Hackers.

This --

-- is my favorite movie. I don't love it for the camp – I was only brought to the realization that it was campy about a year ago – it is a pure and sincere love, full of hope and wonder. I saw Hackers in theatres when I was twelve or thirteen, and it was right around the time when we got Internet in my house and my father and I were exploring this thing called America Online. It was four years before I would code my own website, and five years before I would step foot in New York for the first time.

I remember walking out of the theatre stunned, in a complete daze. This might sound ridiculous to everyone who doesn't know me well (or even those who do know me well!), but this movie was the beginning of everything for me. I didn't know a world outside of the version I had lived in, and hadn't thought about what I wanted to be when I grew up.

Hackers is unrealistic and ridiculous, but I didn't know that at the time. I thought that world was real. It was full of energy, of a group of friends who would dig into things to see how they worked, and defeat the bad guys through code. It was a completely foreign way to spend time and of having fun that I had never considered or knew existed. And then there was this person --

I had never seen a girl lead character who seemed so cool to me in a movie until then. Everything else seemed too gender stereotyped, and it wasn't that I didn't look up to those girls, it was that I hadn't even thought of them at all. This girl was different. This character was a loner. She had her own style. She was brilliant. She was independent. And she helped save the day in the end.

After seeing this movie in 1995, I was drawn to computers in an insane way. I stayed up late regularly, posting on AOL message boards. A few years later, Laura got me into Angelfire, which had me staying up even later once I had graduated beyond the rich text editor and dived into rows and rows of code. It was a fun puzzle, looking at the source of the websites I liked and changing letter after letter to see what these changes affected, and slowly learning how different scripts worked. I got into webrings, hosts, regular site/design updating (which at the time required manually changing dozens of individual Notepad files and took around four hours each redesign), and packing up shop to nomadically move each time my host launched pop-up ads. It was the most fun I'd ever had.

I don't tell people I can code anymore, because my knowledge is frozen in time along with this movie – it barely clears CSS. But the respect I have for what the Internet has let happen is as strong as ever, and many life decisions I've made reflect that respect – from internship, graduate school and job applications to tattoos and my current job. And I really do owe it all to this.

Oh my god, how cool is this movie. Give it a spin if you haven't seen it – you'll hear references to 28.8 BPS modems, the speed of a Pentium, phreaking, and worms. It's mystical, especially for someone around 30 years old who's experienced (and remembers) an analogue world, and has slowly watched this craziness unfold over the past couple of decades.

Two sort-of separate thoughts, linked by TOKYO!

One of my favorite parts of the Internet is how hard it is to miss something wonderful if you're really into its subject matter. Here is a tiny account of how I found out (and was reminded, and was reminded again) about TOKYO! (the movie):


Pretty awesome, right? Over six months, I had messages about the movie coming from a blog, a friend and a mailing list. By the time the movie opened, there was no way I was going to forget about it. And how could I, with a trailer like this?


Last weekend, I finally saw it with Jack and I loved it. This is one I'm going to have to buy when it's released; I can see myself wanting to watch little bits of it over and over again.

In short: The movie is three separate stories – all set in Tokyo – directed by Michel Gondry, Leos Carax and Bong Joon-Ho. I loved each one for different reasons. There were a lot of "everyday adjustments when you're new to a big city" parts in Gondry's, the feelings of which I can remember/relate to. Also, one of my favorite buildings has a tiny cameo in it.


The Carax story was slightly jarring and hilarious at the same time; it starred Denis Lavant, who nobody ever seems to be able to take their eyes off of (here he is in the Rabbit in Your Headlights video). The Joon-Ho story not only referenced hikikomori... but it also had a TON of sunlight in it, which is one of my favorite things in the world to look at.

I really am happy that I enjoyed Tokyo! this much, because I accidentally read a withering review of it a few days beforehand that ashamedly had me spooked (don't click on that unless you are okay with spoilers): Tokyo! has no real reason for being, least of all as a city portrait. It’s disposable art-house tourism, made by filmmakers with too many festivals to attend. Wowzers! Seeing this movie reminded me why I tend to take such things with a grain of salt, since it's hard to apply the opinion of someone I've never met to the context of my own life.*

I realize that this post doesn't really have a clear flow. Sorry. These are the two separate thoughts that aren't SO separate in my mind but I'm having a hard time explaining (try to poke holes in these if you can, I don't feel 100% yet):

1. The Internet is a great platform for guiding you to things you love: either directly (something you signed up for, e.g.), or via someone else who knows you pretty well. DUH, I know, but I'm just thinking about this now.
2. The more paths that something takes to get to you, the more support there is that you should probably check it out further. These paths are in a way pre-selected and shaped by "what makes you you," right? So all of them taken together are a better predictor of whether or not you'll like it than someone who's paid to write reviews that stand on their own or in a silo. Again, common sense, but I liked deconstructing it a little.

* I think of this in the same way that I think of professional restaurant reviews (I wrote this as a comment in Noah's post about rating systems & personal rules). One of the reasons I prefer public rating systems over things like Michelin is context. Restaurants don't live in a vacuum: they are part of people's lives. On Yelp, you can look at profiles attached to each review to get a general sense of the context in which the review was written. You can also look at the other reviews that that person has written (and what they wrote them for), and get a general gauge of how the restaurants (or shops) play a part in their everyday lives, their particular tastes, their "aesthetic" (gross but true), etc. Yakitori Taisho is not on Michelin's NYC Stars 2009, but it would be on mine because of who I am.

Strength in (digital) numbers

People have been banding together around causes they passionately believe in for a long time, right?


Massive change has never been affected at the scale and speed at which it can be today, though. The availability and democratization of web applications has made it easier to rally around a conviction, efficiently prove a point and prompt a kind of domino word-of-mouth effect than before. One example that has been bouncing all over the place has been the heartwarming story of David Armano trying to help a family in need. I first found out about it through Faris:


David wanted to try raising $5,000. Well, in under 24 hours, donations were up to over $12,000. Wow. See what I mean? He blogged about this sweeping gesture of generosity here.

Here's another:


This one's personally relevant. For those who may not know, JPG is a photography magazine. It has a tightly knit online network of almost 200,000 people who submit and share their photos on JPGMag.com. The people on there favor a democratic view of photography over a pretentious one – there's peer commenting, voting and sharing of constructive criticism. This community extends into the magazine in a cool crowd source-y way, too: members’ photographs are chosen and published in its six annual issues.

Anyway, now the bad news happens. I got an email on January 2nd from JPG with the sad news that they'd be shutting their doors – ceasing production of the paper magazine and taking down the web site. As with many arts-based things today, they had been facing some money troubles for a while. JPG thought that they had tried everything, like seeking out potential investors and buyers. What they didn’t realize at the time was that their biggest strength lay in what sourced their content in the first place: the people.


[photo from striatic]
Almost immediately upon hearing the news, those who saw a family in JPG rallied together to fight its death. Among countless blog, Twitter and Flickr posts, SaveJPG.com was born, soliciting personal stories about people’s relationship with the magazine.

And now the good news! In a few days, a single post got over 700 comments (one of my favorites had the line "JPG is my big school of photography"), including how much people would be willing to pay annually just to keep the community alive. This outpouring of support was noticed almost as quickly as it started: JPG sent a follow up email a few days later with this line in it:

Because of you, we have multiple credible buyers interested in giving JPG a home.

So, while those hundreds (thousands?) of JPG members & fans didn’t directly bring back the magazine, their (very) fast and powerful collective influence probably perked the ears of potential investors who might otherwise have overlooked a tiny arts publication before it was too late. Warm fuzzies.


One final thing: last night I read the most glorious words: Smile! Polaroid is saved. I don't know if the THOUUUUUSANDS of people all over the world posting online, making web sites and signing petitions did anything to influence the Austrian photographer (who decided to pay for production of film for Polaroid cameras), but I sure am thrilled he decided to do it. I don't know if this is quite related to what I've been talking about, because this change didn't happen overnight, like the David Armano and JPG miracles (hell, this took nearly a year). But the scale – the fighting on our part – was the same. So, half related (and fully happy).