Connected and Logged On: The History of the Internet in Film and Television

The sky above the farm is a solid color, matching the thoughts of a dead man. Clinging to a telephone pole, Fox Mulder examines a nondescript gray box labeled “OPTIC FIBER CONNECTION” before following a thick rope of cable to a trailer parked in the back. He’s about to meet an artificial online consciousness hidden in a dimly lit nest of wires, outlets, and screens. It has been using a secret government T3 network – the gold standard for high-bandwidth Internet connections – to commit 32 types of crime and mayhem. I am watching X-FilesKill Switch, one of the greatest episodes of ’90s TV around the Internet, written by William Gibson and Tom Maddox.

What’s most remarkable about watching oldies on the Internet and cyberculture is that, from the 1970s through the 1990s, getting online was a conscious, deliberate decision made by turning on the modem and logging in—something made easier and a lot more intuitive and taken for granted after ethernet became A standard that will drive our relationship with computers. The internet has been fuel for Hollywood’s imagination since the 1983 classic War games For such miserable horrors mindwarp, where people were permanently connected to virtual reality and ruled by a supercomputer. Last year, Alyssa Wilkinson examined how Videodrome It was one of the first films to really anticipate the way we withdraw from the kind of connection we now associate with the experience of being online.

It was also full of cables: nice big bundles The X-FilesThin strips for telephone wires She wrote the murder. In J. Michael Straczynski’s book Lines of Excellence, after sticking to technology for seven seasons, Jessica Fletcher finally rejects tradition and embraces modernity in the form of computer lessons. You learn the hard way that going online can also mean getting hacked. After a year came sport shoesthe 1992 techno-comedy/thriller that brought penetration testing and manipulation to mainstream audiences in the pre-Erahackers world. David Strathairn, as blind clerk Whistler, is the center of the film’s most iconic scene, in which he hacks into the Federal Reserve System using a dynamic Braille display (there’s also a stellar cast of audiences like Sidney Poitier, Robert Redford, and Dan Aykroyd).

Then he came hackers – a pure jolt of adrenaline that transformed an often-misunderstood amateur subculture into a cult classic with hormonal teens dripping in hot topic and maniacal, infectious energy. Publics at the time probably didn’t realize the power of longtails when they saw one, however hackers It was hot and youthful, had a killer soundtrack, and propelled hacking, cybersnotting, and cyberculture—and the values ​​of a hacker’s manifesto—to cinematic immortality.

Away from the spectacle of slick high schoolers fueling their tech, there’s something special about revisiting the dial-up and early broadband eras with just as ordinary shows as she wrote murder, Seinfeldand even sometimes Law and order (the SVU The depiction of cybercrime is so bad it deserves constant ridicule.) In “Serenity Now,” George, trying to cheer Jerry up, says he can check pornography and stock prices if he buys a computer, which I honestly assumed my dad used to do whenever I heard the mysterious screeching of a modem from behind our house in 1995.

But it’s the “Kill Switch” and seeing Mulder’s frail body in a coil of cable, bound with scraps of hardware, that really powered the internet for an entire generation of young viewers. This wasn’t a service your parents signed up for or something that nice old ladies like Jessica Fletcher paid to set up. It was, through the eyes of the show’s hackers, a super-futurist living on the fringes of suburban and corporate America and in the best traditions of Cronenberg’s body horror, a new, fluid infrastructural entity that we readily invite to the skeletons of our homes, businesses, and public spaces (the Internet is now largely considered a modern tool and some a human right).

“Who could have predicted the future, Bill, that the computers you and I dreamed of would one day be household appliances capable of the most high-tech espionage?” says The Smoking Man at the end of season 2. Back in the day, the fading limitations of his imagination make perfect sense now even though I didn’t quite understand it at the time – had he read even a few of the early cyber-fiction stories that fueled so much of the social and technological paranoia of the early the eighties.

In Season 5, we learn the origin story of the Lone Gunmen, the iconic trio of hackers who worked with Mulder and Scully and even had their own show for a short time. At the 1989 Electronics Trade Conference, we meet Byers as the straight and narrow FCC officer who clashes with rival illegal cable vendors Frohike and Langly. The latter presides over D&D games’ backstory like Lord Manhammer, and there’s plenty of easy comic relief in the sheer naivety of these stereotypes. Byers hacks the ARPANET to help a mysterious woman, and the rest, they say, is history—the three band together in a poignant altruistic effort to “do the right thing,” and militants become radical conspiracy theorists, government censors, and necessary guides to the tantalizing frontiers of virtual reality and new technologies.

It was, for better or worse, the Lone Gunmen who achieved honest feats of truly wonderful dorkery at a very difficult time for many children growing up around early home computers when logging was still a privileged mechanical and physical process that led to untold riches in the ether (while Register on and repeatedly avoiding the phone system at home as a way to avoid the feds).

No single piece of TV slays the fear of being turned offline better than the second season of Stop and catch fire“10BROAD36” for “10BROAD36”, named after the long-discontinued Ethernet standard that was developed for IEEE 802.3b-1985. It’s 1985, and fledgling internet gaming company Mutiny is facing a sharp rise in data rates from oil giant Westgroup Energy. The Mutiny House is the sophisticated heart of the season as well as the growing cultural fixation on Being Online — where programmers literally dig into walls (and nails) and lay messy ropes of cable along every available surface. Their only goal is to meet Westgroup’s new standards, the biggest of which is to port their code to Unix overnight. Taking a page from HBO’s illicit efforts (of course, to capture half-boob Cat lovers), the bad guys at Mutiny disguise a Commodore 64 as a computer running AT&T Unix, complete with their own local broadband setup to simulate external Internet access.

Of course, their job offer falls apart. There is clarity, pure and simple, in how the show connects data and empowerment, at least through the eyes of idealism; There’s a lot to unpack too, at the time-sharing and network-sharing points of the loop that drive home the importance of data control. It’s amazing to realize that getting deeper into the guts of a computer and stray wires is not a part of the PC experience anymore: cables and wires no longer invite threads to be pulled and run.

Towards the end of the third season of stop and catch fire, Dawn of a New Age: The World Wide Web proper, the evolution of online ontology, and early cataloging. In “NeXT,” we see energy marketing mad Joe McMillan at the peak of his brilliance, talking about how they need to deal with the “Tower of Babel” which is the Internet according to Tim Berners-Lee. He explains that it is pointless to find out what will become of the web because we cannot and will not know. “All we have to do is build a door,” he says, recalling a childhood memory of his mother taking him through the Holland Tunnel and the blast of sunlight at the end, with all of Manhattan ripe for exploration. His pitch drops completely, and suddenly, there’s a clear target for the end of each wire: a portal.

Despite all our efforts to include them in our private spaces, cables are now ugly, outdated things that are made obsolete in the name of convenience. Perhaps a very appropriate metaphor for basic tech literacy today and certainly a more slick version of the working past when users were forced to figure out how their devices generally worked. The cyberpunk dystopia we read about as kids—a edgier fun in ’80s fantasy—has been rewritten into a shapeless mainstream aesthetic that, for the most part, forgets the floppy brass strings of where they came from.

Don’t get me wrong: There are massive movies and shows about the internet coming out today, albeit they reflect very different interests in different kinds of technological experiences. We all go out into the worldFair, for example, is a brilliantly disturbing time spent bathed in the light of social media. 2018 seek It was a tale told entirely through screens and prestige dramas (Hey, SuccessionRoutinely use on-screen text messaging visuals.

But there’s something lost in the way we’ve left those all-important and expendable cables behind – Ethernet is still at the heart of our lives today, even if we don’t think about it much. If the best films about the Internet and hacking are scenes from the near future that are barely recognizable, then it is regular TV that offers more to chew on the technology of the characters’ present; We may have crossed the Rubicon where playing with the internet’s guts will never matter again.

I, for one, would gladly harken back to the old prime-time TV, when the camera still hung curiously on ports and connections, when most of us got sucked into the excitement of Web 1.0, and when the idea of ​​pulling the plug still seemed like a painless option.