Mr. Robot Killed the Hollywood Hacker
<i>When hackers hack in Mr. Robot, they talk about it in ways that actual hackers talk about hacking.</i><p>Mr Robot exists as it does because there are now enough people familiar with computers and the relevant concepts to constitute an audience, rather than due to any sudden insight on the part of screenwriters (of which I am one).  We <i>know</i>, and have always known, that there&#x27;s a distinct hacker subculture with its own linguistic tropes, ethos, etc. etc. and that there&#x27;s been a big gap between reality and how it&#x27;s portrayed in movies.<p>We also know (or learn the hard way) that there&#x27;s a big gap between including enough detail for verisimilitude that will satisfy people who are competent in a particular field, and what the general public wants to watch - which is why you&#x27;ll continue to see shallow or outright stupid portrayals of hacking in the entertainment industry&#x27;s output. Why? Primarily [1] because the mass of people are <i>just not interested</i> in any given field that requires nerd-level commitment to understand. The larger the budget required for the film, the larger and more general the audience has to be, and the more accuracy and authenticity will be sacrificed in favor of spectacle and symbolism, which is the most reliable method for getting people to fork over their money in the first place.<p>Take a recent example from a different context - <i>Jurassic World</i>. The &#x27;plot&#x27;: capitalists and scientists employ DNA technology to produce a bigger, smarter, more aggressive dinosaur than has ever existed in nature; said dinosaur escapes from confinement and menaces everyone in the vicinity, especially the attractive hero, anti-heroine, and small children that are introduced early in the story. It&#x27;s basically <i>Frankenstein</i> only with dinosaurs. Spoiler alert, the attractive proxy for the family unit survives and the bad dinosaur is defeated, though not before killing off the most ethically deficient characters by eating them like ham sandwiches.<p>Now, any biologists worth their salt would cringe at many scenes (if they watch such nonsense at all). Any <i>genetic</i> scientists had to suffer through yet another scene of an annoying smartass mumbling a few meaningless phrases about &#x27;advanced gene splicing&#x27; while screens in the background display animations of double helixes and molecules. I think they might have mentioned CRISPR, I&#x27;m not sure and have no intention of watching it again to check.<p>Would <i>Jurassic World</i> have been better if it was more like <i>Primer</i> or <i>Mr Robot</i>, with in-depth discussions of structural factors and real-world constraints, and a hard-science approach that admitted of 1 (one) speculative assumption, from which the rest of the plot flowed organically? Sure,,,if you wanted to make <i>Gattaca - Herpetology Edition</i>. But though <i>gattaca</i> is one of my all-time favorite sci-fi films, neither it nor <i>Primer</i> will ever appeal to a mass audience and so films like that will never have the most recognizable actors or the most astonishing visual spectacles or the same sort of short-term existential anxieties that would result from having to run or your life from a creature the size of an apartment building.<p>People go to Big Movies to allay their quotidian existential anxieties (about which they often feel helpless) by seeing them safely reflected [2] in contexts that are outside normal human experience. How far outside is primarily inversely proportional to the budget and corresponding box-office performance requirements, while being secondarily proportional to the depth of the underlying existential anxiety.<p>Hacking in films has simply been a proxy for magic, in line with Clarke&#x27;s observation that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Magic serves an important dramatic function as the source of the <i>unknowable</i> solution to the Intractable Problem with which the story&#x27;s characters are presented.Thus, magic and its various proxies (specialist bodies of knowledge, from hacking to legal procedure to medical knowledge) is not a black hole which encapsulates the ignorance of the writer (although many inferior or lazy writers abuse it for that purpose) but a singularity which offers the possibility of escape from the otherwise-inexorable logic of the story world; it symbolizes the hope of a future discoverable solution to an otherwise insoluble problem.<p>A few examples from popular films may illuminate this. In <i>Star Wars</i> the insoluble problem is a spaceship that can blow up <i>an entire planet</i>. The magical device is The Force, a limited but still useful psychokinetic ability. In the <i>Alien</i> films the insoluble problem is an ambulatory disease; the magic device is an artificially intelligent android that can approach the alien closely enough to observe a weakness of some kind (but which has to be temporarily decommissioned first, like Dumbo losing the magic feather). In the <i>Terminator</i> films, the insoluble problem is nuclear conflagration as the crystallization of war in general; the magical device is industrial capitalism&#x27;s promise of reducing economic inequality (represented by the vast technological superiority of the Terminators themselves).<p>To wrap up, <i>Mr Robot</i> hasn&#x27;t killed the Hollywood hacker at all; it has just crushed his dreams and forced him into getting a day job, which is the function that television shows perform relative to movies. You&#x27;ll still see hackers in movies, but strictly as lip service to a real and increasingly less aspirational employment demographic. This might seem like an odd conclusion to draw, but it&#x27;s worth bearing in mind that that serial television dramas are general occupational comedies (I&#x27;m using the term &#x27;comedy&#x27; in the technical sense of everything basically going back to normal at the end of the episode, even if the subject matter isn&#x27;t funny at all). Consider cop shows; they follow a nice steady formula with an initial outrage, a bit of detective work, an uncomfortable moral confrontation, a setback, and finally a little bit of legal procedure. On the other hand if you watch a movie about cops, they almost invariably take place at the beginnings or ends of the lead characters&#x27; careers, and the Best Person in the movie almost invariably has to die.<p>1. there are other reasons but I don&#x27;t want to turn this into an essay on screenwriting.<p>2. A few films address this dichotomy as their subject matter, albeit indirectly. All films have a political dimension insofar as the choice of subject matter and its portrayal reflect some aspect of their originating policy which the creators aim to praise or criticize, but relatively few dramatize the critical process itself; invariably, the subtext of such films is that critical awareness forces us to choose sides in an ongoing moral conflict; or put another way, moral agency comes at the price of other kinds. Generally in these films the lead has to either die or give up the old life completely in an anti-hero pattern.