Hacker Cinema
The Max Headroom Show
1985 · TV series · 3 seasons
Created by Rocky Morton, Annabel Jankel, George Stone
ComedyScience FictionFantasyTalk
The Max Headroom Show started life in the UK in 1985. The show featured actor Matt Frewer playing the role as computer-generated talk-show host Max Headroom.
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Holy moly, I don't know how I never knew about this.
https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2017/03/30/max-headroom-returns/
Mine was supposedly to be… hmmmmm, let me see now… the fourth episode of the series. My title was “Mister Meat.” Now, TV writing in those days was a two-step process: “story with option to teleplay,” they called it. You wrote a ‘story,’ a short plot outline with all the major beats and characters. Then, when the showrunners, studio, and network all approved it, you went on to write the teleplay.
“Mister Meat” never got that far, alas. The showrunners and my fellow Maxxies loved it, as I recall, but when ABC saw the story they reacted with horror. Way too disturbing and offensive, they announced, driving a spike firmly through my concept and sending me on my way. Which I why I never got hired onto MAX HEADROOM and wound up on staff on BEAUTY AND THE BEAST instead.
I got a second chance when MAX was picked up for a second season, however. As a freelancer, I got the choice assignment of writing the Christmas episode. And this time I went to town. Wrote the story, rewrote the story, wrote the teleplay, revised the teleplay. “Xmas” was the title of the episode, and it got as far as pre-production…
And then the show was cancelled. Rather suddenly and unceremoniously, I must say. America was spared from celebrating Xmas with Max.
As predicted in the final episode of Max Headroom, titled Baby Grobags.
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4jl2mm
I don't know if it's the best intro to the series, it was the final episode in fact.
There was an episode of the old 80's TV show "Max Headroom" which explored the idea that a new age church was taking advantage of people by providing kiosks, for a price, that contained a crude digital simulation of their lost loved ones. The show came down pretty much on the side of "it's just creepy, false hope".
Max Headroom
Both the original film '20 Minutes into the Future' and the US drama series. All very 80s cyberpunk. Mega corps and dystopia
Serial Experiment Lain
Lain explores 'The Wired' communication network and reality and the digital bleed together.
Strange Days
Noir styled look at abuse of power. A black market seller of recording of people emotions and memories tries to uncover who committed a murder.
Cyberpunk documentary
I know you said no documentaries but this covers many of the films and TV shows mentioned
Part 1 - https://youtu.be/sttm8Q9rOdQ
Part 2 - https://youtu.be/0VoX3vr6CCM
Part 3 - https://youtu.be/KczJNtexinY
Space Feather (a YouTuber who makes excellent video essays) has an awesome video essay on the older Max Headroom series: On Max Headroom: The Most Misunderstood Joke on TV [0]
Elijah Wood and Christopher Cantwell are behind the reboot, so it should be quite fun to watch!
As a beside, I still think Halt and Catch Fire is the most underappreciated TV series ever!
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsDrXc94NGU
OK, now that I'm actually awake, I'll try to finish answering per the OP's request:
Briefly mention the reason for the attribution. Or in other words write your heart out about why you love your field and why you love "the" books.
For starters, the 3 books mentioned are the only three that really stand out to me as having specifically related to my interest in computing. But it's not fair to say that I credit them solely with sparking my passion for computing. In fact, despite being an avid reader who reads a number of books that most people would probably find ludicrous, I would probably credit more of my interest in computing to other factors. Those would include TV shows I watched as a kid (Whiz Kids, Knight Rider, Automan, Max Headroom, etc.), movies (War Games, Tron, and years later The Matrix), magazines (in the 90's I was constantly devouring issues of PC Magazine, Byte, Computer Shopper, and suchlike), and early exposure to text adventure games and so on.
I'd also credit some books that sparked my overall interest in science / technology / engineering, if not computing specifically. Like a book on electronics that I borrowed from the high-school library over and over again until the cover was falling off (literally), a biography of Charles Proteus Steinmetz, etc.
All of that said, the three books do stand out as having been influential to me. Here's why:
The Soul of a new Machine - Kidder took a story that a lot of people would probably find very dry and boring, and made it into high adventure, involving a fascinating cast of characters. It's easy to read this book and come away with the feeling that creating a new computer is The Most Important Thing Ever. For my high-school aged self, that was profound.
Neuromancer - one of my first exposures to the idea that computers were more than just fancy calculators, or utilitarian tools, and rather a gateway to an entirely different world. No, an entirely different kind of world. The idea of "cyberspace" and the adventuring that could happen there... wow. Ever since reading Neuromancer I think I've secretly, on some inner level, been hoping for the day when we achieve VR or simulations that are that immersive and engaging, to the point of truly feeling like you're entering another world. Watching The Matrix definitely amplified that.
Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier - there are parts of this book that are of dubious veracity, especially some of the parts about Mitnick. Nonetheless, for me at age 24 or so, reading this was my first introduction to the idea that there were specific subcultures associated with computing, and frankly some of the exploits that these characters engaged in seemed rather exciting, if not even enticing. Who read this and didn't want to change the Class of Service on a friend's phone to "payphone" so they would pick up to dial and get the "Please deposit 25 cents for the next 5 minutes" message? C'mon, admit you. You all did.
Hrm. As a nerd growing up in the rural midwest (b.1972) (hundreds of miles from a significant population center, there were some entertainment concepts that were born (Tron, Max Headroom, Knight Rider) that were pretty neat to a 12-17 year-old. 8-bit computer mags were fun to collect--the 8-bit market had some distinctive architectures (z80, 65xx, 8088) that made it fun to try to create similar programs for different systems; some mags would publish the source code for a game or utility for multiple systems in the same issue--it was fun to try with our own code.
Other than that, the 80's were shit. The economy tanked. Rural America embraced Reaganomics during the campaign. Didn't turn out to be such a good deal for most of us, BUT...
We Gen-X rats were fed Superior Bullshit.
The 80's had the Star Wars Project. It is worth looking up--basically, we (the US) ran a (supposedly) successful con on the Soviet Union. Around $61 billion dollars was spent to incite a false tech race with the hope of siphoning Soviet resources into research that neither country had a hope of viably creating. The Reagan admin's winning card was having the money to cover the bluff (that money was doled out on legal contracts with not-altogether-clear film footage of some pieces of in-flight ICBM interdiction tech being dropped every few years).
How much that project contributed to the end of the USSR? Dunno. But it was cool!
Oh, and the Internet was wee. Most nerd comms were done by way of "borrowing time" on one of the corporate X25 networks (chat with a few primitive bulletin-board type systems) or by BBS. I don't know if that actually contributed to the 80's un/pleasantness, but they were fun (as long as you could dodge the bill).
The 80's might also have been the last complete decade that no one was arrested for letting their kids play outside by themselves.
This probably doesn't matter very much, but I found it very interesting. If you watch some old 80s movies, you'll find they had a very naive sense of information, deception, and revolution. I'm thinking particularly of movies or shows like Pump Up the Volume or Max Headroom. "The People" (ie, a few extras and the main characters) were presented with "the truth" (ie, a few sentences about some minor corruption.) and this led to a deus ex machina revolution where those powers were somehow "defeated." Even if this didn't happen on screen, it was sort of implied "everything is ok now."
I think these sorts of cultural ideas hearken back to the cold war, and refer directly to the USSR. Real, specific coverups occurred, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Soviet_cover-ups) and were perpetrated directly by specific government officials, and these specific government officials sat atop a very fragile and vulnerable government structure. Furthermore, the government truly attempted to cover things up, usually successfully.
Obviously we're in a much different world now, and the propagation of information has forced an evil government to move from coverup to disinformation. (or at least spin and messaging.) It sometimes feels like the culture has not quite caught up to this yet. I still see people shouting that people need to know "the truth," and there seems to be an expectation that once "the people" know "the truth," then everything will be alright, just like we saw on TV so many times.
Yes, in the 80's we would call such things cheesy, today they are the standard. Just we kinda accept it for what it is, equally accept that some people will fall for the cheese and enjoy the cheese. So it carries on as the norm. Then, when you get a good, fair - non-brain insulting advert or product, your like just wow - thank you. Though they can alienate most of the cheese lovers out there.
But I'm sure there is some science behind it, might be the case that marketing whent - lets target the average IQ and go for the masses and with that. We get lots of cheese.
As an aside - some aspects of today's marketing remind me in part of an old TV show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_(TV_series)
This reminds me of Blank Reg[1], from 1984's Max Headroom.[2]
The Blanks were people who have no record in the system.
Now that was a prescient TV show if I ever saw one.
[1] - http://www.maxheadroom.com/index.php?title=Episode_ABC.1.6:_%22Blanks%22
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom:_20_Minutes_into_the_Future
He played Max Headroom in the Chrysalis/Channel 4 film as well as the UK and US TV shows. The UK show format was more news/political satire, where the US TV was retconning the film and moving on with character development. The TV show wasn't horrid as I had expected.
I've been using Max Headroom as a benchmark. I think we may b e up to ~80% of th episodes becoming literally true. It's been an episode every other year, approximately.