Black box universe: the mind-game phenomenon, the hacker film, and the new millennium

It is the beginning of the new millennium. Globalization is picking up the pace, and Marxist media theorists warn about affective and ‘immaterial’ modes of extraction, as well as the rise of the attention economy. It is within this web of post-Fordist anxieties and chameleonic, flexible mechanisms of control that Thomas Elsaesser first charts the rise of the mind-game phenomenon, in his 2009 article ‘The Mind-Game Film’. Elsaesser and his successors perceptively trace the mind-game film back to a range of global conditions and technological innovations which marked the passage from the twentieth to twenty-first centuries, from interactive VCR and DVD technology to confrontations with post-colonial Others. However, little-to-no mind-game scholarship thus far has centered the rise of Web 2.0 and the concurrent privatization of the Internet; furthermore, with the obvious exception of the Matrix trilogy, the mind-bending hacker films of the 1980s and 1990s (e.g. WarGames, Sneakers, The Net) have been largely overlooked as mind-game and mind-game-adjacent films. Accordingly, this paper examines whether and how the hacker film might be folded into the broader field of mind-game scholarship.