We weren’t terribly surprised — although we were a bit disappointed — when our daughter slunk out of the family room. We’d stumbled on a golden oldie: WarGames, the 1983 science fiction thriller starring an absurdly young Matthew Broderick.
The futuristic wonders that knocked me out of my chair in 1983 — computers that talk to each other over the telephone! a clever nerd who turns out to be more powerful than the government! — are old hat in 2014. Why should we expect our children to care about the things that preoccupied us when we were young? Times change. Mom and Dad are so…yesterday.
The movie, by the way, holds up beautifully. It feels prescient. Its creators looked ahead to the day when a brilliant kid would be able to cause global turmoil from the comfort of his own bedroom, and intrusion into government computers would be a exploited as a tool of war. The film showcased computing technologies that have become commonplace, driving us crazy, even as they drive business: password encryption, robocalling, brute-force attacks, and machine learning.
Of course, the primal fear at the heart of WarGames was the central preoccupation of the times: global thermonuclear war. All of the computer stuff was a warmup to the main event, a frighteningly realistic exchange of missiles with the Soviet Union, splashed in stroboscopic animation across the monitors of NORAD. The protagonists watch in horror as the Defense Department’s computer vaporizes the virtual world in countless iterations, faster and faster, trying to find a solution to the paradox of mutually assured destruction. Meanwhile, the computer has hacked the launch codes of real nuclear missiles; the missiles will launch the instant a winning strategy is found.
The computer is simply doing what it’s programmed to do: figure out how to win the game. It doesn’t know what a simulation is, any more than it knows what a cheeseburger tastes like. Who can forget its chilling answer, delivered in the bloodless tones of synthesized speech, to the typed query, “Is this a game, or is it real?”
What’s the difference?
WarGames captures the ethos of the hacker perfectly. The Matthew Broderick character isn’t a traitor or a secret agent. He’s merely a kid, desperate to play a video game that hasn’t been released to the general public. There’s joy in his mischief, elation at being able to “game the system,” and astonishment that his wonky skills might win the attention of a pretty girl. The quest for the video game goes badly wrong, but overall, hacking is portrayed as an antidote to the powerlessness of adolescence — and, by extension, a weapon against government secrecy and oppression.
In one of my favorite scenes, the young hero, desperate to make a phone call but low on funds, unscrews the handset of a public phone, expertly short circuits it, and makes a free long-distance call. Back in 1983, this seemed to me to be the height of cool, but these days, that stolen phone call strikes me as the essence of hacking, a miniature morality play about individual and corporate rights. The questions that hover in that little glass booth — a phone booth, how quaint! — are fundamental to a just society: what happens when the lines of communication are privately owned? What is the role of money in the flow of ideas and information? What is lost when the poor are silenced?
I didn’t know it back then, but the phone booth scene was a tip of the hat to an earlier generation of hackers, the so-called “phone phreaks,” an informal, far-flung group of social outcasts obsessed with the secret workings of the global telephone network.
In the pre-digital 50s, 60s, and early 70s, back when the phone system was based on analog technology, these phone phreaks vied with each other to outsmart Ma Bell’s security protocols. While some of them were in it for monetary gain, by and large their efforts were about bragging rights, the simple pleasure of being able to do it. The earliest phreaks learned how to gain access to free trunk lines using toy whistles. Later, their efforts became more sophisticated. They figured out how to make electronic “blue boxes” that could generate just the right tones, in just the right sequence, to make their free phone calls untraceable.
It was illegal to manufacture these blue boxes — after all, making free long-distance phone calls was, at the time, considered stealing, whereas now it’s simply a business model. But some young entrepreneurs, giddy with the idea of exploiting loopholes in a bloated infrastructure, made the blue boxes anyway and sold them out of apartments and garages.
You may have heard of a couple of these guys: Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs.
Not every hacker goes on to found a company like Apple. Some of them, drunk with self-righteousness, expose state secrets; others release malicious worms and viruses, just to burn things down.
WarGames showed us a future where the American genius for innovation very nearly causes the end of civilization as we know it. At the time, we thought of Armageddon in terms of ICBMs and evil empires, but it turns out that presidents and prime ministers aren’t the only ones with their fingers poised on the button.
These days, it’s anyone with a keyboard.
