Now, I realize that complicated things must be dumbed down for public consumption, but there is no excuse for the movie Hackers.
I hate to spoil the fantasies of all the widdle childrens out there, but hacking does not involve flying around through a neon virtual city with directory contents displayed in blinking letters on the sides of luminescent glass building. Hackers do not banter about screen refresh rates and say things like "RISC is good." Hackers do not all roam around the inner-city on rollerblades, going to funky techno club/arcades.
This is not a hacker and this is not their life.
And for FUX SAKE!, there are no (and I mean zero, zilch, nada, none) hacker girls out there who look like Angelina Jolie and wear skin tight leather every day. If this is what the hacking subculture was like, every teenage boy would aspire to it.
Hackers are, as a rule, pale flabby creatures with no social life. We often wear sunglasses, but not to look cool. We wear them because our screen-fatigued eyes are light sensitive from all night hackathons. We do not have girlfriends or, if we do, they are not puffy-lipped supermodel types. They generally have to be on the lower end of the attractiveness scale to go out with hunch-backed goblins like us.
Hacking as an activity is less like a cool space-age flight sim and more like a grueling, late night sloth through endless lines of code. It is port scanning, password scripting, code crunching and other mind numbing activities. If I were to try to give it a metaphor, targeted hacking is like a june bug relentlessly banging its head into a window in the hopes of finding a (usually non-existent) hole.
However, I dont think that would have made a good movie visual...
Now you ask, "Why, if this is such a dull and painful task? Why, oh god, why do you do it??" And I will tell you. It is the sensation of illicit power.
Have you ever rifled though someones drawers when you were supposed to be housesitting? Have you ever thrilled at reading someone else's mail? Have you ever been in a position of invisible power with the ability to scrutinize someone's most personal secrets?
This is why we do it. There is something exhilarating about breaking in and seeing everything... about having the power to push a button and crush someones life... In the end, hacking is just an exercise in ego construction.
Now.. Hollywood, make a movie about that. Make a movie about the real life of hackers, both good and bad. Include the tedium of hacking and the guilty pleasure of success. That is a movie I would watch...
