hacker images

From IndieWeb
(Redirected from hacker photo)

Hacker Images are deliberately stereotypical staged photos of โ€œhackersโ€ with various aspects like darkness, zeroes and ones, one or more people wearing dark hoodies and/or sunglasses, lit only by their screens, and used in at least one article about the IndieWeb.

Hacker images Flickr prank

Featured image of staged hacker photo In the early 2010s, such a deliberately staged photo set https://www.flickr.com/groups/hacker-images/pool/ was placed on Flickr with a permissive Creative Commons license to see if news media would use them in articles, which they subsequently did, not knowing that the images were placed there deliberately for them to find and use.

E.g. this article:

Slate covered the "prank" itself:

IndieWeb Examples

In media

A 2007 professional photograph of eventual IndieWeb community member Dr. Matt Lee wearing a black cap with his face and torso mostly occluded by his stickered-up laptop made its way into several online publications, a few of which are still up.

Street hackers

2009-11-19 Example in the wild with community members Kevin Marks and Blaine Cook pre-IndieWeb: https://www.flickr.com/photos/mbiddulph/4116861374/ Two men sitting, kneeling on a sidewalk outside at night using various devices with glowing screens

Staged at IndieWebCamp

From 2016/MIT2#Photos: IndieWebCamp MIT2 Participants

Shutterstock hacker images

Subsequently there have been other similar images in the media, e.g. Shutterstock image used in these articles:

stereotypical hacker wearing a hoodie with a foreground and background of 1s and 0s overlaid on top

Other Examples

Jesse Eisenberg

Jesse Eisenberg wearing a black hoodie

Jesse Eisenberg playing Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, in the movie "The Social Network"

Articles about hacker images

Articles about the phenomenon of stereotypical hacker images and stock photos:

(each of these also has even more over the top exaggerated photos to make their point)

Other hacker image variants

Variants of hacker images other than the figure in a dark hoodie clichรฉ.

Black keyboards

Red Hoodies

See Also