The hacking itself isn't really nonsense at all, IMO. It's still the only hacker movie I know of that featured dumpster diving and social engineering as primary methods of learning about and gaining entry to a system.

The actual computer bits were outlandish, sure, but that tongue is so firmly planted in a cheek that you can see it from orbit.

i've always seen the flashy computer bits as something that isn't intended to be viewed literally, but rather a way to understand the mental models they had for things. in the same sense that i would explain something as "hopping into a box and poking around systemd to see what's on fire", the movie used big flashy graphics as a metaphor for the minds of expert users. i think that was the best possible choice to bring you into their world without requiring the viewer to have an expert understanding of the inner workings of a computer.

That’s a great way to put it.

i think it was a really good choice, i'm certain i'm not the only person who saw that movie as a small child and decided thats what they want to be. it was exciting and cool back then and it still holds up now. i want to imagine that someone truly and deeply understood having a love and understanding of computer systems when they made the choice to express it with such artistic license.

Have you seen the movie Sneakers? That one gets it so right.

A lot of it was accurate in between the nonsense. I was surprised to learn that there really was a Cookie Monster virus that made you type "cookie". And the hackers are accurately depicted reverse engineering some machine code as a major plot point.

How a group of people... who make their living typing characters, that encode binary values, that get compiled to machine code... can be so judgemental about transformative artistic license boggles my mind. Does it not occur to people that the visualizations are intended to be a layperson's representation of what the act of coding is like, rather than what's actually on the screen?

Interpreting, modifying, and fitting together higher-dimensional structures is a pretty accurate analogy of what my average day to day feels like, at the 1,000 ft level.

Also, some Orbital, for retro kicks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bV-hSgL1R74

Edit: For those who want support from the work itself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlMvYx11V-Y&t=4s. The writers / directors were well aware of what actual computer code looks like.

At the time people were essentially upset that it misrepresented hacking as cool, where actually it was geeky. Today it's easy to take for granted that people understand personal computing, but there was a time when most adults didn't know anything about them. Those of us who did wanted to spread that understanding, and it was nothing like the street fashion and colorful animations of Hackers.

There's also an East Coast / West Coast dynamic involved. West Coast hacking was optimistic/idealistic about depth of knowledge and engineering, and East Coast was more cynical/realistic about social groups and control. Compare Apple to Facebook, the Homebrew Computer Club to 2600 magazine, custom hardware to script kiddies. This movie is a hip Hollywood take on the East Coast scene, while War Games and Sneakers are West.

Hackers was originally a guilty pleasure, but it's aged very well. I was happened to watch it again last week, and organizing a global DDoS to take down a command and control node for an industrial control virus and prevent a terrorist attack was a bit ahead of its time. Part of the visionary magic was directly involving the community, particularly Emmanuel Goldstein of 2600.

I wish the business side of it was doing a better job though. There has always been a cult following that they aren't tapping into... The original may be a poorly typeset laser printout, but why has there never been an official "Trust Your Technolust" poster?