By 1993, the internet was a household name. Businesses had begun to take notice of this new form of mass media, and 1.3 million hosts had been identified worldwide. The consensual hallucination was reaching epic proportions, and everyone was rushing to “jack in.” The very foundations of cyberpunk culture, dating back to Gibson’s universal “matrix” welcome its integration into popular culture; when the mainstream recognizes the allure of the mythologized future, it is a sign that said mythologized future has arrived. Consequently, 1993 witnessed several debates about the state of cyberpunk. In an article about the death of the culture which appeared in one of the early releases of Wired, “Cyberpunk RIP,” Paul Saffo criticizes the culture for having “quickly surrendered their visual archetypes to the cultural mainstream [HREF 3].”

In reality, cyberpunk had always existed for the express purpose of “selling out” to popular culture. Its followers considered themselves merely “ahead of the times.” They were not a counter-culture, but a hyper-intuitive display of what was hopefully to come. The appropriation of cyberpunk by mainstream culture wasn’t so much cultural as purely technological; as devices of the future came into the public sphere, the culture of the public sphere shifted accordingly.

As science fiction became science fact, cyberpunk culture began to lose its edge; it became seamlessly integrated into mainstream society and its own renegade offspring, hacker culture. By 1995, Hollywood had caught on to the emergent symbiosis, and the results were staggering.

Hackers, 1995

It was with the release of the 1995 film Hackers that cyberpunk and hacker cultures truly felt the effects of media attention. Taking delight in techno-culture, Hackers borrowed heavily from cyberpunk norms— portraying hackers as clad in black fingerless gloves and utilitarian vests reminiscent of guerrilla corps of the post-industrial landscapes of cyberpunk literature. Prior to its release, hacking culture lacked a unified paradigm. What little semblance of community there was consisted of small, competitive groups, and anonymous individuals. The hacker community was a disjointed array of technically-inclined misfits with little in common aside from a penchant for exploits.

Hackers changed all of that. Computer-genius high school students were displayed with the high fashion of cyberpunk mythology; the costumes and lifestyle—the expansive video game setups, warehouse raves, and endless urban childhood could have been from any number of science fiction novels. Hackers also cemented the “hacker ethic” of sorts; for the first time, the belief in free access to information was made public, and beyond that, championed as truth and justice.

Perhaps more significant than the glamorization of the lifestyle was the artistic license taken with the technologies themselves; popularized within computer science sectors as “Movie OS,” the swirling 3-Dimensional user interfaces of the film are horridly unrealistic, to the point of self-parody. In addition to romanticizing what in the hacking world is still mostly limited to colorless, text-based consoles, the liberal use of graphic enhancement also served, unintentionally, as a model for future developments in the field of user interface design. It seemed natural that the internet should be portrayed in three dimensions, and indeed cyberpunks had always thought of it in terms of a three dimensional matrix that one could enter by means other than text alone.

The creation of “Movie OS” sparked a revolution within the field of computer science. As the public was sold on the idea of 3-D graphical interfaces, the technology sector began to devote mass amounts of money and time to research in the field. Today, such endeavors are still underway.
“Movie OS” was revolutionary in the cultural sphere as well; the romanticized technologies drew interest to the computer field as never before. Where the text-based command line had failed to generate interest, the dynamic three dimensional hacking environment of the future made heroes out of geeks, and the community began to grow in size exponentially.

Where before had been a closet community of motley techies, there was now a publicly recognized hacker “type”—there was a style, slang, and a pervading belief system, all borrowed heavily from cyberpunks.