Image via Complex Original
A long time ago, way before Catfish or Her, there existed a strange genre of film: cyberpunk. That's not to say that this genre no longer exists, but in the 1990s, many questionable predictions about the future of technology and Internet culture were caught on film. Not only were some of these observations incorrect, but looking back at most of these outdated modes of communication is pretty hilarious. Movies about cyberspace are still wildly popular, but reminiscing about the past and what we thought the future would be is always fun. Take a look at everything that '90s movies got wrong about the Internet.
The Thirteenth Floor taught us that we would be able to use the Internet for time travel.
While you might argue that downloading your Twitter archive and reliving your embarrassing digital footprint is basically Time Travel, movies in the '90s really thought we'd be able to insert ourselves into virtual worlds and relive years of the past. Just ask the creators of The Thirteenth Floor.
No one ever thought AOL would go out of style, thanks to You've Got Mail.
Before Tinder, OKCupid or Grindr, there was email. You've Got Mail's iconic representation of dating in the digital age wasn't wrong, but it did imply that AOL would be our preferred method of communication for decades to come. Go ahead, log into your old AIM profile and see who's still online.
Keanu Reeves taught us that we'd all be directly depositing data into our heads.
That actually might be kind of true, in some ways. But in Johnny Mnemonic, Keanu Reeves can carry “nearly 80 gigs of data” in his head in the year 2021. Meanwhile, in 2014, we can carry 64 gigabytes of data in our iPhones, and if we built a hard drive as big as our heads, we could probably hold hundreds of terabytes in there.
Movies also taught us that we'd be able to directly deposit ourselves into the Internet.
That's basically the plot to The Matrix.
The Lawnmower Man made us all believe that virtual reality games would make us smarter.
If you've seen the 1992 adaptation of Stephen King's The Lawnmower Man, then you know that virtual reality games were a popular film trope in the early '90s. The plot of this story involves a man who is convinced by a scientist (played by Pierce Brosnan) to play a virtual reality game in order to make him "smarter." The subsequent video game is also surprisingly very difficult (as demonstrated by Abbi and Ilana).
Cybersex would be rendered with the weirdest, almost completely inaccurate CG.
Computer graphics have come such a long way since the '90s, as demonstrated by this still fromThe Lawnmower Man. This is probably definitely not what cybersex would look like today...
Dial-up was essential for any and all Internet purposes in American Pie.
In the '90s, we needed dial-up! How else were people supposed to connect to the World Wide Web if they weren't physically wired to a modem? There was no such thing as wireless Internet, so of course in the movies, they wouldn't have imagined that we'd be able to connect to the Internet while sitting on the toilet. If there had been wireless Internet, Jason Biggs' character Jim in American Pie would've been able to come up with a more efficient way to spy on exchange student, Nadia. As Jim says, "God bless the Internet."
It was fairly easy to hack into government files, just ask Angelina Jolie's character in Hackers.
Back then, it seems like it didn't take much to stumble upon secret government files (see: the entire plots of The Net, Hackers and just about any other cyber thriller). Only people with access to the Deep Web are likely the ones who are able to hack into government files.
Pizza.net was supposed to be a website we could use to order pizza.
This isn't 100% wrong. Sadly, Pizza.Net, the site that Sandra Bullock orders pizza from in The Net, is defunct, but thankfully we can order pizza and just about any other food via the Internet today. On second thought, this clip of Sandy ordering pizza, fixing herself a drink and entering a chat room by herself on a lonely evening is probably the most accurate thing about '90s Internet movies.