I don’t fancy myself a hacker of any sort, but I did run a BBS, I administer my own server and back in the old 2600 magazine days I’d been known to pull some of the War Games tricks. I don’t program, but I can rip apart programs when I need them to work for my specific purpose. My wife was also a BBS admin and she’s probably savvier than I when it comes to all things hackertastic.

With this in mind, I’m not going to say the bar for writing hacker plots in television and movies should be set as high as I would expect, but it also needs to be at least a few millimeters off the floor.

The entertainment industry is fascinated by “The Magic Hacker”. In the world of Magic Hacker every lightulb is a webcam for him to spy on you with. Every kitchen appliance runs on linux and is wired to the internet, allowing Magic Hacker to burn your toast when you piss him off. Magic Hacker is always drowning in caffeine and will gladly hack his way into NORAD if you offer him an unreleased video game. Magic Hacker is tweleve years old. Magic Hacker has purple hair and listens to nothing but techno.

I believe that hackers had their high point in cinema around the early 1980′s. Movies like War Games, Tron, and Real Genius set a benchmark for the realistic portrayal of hackers that has yet to be surpassed. The low point came in a rapid downward spiral toward the mid-90′s and it has been a slow climb. We’re still not back to something respectable. Let’s review some of the biggest offenses in cinema history regarding Magic Hacker.

1993 – Ghost in the Machine: Ghost hacker uses the dishwasher to murder a babysitter.

1994 – Disclosure: A corporate intranet that uses virtual reality as an integral part of the OS.

1995 – Hackers: Hacking a high school’s fire response system through the internet.

1995 – The Net: Everyone on Earth believes that you’re lying about who you are even when you have a physical passport and social security card.

1996 – Independence Day: Cable Industry satellite engineer can decode an alien operating system well enough to write a virus and send it via appletalk from a Macbook into the heart of an extraterrestrial battleship… in under 24 hours.

2001 – Enemy of the State: Live feed video of everything Will Smith did.

2003 – The Core: Humming into a cellphone to get free access… as if it’s an analog payphone. Good job guys.

2008 – Untraceable: No one can find the source of a webcam site showing snuff films complete with interactivity. The FBI seems baffled that they can  make a quick call to ICANN and perform a traceroute.

2008 – Eagle Eye: Super computer can transmit video and audio in real time hi-def to electronics store home theater display room.

Now the thing that interests me most about Magic Hacker is that he’s essentially the same person as Ex-Boxer Black Man, Arrogant Professor, Woman Who Doesn’t Realize Her Inner Strength, and Dangerous Rock n’ Roll Loner With a Big Heart. It’s a device of the lazy and an experiment in how humans see each other.

It goes much deeper than race or sex. In 1916, Aaron Blattman wrote an editorial for the New York Times called “The Psychological Reasons for a Popular Prejudice” (which can be read here) in it he comments on the  then new practice of fingerprinting minor criminal offenders. He claimed that this practice could build upon popular fears and create friction in the local communities.

“There is a psychological association in the public mind between fingerprints and crminality. While it is perfectly true that every criminal has his fingerprints taken, yet the converse of the proposition, i.e., that every one  who has been fingerprinted is a criminal, does not hold good.”

That’s a very simple example of how prejudice is much deeper psychological issue than superficial differences. Where I grew up in the Southern United States I regularly heard the phrase “Poor White Trash”. Not being of this persuation myself I could easily establish a gap. Things popped out at me, like trucks on cinder blocks. These images of that prejudice still linger with me as an adult.

Many screenwriters aren’t technically inclined. I’ve met my fair share of writers who want so badly to write techno-thrillers as they gently tap their MacBook keys and ask me how to use twitter. These are the masses who flock to geeksquad when their new HP desktop won’t connect to the wi-fi (mostly when no wi-fi is available). It’s all a matter of sloppy research.

In the 1987 dark comedy “Throw Mama from the Train” Billy Crystal plays a frustrated novelist who’s turned to teaching writing workshops to make ends meet. In one of the best depictions of professorial frustration I’ve seen committed to cinema he patiently waits for his student to finish reading her rambling naval thriller before politely suggesting that she learn the names of the devices used on a submarine instead of just writing “the thing that the submarine captain speaks through”.

With a little research into the broader characteristics of human cultural subgroups we as writers can gain the ability to form a richer story.