In this week’s episode, your favorite radical hacker collective get into the nitty-gritty of 90’s tech paranoia via the 1995 films Hackers and Strange Days. Caro can’t help but admire SD‘s attempt to create compelling a fable for its time; while Ebony and Anita discuss the gendered violence the film doesn’t allow us to look away from. Hackers turned out to be a bit harder to reckon with — not least because Caro couldn’t get past the image of a skateboarding Fisher Stevens; Ebony was tormented by Lorraine Bracco’s befuddled shrieking; and Anita found the film’s technobabble to be long on “cool,” but short on substance.
We want to hear from you, so head on over to feministfrequency2020-production.mystagingwebsite.com/freqout and send us your FREQ-Out today!
Subscribe to Feminist Frequency Radio now to get a new episode every Wednesday on iTunes, Stitcher, Player FM, Spotify or iHeartRadio! And become an FFR backer on Drip to join the community and get access to rewards like weekly bonus segments, access to our friendly Discord, and more!
Segment Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
1:00 Pop Culture News (including extra bonus convo about Anita’s “hard sf” D&D campaign, a Farscape shout-out, and Caro maybe getting sucked into D&D via dice) Serena Williams and the French Open; the shooting tragedy in Jacksonsville at a Madden esports tournament; and Cyberpunk 2077 and the politics of cyberpunk
15:25 Strange Days and Hackers
16:01 Anita mispronounces “Ralph Fiennes”
47:03 What’s Your Freq Out
The Witcher Developer CD Projekt Red Apologizes for Transphobic Joke
Jack Reacher: Never Go Back
Shadowrun Dragonfall
“Why It’s Difficult for Your Library to Lend Ebooks”