🍿 Subscriber Bonus: The 40+ Films to Understand Hacker Culture

A promise is a promise. I had promised one of you (he knows who he is) an exhaustive list, or at least an opinionated one, of the best hacking films in history.

The idea is always the same: when we talk about films about AI, cyberpunk or pioneering sci-fi, we have an unfortunate tendency to cite the same titles over and over. Yet plenty of cult films have already tackled subjects that are crucial today. So you need to see them!

Among the gems (for paying subscribers this time), I'm thinking, for instance, of that 1980s gem where, for once, the hacker is a woman. It's a film nobody in France has ever heard of, but I've always found it fascinating because the techniques it depicts are astonishingly visionary for the mid-1980s.

Obviously, I couldn't skip my two classics: WarGames and Sneakers, written by the same duo, Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes.

For each film, I've tried to apply a "watchability index," because let's be honest, it really depends on your mental load for the day. But if you work in computing, it's striking to see that most of today's big ideas are handled more accurately in 40-year-old films than in current productions.

"But how do you find the time to watch all this?"

To answer Marie Dollé, who asked me the question, the answer is simple: I'm not watching them now. I saw them a long time ago, and some of them still haunt me or inspire me.

That's the advantage of having lived in San Francisco in its heyday. I spent my life at the neighborhood Blockbuster. Video stores had real curation, and I miss it terribly today. The completely

unusable way of choosing a film on Amazon Prime or Netflix pushes me to create lists like this one, so you can go straight for what's worth it.

I've also included a link to the film 23. For me, it's a film about Pengo and Koch, two hackers I had met back then on certain forums. A tragic story and a legend in the hacking world of the late 1980s.

An "IRL" meetup is coming soon

Mehdi from APIDay has offered me a venue in Paris so we can do something together. I'll keep you posted!

In the meantime, enjoy the show.