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Getting an email in the mid-90s was kind of an eventsomewhere between hearing an unexpected knock at the door and walking into your own surprise party. The white-hot novelty of electronic mail is preserved in amber by a ridiculous 1994 film: reverse sexual-harassment thriller Disclosure. It opens with a little girl perusing what was once known as a family computer before casually shouting, Daaaad, you got an email! Her announcement is as much for the benefit of 1994 viewers as it is for Michael Douglass character, an executive in the Seattle tech scene, letting them know theyre witnessing their imminent future. [Photo: MGM] At that point, the majority of Americans had never seen an email. According to a contemporary Pew Research poll, 42% had never even heard of the internet. Still, the early 90s thrummed with the propulsive drum line of digital revolution. The internet had existed in more esoteric forms for ages, but now America Online had terraformed it for normies, and Netscapes landmark IPO in 1995 began fueling the frenzy of the dot-com boom. Things changed fast, and The Net and Hackers dragged online culture center stage. Released as summer bookends, The Net stars Sandra Bullock as a tech worker whose identity is stolen, while Hackers, featuring Angelina Jolie in her first major role, follows a squad of elite high school coders as they get caught up in a corporate conspiracy. Looking back now on the flag-planting internet movies of 1995, its incredible how well they predicted the possibilities and horrors on the horizon. Fast Company talked to the filmmakers behind both about all thats changed in the 30 years since. [Photo: Sony Pictures] Neither 90s movie was a blockbuster, exactly. The Net proved a modest success, earning $110 million worldwide and spawning a short-lived TV adaptation a few years later, while Hackers flopped, making back less than half of its reported $20 million budget. Both gained long tails of notoriety and cult-classic status, however, in part for having depicted the internet on-screen at the precise moment most filmgoers were discovering it at home. The concept of connectivity had, of course, graced movie theaters before. Matthew Broderick plays a crafty teen who tweaks his high school computer system from home in both 1983s WarGames and again three years later in Ferris Buellers Day Off. A ragtag team of techies spends the entire run time of 1992s hacking romp, Sneakers, spelunking in a shadow realm of digital information. As technology rapidly evolved, though, and 90s news anchors began talking about chat rooms and using terms like cyberspace, it had to evolve in pop culture as well. [Photo: TriStar Pictures] Several studio releases from 1995 were lumped together as internet movies, with critics cross-referencing them in reviews. Among them were Virtuosity, in which Russell Crowe plays a computer-generated killer, and Johnny Mnemonic, which is mostly remembered as the cyberpunk action flick Keanu Reeves made before The Matrix. Both are set in the speculative sci-fi future1999 for Virtuosity, 2021 for Johnny Mnemonicwhile paranoid thriller The Net and teen comedy Hackers are dialed into reality on the ground and online. At that point, no one had yet to really make a movie that was anywhere in that world, says Jeff Kleeman, the executive producer who oversaw the development of Hackers. Part of the reason I was excited about it was I felt like, for some reason, nobody is doing this. And I just thought, somebody ultimately is going to do this and I hope it’s me.” “It was slow, and then very fast” Before making Hackers, Kleeman didnt quite understand all the hype about the internet. He could easily grasp its significance for global businesses and governments, but on a personal level, he hadnt found many use cases. Still, he had absolute faith in the allure of a project about computer-savvy teenagers making digital mayhem. As he learned from Secret Service agents while researching the movie, teenagers at the time understood the internet better than anybody. Kleeman shepherded Hackers practically from its inception. It started when a friend, an artist named Rafael Moreau, confided that hed lately been tagging along with an elite hacking crew known as the Legion of Doom, and he was thinking of writing a movie based on them. Kleeman was skeptical (film executives generally do not want to field pitches from novice writer pals), but he agreed to take a look at the screenplay, should one ever materialize. He was blown away by what Moreau eventually delivered. The first draft of Hackers had a technical authenticity absorbed from its primary sources, and it pulsed with kinetic energy. Equally impressive, the dialogue read like it came from actual human teenagers. Kleeman first attempted to put the film into production at Francis Ford Copolas American Zoetrope before succeeding years later at United Artists. Meanwhile, the film that would come to be called The Net originally had very little to do with going online. It started instead as a project about résumé-tampering. Producer Irwin Winkler had read a buzzy spec script called The Game, which David Fincher would go on to direct, and wanted to meet its writers. The project he had in mind for them centered on a woman who hires a hacker to fake her résumé so she can land a job at a major advertising firm, only to end up with the hacker becoming obsessed with her. (Fatal Attraction with some glimmerings of high-tech in the background is how one of The Nets writers, Mike Ferris, describes it.) The in-demand duo took on the gig, executives approved their outline, and they churned out a draft. Nobody involved with the project was impressed by what they turned in, including the scribes themselves. By the time they embarked on the next draft, though, writer John Brancato had read a book on the topic of identity theft, and it sparked some ideas. It was a book about the possibility of a digital shadow and how the world could fuck with it, Brancato says. And that seemed like an interesting thing. The writing pair seized on a scene that took place near the end of their first draftwhen the hacker starts erasing the protagonists credit history and banking dataand decided to make it the engine of the movie. The story would now focus on a computer expert whose entire life is being expunged online, forcing her to figure out why and reclaim her identity. The executives were thrilled. Their résumé-tampering project had morphed into a movie steeped in the technology that was defining the era in real time. During production is when more of the hype about the internet really started rolling out, Brancato says. The awareness of it was slow, and then very fast. The most infamous delivery order in film history While Disclosure trumpeted the glorious future of normalized email the previous year, Hackers and The Net showed 90s viewers what else might be possible online. During an early scene in Hackers, Jonny Lee Millers character, Dade Murphy, digitally breaks into a TV station, preempting a right-wing talk show to put on an episode of The Outer Limits. Through a 2025 lens, it seems bizarre that hed even think to do such a thing. Anyone wanting to watch The Outer Limits, or any TV show ever, can now easily do so with minimal keystrokes. To the average viewer in the 90s, however, what Murphy does is essentially sorcery. The Net has some similarly dated 90s tech-flexing. Its opening moments follow systems analyst Angela Bennett, played by Bullock, as she goes about a flurry of online activity. Viewers watch her talk to some pals in a chat room (ooh!), purchase plane tickets right from her computer (ahh!), and in perhaps the most infamous food delivery in film history, order pizza online. Although it was considered state-of-the-art in a pre-Dominos Pizza Tracker era, this scene quickly curdles into kitsch. I’m sure any kid watching now would be like, Why are we looking at that? Ferris says of the moment. Other aspects of the films tech turned out to be more prescient. Bullocks character works on her laptop at the beach, prefiguring the remote-work eraeven if she does wonder aloud, Where can I hook up my modem? (Wi-Fi would not be invented for another three years.) Dial-up internet took 30 seconds to connect in 1995, but Bullocks character logs on at a speed much closer to present-day broadband internet. The quickness was meant to spare viewers from the full-length screeching sound of modems meeting up, according to Brancato, but some viewers still complained about the lack of realism. One thing thats aged well about both movies is what isnt in them: virtual reality. At the time, hype around VR ran parallel to internet evangelism in the mid-90s. Both technologies appeared on the verge of becoming equally ubiquitous in the American future. Hollywood had already called its shot, making VR central to the plot of several sci-fi films, including 1992s The Lawnmower Man, 1994s Brainscan, and 1995s Strange Days and Virtuosity. The worst offender may have been the more down-to-earth Disclosure, which somehow went all in on the idea of office workers donning VR headsets to find files within their computers. To their credit, The Net avoids VR entirely while only the try-hard villain in Hackers, played by Fisher Stevens, is briefly glimpsed wearing those gogglesand hes meant to look like a huge dork while doing so. Our whole lives are on the computer Beyond showcasing some technological possibilities newly on offer, the early internet movies of the 90s also flicked at the broader societal shifts they representedfor better and worse. Our whole lives are on the computer, Bullocks character says at one point in The Net. It might as well have been the tagline for the film. Although its since become self-evident, nascent online dwellers of the 90s may not have understood just how much sensitive data about them was floating around in the ether, let alone the fluid nature of that data and the real-world consequences attached to changing it. Bullocks character spends a large chunk of the movie trying to convince various authority figures shes actually systems analyst Angela Bennett, even though all online records now indicate shes hardened criminal Ruth Marx. This real-world editing is a far cry from Ferris Bueller changing the number of school absences hes incurred in a semester. It might be considered almost tame by todays standards, though, since it affects only one person. The Net seems to anticipate a catastrophic problem that has only metastasized over the past decade: the degradation of objective truth. In 2025, between AI deepfakes and other forms of digital disinformation, its now harder than ever to distinguish whats real from what isnt. That’s what was so scary about the entire thing, even back then, Brancato says. The more you consign reality to this machine, the more manipulable it is. Hackers, however, demonstrated the bright side of manipulating reality on- and offline. Although the film never addresses their sexuality explicitly, Matthew Lillards character, who goes by Cereal (as in Cereal Killer), and Renoly Santiagos character, who answers to Phreak, are bth stylized with a queer-coded, gender-fluid aesthetic. Lillards looklong, braided pigtails, eye makeup, and tight crop topswas especially audacious for a male high school student in a mainstream movie from 1995. As Kleeman confirms, these style choices are meant to underline the liberating quality of the internet; the way it thrust its users into a choose-your-own-adventure mode of identity. For the first time that I know of, in the history of humanity, if you were a high school kid, you could actually have a second life online, he says. And what you did with that identity in terms of gender, in terms of attitude or personality, was completely up for grabs. As for the paranoia around data privacy radiating off both 90s films, it now seems nearly as quaint as ordering pizza from Pizza.net. I would’ve been up in arms 10 or 15 years ago about Amazon or Apple listening through our devices, Ferris says. And now everyone’s just like, Well, yeah, sure they do. I mean, what are you gonna do? Throw away your phone? Throw away your computer?’ I’m not as outraged about that stuff as I feel like I should be. The escape you cant escape As much as the earliest internet movies seemed to peer into the future, the iPhones emergence is what rendered them hopelessly stuck in the past. Hackers and The Net present computers as rabbit holes, transporting users into a weird, wild online wonderland. Everything changed once a tiny, high-speed computer was suddenly within arms reach at all waking hours. The internet ceased being a mysterious place people sometimes visited, and instead became an omnipresent layer on top of the real world, no entry required. As much as Hackers made the internet feel dynamicdepicting it as a vivid cityscape of circuitry, with skyscraper-like database towersit was still a world that needed to be approached from a static location. Like all early internet movies, Hackers and The Net now suffer from the fact that a lot of their action features a person seated at a computer, typing really hard. Once most people had smartphones, filmmakers started to simply overlay a user interface on-screen. Characters could now move around physically as their online activity moved the plot forward. Of course, the invention of the iPhone may have hurt all movies, not just the retro internet ones from the 90s. Once most modern movie characters had instant access to all information in recorded history, it became too easy for them to solve juicy cinematic problems. They now either have to lose Wi-Fi access somehow, or go back in time. Perhaps the reason directors like Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, and Paul Thomas Anderson seem to make only period pieces these days is so they can create movies devoid of the ever-present internet. While going online was once a tantalizing escape from reality, a lot of people now seem to fantasize instead about escaping from the internet. In that sense, The Net did accurately predict the future. It ends with Sandra Bullock literally going outside and touching grass.
Category:
E-Commerce
President Trump’s proposed baby bonus would have come in really handy at chez Guy Birken 15 years ago. Money was a bit of an issue for my family when we welcomed our first child in 2010. We’d moved to Indiana from Ohio in June of that year so my husband could take a higher paying job. Id left my own job as a high school English teacher. Our baby was born in late August, making it impossible to find a teaching job in our new town. Our timing was impeccable that year. We also unwittingly put our Ohio house on the market one month after the federal first-time homebuyer credit expired, bought a house in Indiana right away, and paid two mortgages for 11 months until the old house sold. As my husband likes to say, in 2010 we went from two incomes to one, from one mortgage to two, and from two people to three. (And yes, I am now considered a financial expert.) But would a $5,000 baby bonus really help new parents on a national scale? Or is it just Trumps transactional solution to falling birth rates? In honor of Mothers Day, lets look at the best ways to support new parents, working mothers, and our nations children. And it doesnt include a onetime cash payment. Paying for a baby boom The United States sees over 3.6 million births each year. If the government were to go forward with Trump’s $5,000 baby bonus proposal, Uncle Sam would be handing out over $18.3 billion to new mothers every year. While that would only be 0.019% of the $9.7 trillion federal budgetbasically, a rounding errorits important to compare that amount to other types of spending that affect American families. Federal Agency2024 Spending BudgetDepartment of Health and Human Services (HHS)$2.5 trillionSocial Security Administration (SSA)$1.6 trillionDepartment of Education (ED)$228.9 billionDepartment of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)$88.2 billionDepartment of Labor (DOL)$66.2 billionConsumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC)$167 million $18.3 billion in annual baby bonuses may represent a tiny portion of the governments total budget, but that spending could be a relatively significant percentage of each of these departments budgets. Specifically, $18.3 would equal 0.73% of the HHS budget 1.1% of the SSA budget 7.99% of the ED budget 20.7% of the HUD budget 27.6% of the DOL budget 10,958% of the CPSC budget Allocating that kind of funding to existing programs could potentially improve maternal and infant health, provide ongoing financial benefits, support public education, increase access to affordable housing, support employment goals, or protect children from unsafe products. Obviously, $18.3 billion cant do all of those things at once, but increasing the budgets of one or several of these departments may be a better use of the money. Make motherhood feasible again As helpful as five grand might be for any one family, the Trump baby bonus is the federal policy version of handing your wife a sawbuck the day after Mothers Day and telling her to buy herself something nice. Its not giving her what she needs or wantsand feels a little insulting, to boot. American mothers are clamoring for help with the impossible financial and logistical challenges of raising a family in this country. Specifically, new parents need access to paid family leave and childcare. Spending federal money on these programs will do more to improve mothers lives than a one-time $5,000 payment. Paid family leave The United States is one of only seven countries without paid maternity leave. This means American women may have to choose between getting a paycheck and having a kid. While the Trump administration’s $5,000 baby bonus might help, the median weekly earnings for an American woman is $1,092which means the bonus would cover less than five weeks of leave. Instituting a federal paid family and medical leave program could potentially encourage more births, since it could help solve the financial problem of affording parental leave. In 2022, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that a proposed federal paid family and medical leave program would cost about $200 billion for the 10-year period between 2022 and 2031. As it was written, the program would allow eligible workers to take up to four weeks of paid leave after the birth or adoption of a child. Benefits would equal a portion of the workers pre-leave wages and would be paid by the federal government. The CBO anticipated the program would significantly improve the mental and physical health of postpartum parentswhich would lead to increased employment and earnings. Although the four-week maximum leave time seems woefully inadequate, simply providing federal leave would make an enormous difference to a wide swath of American families. Birth to kindergarten childcare Returning to work after having a child is challenging (to say the least) without consistent and safe childcare. This is not nearly as simple as asking Nana and Pop-Pop to take care of the kids for free, especially considering grandparents are probably working, too. Nearly one out of every five Americans aged 65 or older is employed full-time. And without free family options, childcare for young children is remarkably expensive. Anecdotally, every parent I know had a daycare bill that was higher than their monthly mortgage paymentand this is backed up by data from the Department of Labor, which found that American families spend between 8.9% and 16.0% of their median income on ful-day care for just one child. The Biden-Harris administration worked to invest in childcare on a federal level, providing $24 billion in funding to childcare via the 2021 American Rescue Plan (ARP). The administration calculates that the onetime investment of $24 billion saved families $1,250 per child (representing a 10 percent reduction in childcare costs), increased the pay of childcare workers, and increased the employment of mothers with young children by about 3 percentage pointsleading to womens prime-age labor force participation hitting its highest value on record. This meant the benefits were greater than just the $1,250 in childcare savings enjoyed by young families. Childcare workers made more money, employers kept more of their staff, and families maintained their financial and employment stability. Unfortunately, all of these improvements were lost after the ARP expired. Happy Mothers Day! Heres five grand America has a cultural expectation that mothers will pick up the slack when children, fathers, or society needs something that theyre not getting. That means a national conversation about supporting motherhood to the tune of $5,000 a pop might feel like progress, even if its misguided. But a baby bonus feels a little like the exaggerated social media praise often heaped on mothersa showy expression of appreciation that requires little effort. The truth is that encouraging more people to consider motherhood isnt a tough proposition if you provide the support they needjust as making Mom happy on Mothers Day isnt difficult if you listen to what she actually wants. Offering actual support is harder than throwing money at the problem, but its the only path to a real solution.
Category:
E-Commerce
Every year brings its own unique challenges for California farmers: water shortages, fires, finding laborers to do the work, bureaucrats in Sacramento adding new requirements and fees, and more. But the second term of President Donald Trump has made this year very different. As part of deep cuts across much of the government, Trump’s administration chopped $1 billion from the U.S. Department of Agriculture almost without warning. This led to widespread financial pain that affected already struggling farmers and left hungry patrons of food banks in many parts of the country desperate for other sources of healthy food. On February 28, California officials warned farmers who had grown food for schools and food banks that there was funding only for work done up to January 19, despite the fact that farmers had submitted invoices for work and harvests past that date. California farmers quickly organized a phone call and email campaign over the span of seven days in early March to demand the attention of elected representatives and answers from federal officials. By March 7, their efforts were successful: They would receive pay for the fall and for harvests for the rest of this year. But their success was overshadowed by news that the program would stop at the end of 2025. For Bryce Loewen, a farmer who co-owns Blossom Bluff Orchards in Fresno County, the first freeze in funding meant that the USDA failed to hand over more than $30,000 that it owed the business for growing food to help feed Californians who could not afford it. There isnt really a good time to get stiffed for your work. But during winter, the slowest season on the farm, theres downtime, and California farmers like Loewen recently used that lull to fight to regain the money farmers were owed and help feed some of their most vulnerable neighbors. A farmers instinct is to fix things, Loewen said. And thats what we did. Loewens farm is in the small town of Parlier, California, which has a declining population of less than 15,000. On March 1, Loewen called federal officials to try to change their minds about the funding cut. Farming is a business of slim margins, and Loewen was trying to keep his farm from falling into debt, he said. Loewen was just one of many farmers in California and around the country who called and emailed officials that day. They asked why they hadnt been paid, and they described the economic benefit of the USDA funds to small farms and public health services and to agencies that feed people in their own communities who are struggling. Loewen left messages and wrote emails to Rep. Jim Costa (D-Fresno); Brooke Rollins, the secretary of agriculture; and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York. Other farmers also contacted Rollins, their local representatives, and congressional and Senate leadership on both sides of the political aisle. The impromptu campaign was somewhat successful. Six days later, the USDA agreed to pay farmers for their fall harvest and contracts for 2025, but not beyond. The USDA did not respond to calls and emails from Capital & Main about why the cuts were made or why they were restored. Neither the USDA nor Rollins have publicly acknowledged hearing from farmers about the cuts. In securing payments for slightly more than nine additional months, the farmers relative success might offer lessons for other groups targeted by government cuts as they seek to claw back some resources for crucial programs. California may be world-famous for its beaches, Hollywood, and Big Tech, but many people dont realize that the states vast Central Valley supplies a quarter of all food to the United States. In the Golden State, agriculture is the backbone of many local economies, from the states southern frontier with Mexico all the way to its northern border with Oregon. This is especially true in the states agricultural heartland. Yet many residents who live in what dust-bowl musician Woody Guthrie once referred to as the Pastures of Plenty cannot afford the fresh, locally grown food that surrounds them in the regions villages and towns. The Healthy Fresno County Community Dashboard, which publishes local health information, reported that 16% of the countys 1 million residents in 2022 were considered food insecure. Those rates were higher for the countys Black and Hispanic residents in comparison to their white peers. Since 2006, the USDA has used the term food insecurity to describe the status that leads to weakness, illness, and harm to families who lack stable access to food. It disproportionately affects lower-income groups in the state. Food insecurity includes the inability to afford a balanced diet, fear that a homes food supply wont last, or having to eat less because one cant afford to buy more food. An insecure food supply causes physical pangs of hunger in adults, as well as stress and depression, particularly in mothers. Limited food intake affects brain development in children, prompting stress among preschoolers and affecting a students ability to learn basic subjects such as math and writing. In California, 9 of 20 adults with low incomes reported limited, uncertain, or inconsistent access to food in 2023, according to a California Health Interview Survey. Loewens farm helps feed some struggling Californians with the help of money through a $400 million federal program called the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program. The California Department of Social Services distributes the funds across the state through a program called Farms Together. Farmers werent the only ones to feel the pain of the USDA cuts between late February and March 11, said Paul Towers, executive director of Community Alliance With Family Farmers. His organization helps distribute food from small farms to food banks and school districts. During a two-week period, food banks didn’t receive any such food, which left people who rely on that food aid to scramble for something to eat. Thats two weeks of lost income for farmers, Towers said. And two weeks of no food. Nationwide, 18 million Americans were food insecure in 2023, according to the USDA. Most of those people live in rural counties such as Fresno County, according to Feeding America, a national network of food banks and pantrie. By March 10, news of the cuts was spreading. The online agriculture and food policy news outlet Agri-Pulse warned in a headline: Trump administration canceling local food initiatives. On March 11, Fox News highlighted the cuts to farmerswho voted disproportionately in favor of Trump during his presidential campaignsin a live interview with Rollins. Americas Newsroom anchor Bill Hemmer asked Rollins to justify the $1 billion cuts in food security aid to schools and food banks. Rollins offered conflicting responses. The cuts were to pandemic-era food programs and were aimed at new and nonessential programs, she said. Rollins said the programs cost had grown but didnt offer any evidence to back that up. The initial iteration of the local food purchasing assistance, the Farmers to Families Food Box Program, was a multibillion dollar pandemic food aid project started during Trumps first term. But Rollins didnt share that detail. Speaking of other cuts made the day before the interview, she added that authorities had canceled more contracts on food justice for trans people in New York and San Francisco; obviously thats different than the food programs in the schools, but it is really important. The local food purchase agreement didnt, and still doesnt, favor food aid or food justice to trans people. It pays for farmers to grow food that goes to food banks and school districts. Rollins didnt acknowledge that the cuts were overzealous or the harm that they might cause. As we have always said, if we are making mistakes, we will own those mistakes, and we will reconfigure. But right now, from what we are viewing, [the local food purchase assistance] program was nonessential. It was a new program, and it was an effort by the Left to continue spending taxpayer dollars that [was] not necessary, Rollins told Fox News. On March 11, the Community Alliance With Family Farmers posted on its blog: The reinstatement of Farms Together is a victory worth celebrating. Through collective action, the voices of farmers and allies were heard, but the fight isnt over. Farms Together IS restoredthough only temporarily. Our intent, Towers said, was to make sure Secretary Rollins heard directly from farmers that they were harmed by the cuts to these programs. George B. Sánchez-Tello, Capital & Main This piece was originally published by Capital & Main, which reports from California on economic, political, and social issues.
Category:
E-Commerce
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