What We Supposedly Learned About Technology From 1995′s Hackers

Here at Wired, we talk a lot about the evolving relationship between technology and culture. In order to help our readers keep up with the fast-paced changes of our increasingly digital world, we’ve decided to analyze the valuable lessons about technology contained within the most educational material that we as a society have ever produced: Hollywood films. Today’s subject: 1995′s Hackers, a classic story of intense coding, romance, and the all-consuming importance of the payphone.

Hackers is quite possibly the finest representation of the ’90s that has ever been committed to film, and I love it with an intensity that most people reserve for spouses and children. Seriously, of all the tattoos that I’ve chickened out of actually getting, the one that I got closest to was a full sleeve dedicated to this movie, complete with a scroll winding through with “Crash And Burn” in script, a reproduction of the front page of the Aug. 10, 1988 New York Times, a yellow 3-inch floppy disk, and of course, Angelina Jolie and Jonny Lee Miller exchanging a longing look based on the poster to Gone With the Wind. (Miller would, of course, be the Scarlett O’Hara.) Fortunately for my left arm, my dedication to irony is not quite strong enough to go through with it.