. That's not. But I was very, like, online culture was a very, very big thing for me, like a very formative thing for me. And I think the interesting thing about being part of my age, our age, is that you remember that time when you completely had, I had a childhood without the internet, without phones, without anything like that. that. And the internet while I was in sort of high school became, you know, eternal September is what they call it. It's when everyone got on CompuServe and then it just never stopped. You know, the adoption that flooded it will ruin the culture at the time and then it just sort of never stopped. And so it's been super fascinating and weird to have in that time in my

life, the internet felt like this secret place. It was where you went that was away from the real world. And then over time, you know, and so much of what's happening, you know, in this culture, in that time is dominated by that sense, by a lot of senses that were created by this very small group of people online, including very formative ones that put things into place that we're still dealing with today. But a lot of them didn't necessarily scale up to everyone when the internet became everything, when it became reality, when it was just where you were at the same time you were there in a sense i don't i don't know how to explain it but like to me that has been the strangest part of growing up coming of age in this specific moment and then

proceeding into the year of our lord 24 sure uh john how about yourself so i wasn't i guess a fairly early internet user we had america online and stuff like that um and i actually got into computer hacking not in and phone freaking not so much that I could actually do any of it but I just liked it aesthetically I think I was actually into it before I saw hackers maybe not it's it's difficult to say which came first I mean it would sort of make sense that hackers the movie came first and that kind of got me into it but I'm not sure that's how it happened I bought it I was at Barnes & Nobles which is also kind of I mean they still exist but it's also very 90s experience and I found a issue of 2,600 magazine, The Hacker Quarterly, and I got super into this stuff.

I thought it was this whole world of mystery, and it was sort of this, it was very romantic and there was like this underground that was doing interesting things. It had a political side to it, and it seemed to be futuristic, but there was something also kind of retro about the whole thing. it was extremely you know and this is the time in your age you know I was 12 13 and you know you're starting to kind of become a self-aware being and you're starting to get into different music and subcultures and you know that and I was kind of into punk rock and this was sort of felt adjacent to that and I got into it and I got kind of into the whole scene and I went

to 2600 meetings and I got into a hack computer. hacking world and I hung out with some of the people, you know, some of the people as a pretty young person. And, and I was taken in by the kind of politics of it, which are sort of utopian kind of, I don't know, hangover of the new, neoliberal hangover of the new left, which we've talked about many times on this podcast. And this movie was not only fell, you know, fell into that, but, you know, this movie, I grew up in New York. I was a little young. younger than, you know, I was 10 when this movie came out. So it's, it's, it's around the time, and I probably saw it on VHS when I was 11 or 12. I don't think I saw it in the theater.

In fact, I know I didn't. Um, you know, and this movie was one of many that kind of influenced the, the self-conception of me and my friends as we were kind of kids in New York, you know, like, uh, you know, kind of downtown near to Wells. Not to say my life was anything as cool as the kids in, in hackers, but it was definitely like, you know, their way of dressing, their way of being was sort of something that friends of mine definitely emulated. Um, so yeah, this movie was like highly influential and it almost makes me it's strange to think because this movie's kind of, I wouldn't say forgettable, but for not for many people, but this movie like makes me, it used to more this time watching it didn't happen,

but it used to make me kind of emotional even because it was so formative for me as a young person and I would get, you know, like kind of melancholy feelings of lost youth and hopes and all that kind of stuff. I also had a, I had a crush on a girl who was really into this movie. I think I associated her in my head with Angelina Jolie's character in the movie. So it just plugged into my adolescent brain in a very direct way. So yeah, this movie is very, I would go so far as to say, important. me. But yeah, that's my experience with it. Well, and I think that this hacker culture was so perfect for teen coming of age at the time because there is a sense there are these stultifying

structures and systems around you. And because you are, and this is crucial, so smart and sometimes so cool, because it really, there was that sense of intellectual domination over, say, the jock. You know, it was a very masculine space and it was a very white space. And a lot of that was people who had access to computers, right? And then it was the kids of the people who had access to computers. So it was a very, very limited group of people. And they did prize themselves for obvious reasons on their intelligence rather than their athletic skill. So there was the sense it's like because we're smarter than the older people, you know, like we know the new ways and like we'll just do end runs around them. Like that power fantasy of like they'll try

to stop us, but we'll just do it. And like it's so irresistible from a countercultural perspective. That aligns over all of a million other things, but just from that perspective alone, it's perfect because it was that generation that we had an experience that people don't have, like parents know how to use parental controls. My parents did no crap. I was jumping in like AOL chat rooms where everyone was like ASL, ASL, ASL, when I was like 12, very, you know, concerning. But it was like a parents didn't know how to program BCRs. They didn't know how to use computers. You did. You did. You were the one who knew and understood the future. And again, a lot of these things didn't work out the way we hope. But I think in that moment for us, in that generation, for me at least, it felt super powerful and super exciting. And I was so, like, thrilled to see where it will go. Yeah, absolutely. It felt like a very hope. I think it was also just the era, too.

I want to hear Jamel's take. But, yeah, the politics of it are something we can discuss at greater length. But the politics were kind of utopian in their own way, too. So I don't have a history with this movie from when I was, kid. I would have been a little bit too young to even seen it in 1995. But I, you know, when I was in high school, you know, five, six years later, after the movie came out, like a good chunk of my friends were very much into, you know, computers and hacking and freaking and all that kind of stuff. And so I feel like through, through them, I was sort of tint, I was aware of this culture and

and kind of, not, I want to they plugged into it. That's too strong, but sort of like adjacent to it. The movie, of course, and the movie, kind of the thing that is, they're distinctive about it, is that the teen hackers are part of this sort of vibrant underground that, as you said, John, does feel kind of retro in a way. It feels like an update of like a 1950s soda shop hangout, right? All these teens hanging out in this sort of like underground teen club, you know, selling hocking computer gear, playing video games, that kind of thing.

And, I mean, I've described this movie as hard not to like in that it's just sort of like a joyful kind of atmosphere of, you know, smart kids doing things that they find exciting. I apparently, apparently the researchers for this movie, the writers, they actually did try to find to my teen hackers hang out with and they were like these kids are boring as hell yeah kind of just you know they made up this shit to make it seem more exciting

but the funny thing and we can talk about this right is that because I think this movie has been was legitimately influential with young people interested in computers in a roundabout way the movie may not have really reflected how hacker culture was but it ends up influencing the development of like that culture

because of it's because it's like it's I think it's really quite evocative in how it presents presents everything. I know for you know I I know for just thinking about my friends in high school joking around in elite speak was like a fake. Yeah exactly. Right. Yeah.

And I think that's also reflective of a problem the movie has that it solves and this is a problem in a lot of movies and TV shows which is how do you make hacking, aka typing exciting to watch and hackers has a lot of answers to that and you'll see like CSI have all of their own answers to that but it's that you know as you were saying it's that fundamental issue of watching hackers do

what they do is incredibly fucking boring well and like and the hacker is now an inevitable part of stories right there's always got to be that hacker that you know jumps in at the last moment and does something impossible and enhances the photo right like it's interesting how that has become almost this sort of like magician role in media is of the hacker.

No, I think you're totally right. I think you're right. I just thought about this last time how the film visually solves how to make hacking. And we used to joke about it in, you know, oh, it's so stupid. They have these like weird visuals of how it looks like to hack into a computer system. But they had to do that to make it even begin to become palatable for an audience who doesn't otherwise give a shit about this kind of stuff to enjoy it. So it does, like, solve that artistic problem in a way, even though it's kind of silly.

But as you're saying, like, yeah, there is something fundamentally dull about this. And I think the possibilities of the internet as a place of self-transcendence or self-discovery or utopian possibility felt very live at the time. and then it kind of just like now is just the the the substratum of our lives in such a way I guess that's because I guess being able to hack or or navigate through it in a special way is still appealing to a certain degree but it's just like I just don't think computers are that interesting anymore I guess I don't know it's just a thing I grew out of um I think um and how they work. I think I wasn't interested ever that much in the computers. I wasn't really

interested in computer programming, which is basically what hacking is after the era of phone freaking, which was tricks to mess around on the phone system, which I actually always found more interesting. But a lot of the things they show in this movie, a lot of the things that they were on their way out even in 1995, right? So like the movies already like dated in terms of what the hackers do in terms of like the kinds of things they they are able to accomplish with phone with phone freaking one because there was that digital switchover at some yeah was it in the 90s and then yeah the blue boxes weren't working anymore the blue by the time I was it a hacker or a free phone there blue just to explain to the audience like the blue box was a machine that could make the tones

that emulated what an operator had in front of them so you could basically kind of get through the international phone system without paying, but you could do all kinds of other interesting things on the phone. That had already stopped working. Red boxes still worked. I can tell you from experience. I built one, but that didn't last very long. That went out pretty fast.

But yeah, a lot of these things were already on their way out. Now I think things just move so quickly. There was that movement from freaking into computers because they were different things. Right. Right. There were a lot of the same people were into them. But yeah, it was a movement. Yeah. The freaking was very 60s and 70s. Yeah. Yeah. And like that whole Bay Area culture. In fact, may I read a quote aloud from the screenplay writer Raphael Moreau, who's best known for hackers and also The Rage, Carrie, too. He says, in fact, to call hackers a counterculture makes it sounds like they're a transitory thing. I think they're the next step in human evolution. Yeah Well

No, but I'm like Get aside from the cheesiness which You know But I'm like Assume he really believes this There was that idea There was this transhumanism Yeah

In elements In you know VN well actually VNS Make sure it's kind of the opposite But there was that element of The internet is going to take us outside of our bodies Our gender and sexuality and race aren't going to matter anymore And it's going to be this you know

Sort of magical utopia And I feel like this kind of folds in, like we're all going to evolve past it and we're not going to need it anymore. And it didn't work out like that. But, you know, the excitement of that moment was really powerful. And it's interesting to look back on now from such a cynical time. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it was a really product of a very hopeful time, which more than many of the movies that we're watching. I mean, there's something just very youthful about the movie, obviously.

but it's full of the hopes of youth in many different ways and computer culture in its youth. I was young for the scene, but then as I grown older, I was like, these people, I mean, these people were kind of puerile and their politics were puerile and their hopes were pure aisle. And like, it was a fundamentally, there was something fundamentally immature about the whole thing. And it's fine to be into when you're 13, 14, 15, but then. Then I just was like, dude, this is not cool and like this is not like it was just so closely connected with pranks. You know, like it was just like this is not there's nothing serious about this. Like the only thing serious about it is people who are like actually malicious.

You know, like there's a lot made about and I would argue with my parents like hackers are good. They're actually these, you know, they read the hacker manifesto, and I'm just looking at it now and I'm like, this is so fucking infantile. Like, yes, I'm a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something you will never forgive me for. This is a teenage.

I don't know if he was actually a teenager when he wrote this, but this is some teenage shit. And like when I was a teenager, it was, it was, you know, acceptable. But then as growing out of it, I'm like, all right, that was fucking a little bit. The whole thing was kind of puerile. Well, and also the ethic of the hacker kind of evolved over time. You know, when very, very early on, you know, it was more ARP and it related and all that. I think there was this genuine academic sense of they just, it was the tinkerer mentality of like, I just want to see if I can do it. But I feel like this is also where privilege comes in because like at first there were no

hacking laws, not until 1986 when it was the computer fraud and abuse act, something like that. And, you know, the real, you know, the real prosecutions didn't really come until, you know, 1989, 1990s, sort of in that era. Sneakers came out in 1992, which sort of brought it into public consciousness, beyond the war game stuff

of 1983. And then, you know, 1995, hackers comes out and the net comes out. And that's, you know, sort of when it starts to take that turn into this is a dangerous thing this is a criminal thing because it wasn't you know how i had always perceived it at least was you know this researchers who are kind of sneaking into other servers and and and again that sense of privilege of like well we're not doing any harm and it's fine and we're not going to get in trouble uh and how that kind of branches out to more of that

countercultural stuff and it is more about pranking causing destruction and i think that's become more of what we think of a hacker as now i mean when you guys think of a hacker do you think black hat like right i yeah like the movie black hat because that's no i do i do in fact think about yeah we used to talk about that like there was like gray hats and white hats and black hats and so on and so forth i think that like you know we used to think you could be countercultural and subversive and do illegal things and break into big corporations of the government but with like with good motives, not the motives just to be destructive. And there were all those big denial of service attacks.

And then we would, basically it was really stupid. Like every, there was this hacker talk radio show. And every time some destructive hack would happen, they would go on, you know, being like, those people aren't hackers. That's not what we're all about. And I'm like, it becomes like no true Scotsman. I was like, well, what do you call it? Like, they're obviously like using the same skills, using the same techniques that you, that you do.

You just disapprove in this case of their techniques. And also, like, as in any subcultural thing on the internet, like, yeah, there was like an utopian leftish, you know, kind of left liberal, I guess, or even not socials because it was so interested in mass politics. But like, thing to it. But then I met a lot of people with very weird politics at that time of my life. You know, like, don't forget the libertarians. They're in there.

I was about to say that were like where I met like there was like basically the left and right divide on in it was between kind of like utopian left liberals and and and libertarians both of which are sort of you know like you know politics have their limitations but this group of people also a lot of the utopian sides of it and the idealistic sides of it have curdled and like a lot of the same people who would have said, like, you know, were one of these hackers with, um, with these idealistic goals for society are now probably like kind of Silicon Valley reactionaries. And, and I think that that's sort of like, that also happened in an earlier generation, but I think that, you know, for the most part, I became pretty disillusioned with the whole thing.

I mean, as is age appropriate. But in a lot of the people that I was friendly with in retrospect, I'm now like, those people are fucking losers and like, I'm sorry to say it. And also like, you know, they're just like dedicated themselves to something that I don't necessarily respect anymore. And I feel like it was like more appropriate for teenagers than people that were adults. I mean, I would say there are people who genuinely, I did meet people who were really brilliant with computers and had a special talent in that regard and had a creativity and brilliance about that.

But they weren't necessarily the same people who were really into the scene. A lot of the people in the scene like myself were kind of posers and it was about an image. And I was attracted to the image of it, which this movie definitely contributed to. I was a big poser. And it was all about, it was all about,

the image of the movie and the image that the hackers had sort of built up around themselves and made it attractive and would even attract posers was something to do with that utopian side, something to do with, as you were saying, the elite, you know, elite speak, but as a hackers would call themselves elite or elite, like, yeah, the intrinsic elitism of it, the fact that it was a subculture that took intellectual pursuits really seriously and was like, yeah, you can be smart. here's here's a way to be smart but not be like a obedient dweeb which i mean they were just dweaves in another way it was like oh yeah you can be like smart ass and subversive but still smart which attracted me for and like because i had those pretensions about myself and then the

other thing about it which i think we can get into more is like why this movie still has a charm for me um is like the technology itself has some we talked about this in previous episode Like this older technology, it has some thing that I can't quite put my finger on. This is very connected to my nostalgic feelings about it. It's like what could have been, it wasn't quite seemed very cutting edge at the time, but now it seems very retro or retrograde. Like, I'm still attracted to that aspect of it. I'm like, I love old computers.

I got really into retro computing. I don't do this anymore. But I was like, that was one of my interests was like, the things from the, the generation that had just passed that had gone out of date and weren't really working anymore and were out of date were always much more interesting to me than the cutting edge of technology, which is also where I kind of broke interest with these people because they always wanted to figure out how the new things worked. And I was like, the old things were more interesting. Well, and one of the problems I, at least, you know, some of my friends who are

deeper into more programming sites of tech have talked to me about is that that is one of the problems we have now, both in a capitalist sense and an organizational sense, is still, Silicon Valley always wants new, new, new, new, because they want to sell you new. Or I'm like, there's actually things from the past that work well in terms of what computers do, what computer language, all of this stuff. But it's this constant need to repackage to sell that ends up breaking things a lot of times. It makes it less functional in the name of making. I mean, so much of the dysfunction, I think we see now in the Internet specifically comes back to that.

It's that constant need to read. they just invented roommates and libraries and weird orange juice and it's just going to go on forever at the expense of things that actually work. You know, one of the things that's striking about the world of computer enthusiasts as presented in hackers is that it's all presented very much as as in opposition or at least intention, but I think in opposition what's sort of like the profit motive, right? in opposition to efforts to make money at all cost. The central conflict of the plot is up against a big multinational corporation and then people within it who are trying to like enrich

themselves at the expense of the corporation at the expense of these hackers. And that's like not just the utopianism of this moment in I think the history of computing culture does really seem And we should have alluded to this already, but does really seem to have both continued. You know, there's with the with the current, I guess, enthusiasm for AI, there's like a real, there's a real, you know, whiff of utopianism and but it all. But also like, it also feels as if it's like curdled a bit in that that utopianism is kind of connected to the search for profit, right? Like the utopia is we have this new device, this new technology that can help us like accumulate ever more profit with ever less work. Not so much connect people, not so much open up the world to be to be used for its own good and not not instrumentally.

Well, I think the movie, yeah, that's super interesting. I think the movie's relationship to capitalism is interesting to look at because, yeah, like so there's a big multinational corporation. there's the state, right? The feds who are kind of stupid. The multinational corporation doesn't have a clue. And then there's the hackers, both inside the corporation, the guy who's extorting them, and then there's the good hackers.

What are the good hackers end up doing in the end? They help the feds and the company to get the internal problem. They're not, they're just like, no, we're, and they're all like talking about going to MIT and like going to college is their biggest, the smart kids like going to call they're just joining the system they're not that subversive they're just like they're very well meaning they're like yeah we're a little bit mischievous but it's like they're the we're the kind of people the system needs these kind of creative thinkers who think

outside the box and do these kind of break the edges but when you need us we're there to help out they help the company well i mean it prevents an ecological disaster so that's like some greater cause but they help the company need to be created for any reason at all but go on yeah exactly like they need that the ecological yeah exactly that was just but they stop and the feds aren't bad in the movie like the government it's just stupid right and and doesn't have a clue and is working too closely with this evil guy on the inside but it's very much like oh yeah it's just like there's a couple evil people the good people the good people out of there i mean it's kind of you know a lot of movies have good guys and bad guys but it's it's just like there's nothing fundamental and this is a lot of things and this is a lot of things in this era, it's like, nothing is systematically oppositional. It's just like, oh, yeah, we can, you know, we can, you know, we, these are the kinds of people that we need to encourage, these really smart kids who are special, and they're going to help everything function even better.

And that was also the ethos of a lot of hackers being like, you know, like, I'm here to lend a hand. Like, I'm mischievous, but like I will help your improve your computer security by teaching you how to break into it. It was very, and that was like the constructive side of it. And that's like my parents are like, all right, well, like maybe something constructive will come out of it. I mean, anonymous tried to do kind of politically inflected hacking with mixed results. But I think that's, that's another thing. It's just something kind of tame almost about the, about the activism of the movie. Yeah. And campy to us at this point.

Yeah. I mean, I mean, the AI example from before like gets to a lot of what technology has become where it's like it's it's it's not the ability of the tech sector to not sell us something so much is the idea of something, you know, like I don't if you guys watched halt and catch fire, but like Joe McMillan and his ability to just spin these Don Draper. bullshit speeches out of nothing and like sell people the idea of freedom sell people the idea of this and there there's so much of that bluster that optimistic bluster in silicon valley with AI yeah so much of that I can't tell you how many people I know in various industries have bosses that are like I want AI I want AI can is this something we can do with AI because I want to bring this to my boss and show him I'm using AI and AI doesn't won't even necessarily be useful but it becomes this thing that you everybody has to do to keep up even though it isn't necessarily

more functional sometimes it means that you're selling people a bill of goods that your people are just going to have to make up later which is another problem I think we're going to have to deal with but like that sounds kind of like the dot-com boom yeah I'm like we're seeing it again at least I am and and I'm like you know because it's it's people who don't understand technology wanting to grab on you know to the tail of a kite or something like that and but the way that the environment gets warped by that is bad. Yeah, absolutely. Sorry, I don't mean to get up on my soapbox. No, I think I think that it's like, you know, this is what you see during speculative bubbles. And I think like this movie obviously just comes before the dot com bubble a little

bit as like, you know, and then you kind of see the ruins that are created after a speculative bubble where there were actually maybe some good ideas that just, you know, capitalism decided, not to say it's kind of weird. It feels like it has a weird agency sometimes, but it's like decided there's no profits to be made on it. So it was kind of liquidated in the crash. But there were like, I don't know, prior to the dot com bubble crash, it just felt like, whoa, like, you know, there's all this neat stuff.

And if you have a neat idea, it also just felt like anybody in their garage, that was the other part of the hacking ethic is like anybody tinkering. as you put it, like tinkering in their garage, messing around, could come up with an idea that could change, not only millions of dollars, but change the world to make people's lives better and was a cool. And like, it just had this, there was an air of real optimism, which was funny because there was also this paranoia. We were very paranoid about surveillance and stuff like that. Privacy was super important, you know, like avoiding surveillance, avoiding government surveillance. And we were very interested in the NSA and which was

sort of prescient because, I mean, that stuff became with Snowden's revelations, you know, the severity of it became clear. But where was I going with that? There was a lot of concern for privacy, which I think was also just kind of like, I think a lot of this is an effort, you know, the subculture, even though it's technologically inclined, I think there is a way that It's trying to preserve older ways of being prior to the internet. It's like subcultural, as you said, it was like going back to the 50s, soda shop, there's old school rebellion, there's old school styles of individualism and individual self-expression. And you're trying to like resist all these structures, like the state and the corporations.

Ultimately, the thing that, and you're trying to hack, which is you're trying to use technology, It's purposes. Use it creatively. Be its master and not controlled by it. Ride the sandworm, you know. And I think that it was very much actually, even though it seemed to be cutting edge or into what was cutting edge, there was something kind of nostalgic and retrograde about its entire way of being in the world. And now it just feels impossible and silly, which is sad in a way because you're just like, well, that was nice to think that that was even possible. I think that the enemy, for me, unfortunately, is not so much the corporations or the government. It's technology itself. It's the logic of technology itself, no matter who is in charge, it has its own power. And it doesn't matter, oh, can we use it responsibly? Maybe somewhat. But I think it has its own internal power that is out of anybody's control.

I don't know if that's too grim of a note, but yeah. Well, and that sense of freedom is something that I think about a lot, you know, is it freedom from, freedom too, but that sense of that lack of accountability that bled into all of online culture and then that bled back into real life, that was the real part of it. And I was just thinking about this, you know, talking about that Bill Gatesmith, the kid in his garage, who he doesn't have to go to college. He's just so smart.

He has this amazing idea. And he jumps right in. He skips all the steps. he doogie houses it and I'm just thinking about how what that says in terms of you don't need to know anything else because I look around at a lot of these these tech leaders and they aren't people who understand people they aren't people who understand life and human like the degree to which that's true is terribly frightening to me at times but it's like I wonder how much of that stems from this ethic of like yeah all you need is your tech smarts and

the maturity of a 17-year-old, and, like, you're good to go. Like, that was the ideal person to be. And so much of our world today, I think, was made by guys who thought like that. Yeah, I know what you mean. And there was, like, a kind of like, I think that's, yeah, lack of accountability, lack of responsibility, kind of glib, superficiality, not believing institutions are that important or that like hierarchies of contrarianism hierarchies of knowledge of tradition aren't that important like which is strange to me to support as ostensibly a left winger but like I'm a person

who's interested in the humanities which is a discipline that's transmitted through reading of texts according to a tradition and first you learn the tradition and then you begin to make alterations based on you know first it's like playing music like okay you learn your instrument you learn the rules and then you can begin to improvise and I just feel like the attitude of Silicon Valley is I don't need to learn anything you know like I learn right I can learn yeah I like and I don't need to learn how the world was before I don't need to learn listen I don't need to think learning in fact is is is is an obstacle to do it. Right. If you know what came before, how can you invent it and pretend it was your idea?

Right. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. I think there's a desire to be sui generous and to be original in some way or, yeah, to be brilliant in a way that I find really facile and boring. Like, if you don't know that somebody else, you don't know the tradition that you're coming from, I mean, and then you just recapit you. something that somebody's already accomplished, like, you've done nothing, essentially, in my view. But, like, there's a weird, like, lack of reverence for the past that I don't really like. And that's strangely conservative of me. I think in this respect, I'm quite conservative, that what bothers me about Silicon Valley culture is it's a historicism, right? It's belief that history doesn't need to be paid attention to, that the transmission of knowledge from previous eras don't need to be paid attention to. that we ultimately are just kind of brains and vats.

There's something so soulless about that to me. And it wasn't the way I felt about what felt cool about this movie, about hacking culture when I got into it, was it had a kind of air of historicity because it felt like a movement trying to do something in a certain historical moment. It had a tradition that came before it. It had people who were its heroes.

You know, and we were, we were carrying on that tradition. There were the heroes of the past and there were the, you know, the martyrs and the so and so forth. They had a whole kind of, and I just don't, I mean, I stopped giving a shit about it, but, but I just don't get that vibe at all from anything intact these days. I'm just like, dude, this is so soulless and a historical and so disconnected from anything to me that feels interesting about being a human being that I just can't get into it. anymore. So I've become, I've become, I've gone from being interested in hacking to just being kind of a lot of it. Well, because it's this constant theater of the cutting edge. But it's, it's, and, but it's this faux cutting edge that's, yeah, that's born of ignorance. That's born of this unwillingness to acquire or look at institutional knowledge, you know, this insistence upon

making the same mistakes over and over and over again in exciting new ways. Sorry, I get very frustrated. But like so much, I wonder how much that comes from that need for every, yeah, everything to be sweet generous, everything to be new, everything to be arriving for the first time now. Is it that desire to recreate that feeling, this feeling that we're talking about in the 90s, that feeling that everything for the first time now is so exciting, but it's not. Because it was the real end of history moment and now that has sort of didn't,

work out the way people thought it was would yeah i don't know i don't know i think it's just like every time i have a conversation with somebody who's a tech person in this way i get very frustrated and i'm like you we just don't we just fundamentally don't understand each other and you'll like and i get i'm just you know uh and then i i just they're just like well like the humanities don't make sense to me and i was like just let's stop right now before i lose my temper but i i i i Yeah, I think it is a desire to kind of feel that being, you know, I just think it's also like the problem with the world today is that being smart is so much of a value in our economy and being the smartest person that there are so many spurious snake oil cures to sell that to people. they're like, hey, we got a podcast, we got a podcast for you. We've got, we've got, you know, we've got AI.

We've got AI. We have some trick for you to become the smartest person in the world overnight. Here's one weird trick. By being an annoying contrarian, you can be smarter than everybody or like learn the tricks of this and learn the tricks of that, which is also tinkery and hackery in a way. It's like you can hack, you can hack this problem in your life. create a little fix and you don't actually have to work at anything. I mean, most of people are very good at hacking or have incredible work ethics and also have inquired enormous

amounts of knowledge and have studied things in depth. But there's an aspect to it in which it's about looking for shortcuts and fixes. And I think that that has become very much a way people think. Like when they learn stuff, it's like they want to learn how to like quickly circumvent the obstacle, not, like, learn how to, like, oh, here's the history of everybody who's tried to do this before, and here are the various ways of approaching it. And they're just like, no, tell me how, like, I don't need to deal with this problem. And I can just wake up tomorrow morning and be like, I'm the smartest person in the world. And that bugs me and does not make me feel good about humanity.

But can't control people. Before you wrap up on the movie, one thing I wanted to point. out just because it is quite relevant to the general theme of the whole show here is that this movie has so many references to sort of like the little the various cultural panics of the 90s. So there is when when our date, our hero, is trying to get access to a television station, he pretends to be an employee at the station and is complaining about his like difficult Japanese boss. Right. whose man's been techniques, you know, will result in him having to kill himself if he doesn't perform.

So there's a little sort of like Japan panic there. There's a couple of other things I clocked as I was going to movie that are like very much for touchstones of the 90. There is a there is a there is a there is a this woman has a her butt's too big joke at the party. I've noticed that one of the characters says like you know, spandex is a privilege, not a right. Yes. and that's that's a kid kids younger listeners may not remember a time when uh amongst white americans at least it was not cool to have a big butt now of course butts are in um it have been for some time um but in the 90s not for everybody yeah well and the gibson is i'm pretty

sure william gibson oh yeah definitely iverspace and neuromancer and the tv hack i'm pretty i didn't look this up but I'm pretty sure it's a reference to the Max Headroom hack in 1987 where someone took over a local TV station, played absolutely terrifying images of Max Headroom and upsetting. I'm like, if I'd seen that in the 80s, I would have lost my goddamn mind. Oh, yeah. That's why I remember revisiting,

because I learned about this when I was a kid, but then like revisiting it recently, the, you know, the Orson Welles, War of the Worlds, you know, thing where people lost their minds. And I was thinking about that and it was like, listen, If I'm just like an ordinary citizen and I'm listening to the radio and this very commanding voice to talk about an alien invasion, I might well get a little worried. I mean, in Orson Wells, you know, he's the guy that did the creepy voice and thriller.

He's terrifying. That's Vincent Price. Oh, wait, is it? Can you cut that out? I made a huge thing. No, you don't have to do it. I mean, there's no reason for anyone to know that. Orson Wells was alive still.

I think it was his last year of life when Thriller came out around that time. but he was the voice of Unicron and Transformers the movie. That's right. Wait, was that his last? That was his last role. Raul Julia's last was Em Bison. In Bison and Street Fighter, that came out in this year, in 1995.

Wow. Oh, wow. And this is, I mean, this is nothing about hackers, but I'll say, Raul Julia is actually great in Street Fighter and has a line that, like, is legitimately incredibly memorable that people still use it today, which is when, uh, But what's your name? Why can't I remember her name? There's a very famous actress who plays the character Chun Lee in the film.

And she confronts Bison and is like, you know, you came to my village and killed my parents and ruined my life. And Rall Julia, in this like perfect delivery says the day of bison came to your village was the most, you know, important day of your life. For bison, it was only a Tuesday. day, which is a great line. It was a great delivery. And Rall Julia was a king. I think, yeah, I think one last thing about hackers, like, I think the career of the computer hacker and troll weave is, is, like, really telling about, like, how this stuff curdled

as, as we went. Because, like, he started off in this, like, kind of, like, idealistic world of hacking. He wrote things for wire that said, like, hacker should, like, you know, be responsible about the zero-day exploits and, you know, and then he went to prison, which, I mean, we'll fuck anybody up. So, but then, you know, he ends his career. He's still alive. I assume he's out there doing stuff about, you know, becoming this hyper anti-establishment

person and then just getting into white, hardcore white supremacy and Naziism. Wait, whoa, wait, wait, wait, who is this? Weave. Oh, Ironhammer. Yeah, I'm familiar. I thought you were talking about someone else. No, no, no. It's all falling into place, yes.

Yeah. So, I mean, it's just like that sort of just, and then he was like praising the Timothy McVeigh and stuff like that. And it started off as trolling. And I think it's just like the space of the internet and wish we had more time to talk about this. The space of the internet was like, yeah, you could kind of become anything and do anything without consequences. But that was also like allowed people to morph into truly evil things without. without much friction and I think that's still that process still happens and I think there's I think there's something to I mean it the extent to which in this movie

kind of depicts it like you know that they being a hacker was sort of being a member of the elect can really I mean it can't it can and does that notion that you you are a special person yeah can very quickly curdle in the ugly things yeah and I don't I don't think I I personally don't think, you know, there's been lots of talk about kind of like the reactionary turn in Silicon Valley. And certainly someone like Elon Musk is, you know, spreads white supremacist ideas and propaganda on a regular basis. And I actually don't think one can disentangle that from the, um, the notion, uh, that people in this world are some sort of like, you know, superior beings. Yeah, superior beings, you know, some sort of elect of one type or another. Yeah, for sure.

I think that, I think that lends itself towards kind of certain patterns of mind. I can grasp upon various forms of supremacism. Yeah, yeah. Well, and, and, you know, on all counts that you were just talking about, it's not like these are signs of great personal security, right? Right. The people who are looking for those things, who need the superiority of racism, who need the superiority of intellectualism or sapio, whatever, you know, it's because they don't feel like

they have it. Like, on their own, one of my favorite, my favorite, maybe not statistics, is about verbal abuse of women in video games. I'm like, Jamelma, I'd already know where I'm going, but that they found that when women enter a male-dominated space, the lowest performance. men are the angriest because of their insecurity, the fact that they feel like they might actually have something to lose from a competent person, from a competent woman, you know, and I found that so telling that I'm like, of course it's the most insecure ones, you know,

who are who are grasping for this, who have that personal insecurity, that they need something to fill. And if you find that, you know, you've been anointed by the God of technology or whatever, that sense of being chosen, that sense of having this community, which now you must defend, right, from outsiders inevitably in one way or another. But, like, I feel like that fundamental issue of insecurity is, like, it's so big, but I'm not even sure how we would talk about it because it is such a personal thing. But I see it. I see it in them.

Like, I think it's obvious. What's so bizarre is just looking at Alon Musk who's like, he's the richest person in the world. He's incredibly powerful by any, well, I don't know how powerful he is. By any standard, he's very successful. And he's so insecure. He needs this recognition from people. He craves this recognition from people and these fans. And for what? It just seems so sad to me that like, you know he's so and I just think that the experience of insecurity I just don't think the the internet also obviously makes that worse in a lot of different ways because it just like exposes you to different forms of judgment and standards and then exposes you to publics that judge you according to those

standards it's just and then you seek out approval and then it's not always forthcoming so then you have to buy the biggest approval company in the world to get all the approval, you know? Right. And it's just very, I mean, it's sort of humbling in a way to see that there is. Yeah, like there's no top. There's no, you can be on top of the world. I mean, it's sort of a cliched realization, but it doesn't matter how high you get. Like the things, the insecurities that human beings have will follow them there.

And there's no curing them in a way. Like, they're, you know, these, these wounds are like having all the money in the world, having, you know, adulation, having success. It just doesn't do anything to get rid of that stuff, which is an important lesson, I think, for our listeners. All right. I think we're reaching the point where we wrap up the episode. So any final thoughts on hackers before you move on? no i think i kind of gave my final thought i i still like the movie i am for the first time am truly old and looked at it now and saw it as pretty as at first adolescent as it really is

and i still and i did not have the same kick of nostalgia this time i did not missed up watching it i felt no i felt less emotional than i ever have watching movie so perhaps i've truly moved on laura i have fun with it uh it was it was about as i remembered from the canon of 90s uh internet movies uh and i had a good time going through it and talking with you guys but what i mainly want to leave listeners with is a gift uh if you would like to experience the real epitome of this culture what i want you to do is google julia styles ghostwriter. I just watch the video.

If you haven't seen it, it's a real treat. My gift to you. I'm going to check this out. That is our show. If you're not a subscriber, please subscribe. We're available on iTunes,

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Laura, our previous episode was on The Rock, in which VX Gas features prominently. All right, here's Frank. I love The Rock, two thoughts. One, there is something about this era of films that really strives for, I can never say this word, thank you, versimilitude, about the world they are building. They famously had lots of Pentagon cooperation for lots of films. Wolf Blitzer and Jay Leno have lots of cameos in this era of movies, for example. The films keep trying to tell us how real they are, handheld cameras, et cetera.

So when you see the green bubbles, of course the first instinct is that must be what it looks like. but it turns out it's just a cinematic McGuffin. 2. John hints at the end of the episode, but there's a clear reason the stab-in-the-back narrative gains favor in the 90s, which is that there's a pot-smoking draft dodger in the White House.

Maybe you had to live through it, but the intensity of hatred the military types had for Clinton was something fierce. Of course, he and his technocrats left soldiers behind. What did they care of honor and valor? Then Bush 9-11 and all that goes away.

So that piece more than anything dates his film to the 90s. Cheers. Yes. Yeah. I mean, yeah. You know, my parents are in the military, and I do remember my dad, like him Bill Clinton, specifically for the fact that he was like a pos-smoking draft doctor.

Oh, interesting. Yeah. I remember asking me that who he voted for in those 90s elections. We'd be best not to know. I'm 90% sure he probably voted for Pappy Bush in 92. I don't know about Dole, but I would be. And I think he might even voted for W in 2000. Wow.

I should ask him. Pappy Bush was actually not had a period of being like, looking like he was going to restore historic Republican popularity among black voters. And that fell apart very quickly. Right, right. Yeah. I mean, the thing about George Subby Bush as a politician is he was sort of very old school and that he was like, listen, if to win an election, I will say and do whatever it's

Exactly. But once I win, I'm going to, like, be responsible. Right. I'll try to moderate and meet people halfway. Yeah. And is that the basis of the myth that we have now where people are like, no, they're like advisors around them when they get an office? Because I feel like I heard that a lot during Trump's first election where they were like,

no, no, no, when he gets an office, you won't act like this, he'll be normal. And I'm like, why do you think that? Why? That was the thing people believed about George W. Bush, sort of like. like, oh, well, he's young-ish and doesn't seem that bright. But, you know, Don Rumsfeld's around him, Dick Cheney's around him. These, like, longtime Washington hands are around him. Well, his Bush's advisors were all bad shit, so that didn't help.

So we're Trump's in a different way. But it was part of the reason, because people assumed there was a campaigning mode and an in-office, you know, what did Mara Cuomo said? You campaign in poetry and you got. in pros, and they thought, oh, well, he's just doing goofy things to get elected and he'll have some kind of normal apparatus of a presidency around him, a chief of staff, et cetera, et et cetera, and things will be fine. But anybody could just look, take, anyone could take one look at this guy and know that that wasn't going to happen, but whatever.

So, okay, and then what else about this, this, this note? The vermin, the versimilitude point is well taken. And that shows up in a bunch of these movies, like really an attempt to make this seem as real as possible. And Bay especially is, yeah, has known for Pentagon cooperation. The Transformers movies are basically sort of like

made with the American military. And this carries on to today. Tom Cruise's whole output these days is sort of like trying to show you that all this is real as much as possible. So that continues. news. We actually, I mentioned this to you in our Patreon episode, John, but we have a ton of feedback. So listeners, we may do a mailbag episode, but that'll be Patreon only to respond

to some of these emails, because we got a lot of good ones. And speaking of the Patreon, oh, thank you, Frank, for the email. Speaking of the Patreon, our latest episode is on Dr. Strange Love, which should be up at the time you listen to this. You can listen to it at patreon.com slash Unclear Pod, $5 a month, two episodes a month. And the Strange Love episode is the kind of companion episode to the failsafe episode we did the previous Patreon episode. So kind of two episodes dealing with the same kind of material from two very different perspectives.

Episodes of this main feed podcast come out every two weeks, roughly. So we'll see you then. And here's where I'm going to ask you, John, where we should go. Doing hackers, this reminded me that we do have a couple of these. these hacker movies these like tech movies are from this year in fact and so on the list on the schedule next up is independence day but what we could do is virtuosity um virtual do we do johnny mnemonic we have not done johnny mnemonic can we do so we can just go ahead and do like johnny mnemonic and virtuosity then return to to the the year is it is it possible

to do a double feature episode or we probably had to take way too much time. We do virtuosity and Johnny DeMocke, but I think we could do both movies. Let's just do two episodes. I mean, what we could do Johnny Mnemonic for the main...

That feels like a main feed episode and then we can do virtuosity for the Patreon. All right. That sounds good. Yeah. So next episode is Johnny and Mottica. I think Johnny Mn Mn Mnick is a good choice

because there apparently is a black and white version of the film. Apparently the film was the movie of a shot to be like shown in black and white. And there's a black and white Blu-ray that apparently looks incredible and like really transforms the vibe of the movie.

So I'm gonna, it's my excuse to pick that up. And we'll do Johnny Nemonic with Keanu Reeves very much a movie that is trying to translate William Gibson to the screen directly. And then perhaps for the Patreon, there'll be virtuosity, which stars Denzel Washington and Russell Crow.

in which Denzel Washington is like a cyber cop chasing Russell Crow in AI produced by combining the personalities of the worst murderers in history. All of them? All of them. Yeah, they give him Hitler's brain and stuff. Laura, have you never seen this, virtual awesome? No, I have, I have.

Okay. It's, it's, I really like it. I like really incredibly stupid movies. um so okay you did you look have you seen lawnmore man dark city i i love dark city it was seen dark city for sure love dark city or is it not on topic i mean strange days we we've done strange days we did strange days for sure so yeah yeah we'll get to all of these we can maybe do dark city the net is a great stupid one yeah we definitely did the net oh you do that one. Okay. I think

Dark City is later in the decade and we're going to do the Matrix. They should do Dark City because those two are very much of a piece. Okay. Laura, thank you so much for joining us. Do you have anything you would like to plug, share anywhere people can find you? You can, I mean, find

me on Twitter and Blue Sky, Lara Hudson, Lara underscore Hudson, depending on which one. I'm probably going to be doing for those of you who enjoyed my Game of Thrones Recaps at Wired, I'm going to be probably doing my own

for House of the Dragon season two. So that would be very exciting to a very specific group of people. More to follow. All right. For Laura Hudson and John Gans, I'm Jamel Bowie, and we will see you next time.

Thank you, as always, for listening. You're going to be able to be.