Talk:Fresh Kill

A fact from Fresh Kill appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 20 July 2020 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows: Did you know... that the 1994 film Fresh Kill is noted for its influence on hacker subculture, with a 1995 article about the film containing one of the first recorded uses of the term "hacktivism"? A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Did you know archive/2020/July. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Fresh Kill.

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The following reference(s) may be useful when improving this article in the future: "Cinema Frames, Videoscapes, and Cyberspace: Exploring Shu Lea Cheang's Fresh Kill"

As someone keenly interested in the history of hacker subculture, I was quite surprised to hear of this film allegedly having had impact on it. The Webber et al. citation cites a RAND monograph, Networks and Netwars, which establishes pretty robustly that the emergence of actual hacktivism was organic, occurring only years after this film was made. If any movie from the same time period of Fresh Kill had a significant influence in the genesis of this stage of hacker culture, then surely it was the much more widely-known [Hackers (film)|1995 film Hackers], which is also about an act of civil resistance, against both the US federal government and a powerful corporation. Neither film exactly has a claim to be the origin of hacking as a tool to fight oppression, though. Hacktivism incidents are known since 1990, broadcast signal intrusion incidents go back to 1977, and culture jamming might have started in the sixties. (Even the InfoNation review starts with a nod to Marcel Duchamp!) Both the review and the film came from a community which was already largely comprised of children of the Summer of Love, self-evident in other sources of the time period like the Electronic Whole Earth Catalog (1988).

The InfoNation review could be the first chronological use of the word 'hacktivism.' But there was a period of several years where politically-motivated hacking was not described with this word in the press, even though it was clearly already happening. I think it's much more likely that it has independently coined on multiple occasions, and the current usage might stem from a journalist to explain high-profile cases like Project Chanology and Wikileaks. Even the actual hacktivism article here on the English Wikipedia suggests it is commonly attributed to a source from 1996, despite acknowledging the existence of the InfoNation article. It's a very simple portmanteau, after all, so it wouldn't be surprising if it were reinvented.

With the above in mind, I think it is overly generous to state that the film had influence on hacker subculture. Reviews of a film are not the film itself, and the more direct claim—that the review influenced the hacker subculture—is extremely tenuous when the review is understood in the context of the underground counterculture that it came from. Hexadecima (talk) 08:14, 20 July 2020 (UTC)Reply

The point isn't about the nature of hacktivism (Julian Assange was involved in actions that could be described as "hacktivism" as early as the 1980s), but the origin of the term. See this article by Gabriella Coleman, where she ties the term to Fresh Kill and Shu Lea Cheang and goes on to explain that it was taken up by the Cult of the Dead Cow. Morgan695 (talk) 17:13, 20 July 2020 (UTC)Reply