Difference between revisions of "Hacker-as-Hero"
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One of the more notable archetypes to emerge in the 90's and 00's has been the hacker hero. Hackers have increasingly become the central protagonists in movies, using their computer skills to augment the "system" and drive the plot. Hackers are here defined as programers that work from outside the system and have powers to manipulate the system that ordinary people lack. | One of the more notable archetypes to emerge in the 90's and 00's has been the hacker hero. Hackers have increasingly become the central protagonists in movies, using their computer skills to augment the "system" and drive the plot. Hackers are here defined as programers that work from outside the system and have powers to manipulate the system that ordinary people lack. | ||
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Revision as of 23:48, 16 June 2011
Definition
One of the more notable archetypes to emerge in the 90's and 00's has been the hacker hero. Hackers have increasingly become the central protagonists in movies, using their computer skills to augment the "system" and drive the plot. Hackers are here defined as programers that work from outside the system and have powers to manipulate the system that ordinary people lack.
The most notable example of this would be Neo in the Matrix. A hacker who suspects that there is more to life than meets the eye discovers that everything he has known his entire life is a computer program. More than this, he discovers that he is "the one" that can manipulate this reality-program. Other hacker heros include the protagonists from Swordfish, Hackers, Terminator 2, The Social Network, and supporting actors in the X-files, Ghost in the Shell, and Cowboy Bebop.
Hackers are often analogous to wizards in fantasy books. Harry Potter and Gandolf have many of the same qualities of hackers in their ability to manipulate the basic structure of the world that surrounds us. Fantasy novels ask us to take it is a basic premise that magic exists, but hackers work within the world that we inhabit. The hacker/wizard trope thus embodies Arthur Clark's law that any technology of sufficient complexity is indistinguishable from magic.
