netsys:~/1337# cat CREDITS RESOURCES

Credits & resources

Who made it, what it's built on

netsys:~/1337# cat AUTHORS

Credits

1337 is created and directed by Cameo Wood for Charming Stranger, and developed as part of Odyssey Works' New Frame program.

The company
Cameo Wood	Writer / Director / Producer
Casey Selden	Producer / Stage Manager
Brett Kuehner	PBX and Phone Control
Sophie Clover	Payphone Physical Effects
Avi Dobkin	Lighting
Isaiah Audelo	Sound
Justin Lieb	Production Design
Allen Wilson	Special Thanks

Written by Cameo Wood and performed live by the 1337 cast. Every word you hear on the line is written and performed by people; no generative AI is used in the writing or the voice.

Companion research on the history and anatomy of phone theatre — one voice, one listener — is collected at anythingcanbesaid.to

Press or festival inquiries: info@charmingstranger.com.

netsys:~/1337# cat ODYSSEY_WORKS

About Odyssey Works

Odyssey Works, directed by Abraham Burickson, is an internationally acclaimed experience design group known for creating performances for an audience of one for twenty-five years. The group shares its approach through books, workshops, lectures, and a year-long Experience Design Certificate Program. It is also the center of a community of designers dedicated to developing a better approach to making, one focused on empathy, intelligence, and impact. Learn more at odysseyworks.org.

netsys:~/1337# cat HISTORY

Understanding the history

1337 is fiction, but the world it's set in was real, and it was more complicated — and often uglier — than nostalgia lets on. The phone-phreaking and early hacker underground of the 1980s and '90s produced genuine technical brilliance and genuine cruelty, sometimes in the same person. If the show sends you looking, start here. These are the honest accounts, not the Hollywood ones.

A caution worth stating: some primary sources from this era — old zines, board archives, handles — contain racist, antisemitic, and otherwise hateful language, presented without comment. The show references that this existed; it does not endorse it. Read the primary material with that in mind.

netsys:~/1337# cat BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books

Sterling, Bruce. The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier. Bantam, 1992. The definitive account of the 1990 crackdown, Operation Sundevil, and the culture around it. Released free by the author; widely available online.
Hafner, Katie, and John Markoff. Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier. Simon & Schuster, 1991.
Slatalla, Michelle, and Joshua Quittner. Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace. HarperCollins, 1995. On MOD and LOD — the milieu 1337 draws from most directly.
Levy, Steven. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Doubleday, 1984. The origins of the ethic, a generation before the phreakers in this show.
Lapsley, Phil. Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell. Grove Press, 2013. The deep history of phone phreaking, blue boxes, and the people who found the tones first.
Dreyfus, Suelette, and Julian Assange. Underground. Mandarin, 1997. The international scene of the same years; free online.

Primary sources & archives

The Mentor. “The Conscience of a Hacker” (“The Hacker Manifesto”). Phrack, vol. 1, issue 7, 1986. The essay the MENTOR's audition reading is drawn from.
Phrack Magazine. Published since 1985. Archived at phrack.org. The underground's own journal — technical, political, and of its time.
2600: The Hacker Quarterly. Published since 1984. 2600.com.
Computer underground Digest (CuD). 1990–2000. Contemporary reporting on the busts, trials, and community, including primary accounts from those prosecuted.
Scott, Jason. textfiles.com. A vast archive of the actual text files, zines, and board posts of the era — the raw material, including the ugly parts. Handle with the caution noted above.

Film & screen

Sneakers. Dir. Phil Alden Robinson, 1992. The heist-caper register 1337's fictional plot plays in.
Hackers. Dir. Iain Softley, 1995. Contemporaneous, stylized, and set the year the show is set — as much about the myth as the reality.
Pump Up the Volume. Dir. Allan Moyle, 1990. Coming-of-age film with Christian Slater as a pirate-radio DJ who exposes corruption at his high school and is hunted by the FCC.
Freedom Downtime. Dir. Emmanuel Goldstein, 2001. Documentary from 2600 on the “Free Kevin” movement and Kevin Mitnick.

Referencing a source here is not an endorsement of everything in it, and several of these works document hateful language and conduct as part of an honest historical record. Citations follow no single house style; they're here to be found and read, not graded.