Hacker Cinema
The Skulls
2000 · Film · 106 min
Directed by Rob Cohen
A senior at an Ivy League college, who depends on scholarships and working on the side, gets accepted into the secret society The Skulls. He hopes it betters chances at Harvard but The Skulls is not what he thought and comes at a price.
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2 comments on Hacker News
Yale University isn't responsible for these societies and has no control over them. They occupy private property and by their very nature lack any formal institutional affiliation with the school. They're simply private clubs where current and former students can hang out and plot the next global financial collapse, have orgies, or whatever exactly it is they do. In any case, not Yale's problem - except an image problem, maybe.
As an alumnus, I find the hand-wringing over these societies weird, because they're completely irrelevant to most students and have been for a long time. (No, I wasn't invited to join one. I don't even think I knew anybody in one of the name-brand societies, at least not well.) The fact that Bush and Kerry were both Bonesmen was amusing, but hardly surprising - the societies are exactly where you'd expect ambitious, privileged social climbers to end up by senior year. They're not even very secret, since the membership lists inevitably leaked. The only time the rest of campus noticed is when they walk past one of the "tombs" - windowless clubhouses - or when a really terrible movie about S&B ("The Skulls") came out while I was an undergrad.
Are they creepy and elitist? Of course. Are they a sinister conspiracy? No more than Goldman Sachs or McKinsey.
They will think:
(1) that we write equations in white markers on glass windows (like John Nash in Beautiful Mind) prior to whipping out PHP to build a website, (2) that Zuckerberg intended from the start for Facebook to become the photo-and-info-sharing megahub it is today (almost like he had Facebook Places in his head 7 years ago), rather than implementing something that Harvard IT had promised "in a few years" (from the horse's mouth), (3) that we get more action than we probably do for being technology folks, (4) that secret societies at Harvard are just as mysteriously sexy and dangerous as other movies like The Skulls have made them out to be, (5) that kids entering college have more vision, ambition, and maturity about their futures rather than being awkward and confused (I teach freshmen sometimes), (6) that "hacking" is frequently accompanied by hot nypmhettes pleasuring you in time trials, in which case "Hacker News" is a total misnomer.
In other words, they will not think anything new...