Well, I suppose these freeways made this town and a lot of others like it possible. ‘They’re the cathedrals of our time,’ someone said. Not me.”
– True Stories
If you haven’t seen True Stories, you should put it on your watch list – but that’s for another time. We’re not here to talk about the 1986 American musical satirical comedy film directed by David Byrne, who stars alongside John Goodman. But that line about freeways and cathedrals has always stuck with me.
If you’ve driven anywhere in Texas you’ve experienced these mass architectural structures. They’re beautiful. The cold grey concrete crisscrossing the vast blue sky. Stunning. And yet because we use them everyday, they’re totally overlooked as some of most important structures of our time.
The internet super highway is another one of our essential and yet taken-for-granted structures. The film Hackers, another cultural touchstone, follows a group of high school hackers and their involvement in a corporate extortion conspiracy. Made in the 1990s when the Internet was unfamiliar to the general public, it reflects the ideals laid out in the Hacker Manifesto:
We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias… and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals.
Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.
I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can’t stop us all… after all, we’re all alike.
For our shoot with Mutual Feelings, the super rad vintage shop on 12th and Rosewood, we wanted to bring together these two ideas: set in urban cathedrals, manifested by hackers. Check out their page for more looks.