Hackerman

About

Hackerman refers to an image of the character "HACKERMAN" from the 2015 film Kung Fury ^[3] that is used in jokes regarding a person's inflated sense of self-esteem when they solve a simple technical issue. It later grew to include variations that have Rami Malek dressed as his character Elliot Alderson from the USA Network television show Mr. Robot.

Origin

The original image of Hackerman with the text comes from Hackerman's introduction in the film Kung Fury.

Shortly after the film's release, the image became fodder for memes centered around performing simple technical tasks.

Spread

On August 31, 2015, Redditor JBisBlu submitted the original image to the /r/MrRobot subreddit (shown below left).^[1] The image features Rami Malek dressed as his character Elliot Alderson from the USA Network television show Mr. Robot captioned with the text "HACKERMAN". The post received more than 500 points (94% upvoted) in three years. The image of Malek was taken from a July 20, 2015 Instagram post by the show's official account "whoismrrobot"^[2] (shown below right) and as of December 12, 2016 has 3,998 likes and 182 comments.

The meme spawned hundreds of variations, either with Malek or other characters. On iFunny,^[4] there are over 250 entrants in the "Hackerman" tag.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References