In the mystery series My Life Is Murder, Madison puts a thumb drive into someone's laptop and presto she is typing, downloads and is finished in 60 seconds. No guessing a password or searching for files. Just shoves it in and takes it out. This happens in most episodes of the current season.
The movie Who Am I has some great hacking scenes since most of them are like 20% actual hacking and 80% social engineering and getting physical access to places/servers.
It’s made by the same people who made Dark so if you liked that show and are willing to read subtitles
I cant find the clip online, but i seem to remember a scene in ‘Lucy’ where she, while on an airplane, pulls out two laptops and uses them both, one with each hand, to do some tech magic.
We’ve seen this exact pattern happen in other industries. Bookstores were largely massacred by amazon et al. Which meant that the major publishers no longer controlled what we could buy (at a reasonable price). So rather than stand in an aisle and skim the Warhammer 40k books or see what had a cool cover, we read online reviews and even started reading (gasp) self-published books… in large part because other aspects of technological advance meant those self-published books could still be professionally edited.
And… that was awesome because it meant we got a constant feed of new voices rather than just the people who had enough connections to get a publisher’s “slot”.
And while there is very much something to be said about a nice crisp hardcover (just look at how ride or die I am on Michael Sullivan’s kickstarters…), the vast majority of my books are ebooks that I read on my (as of late) onyx boox. Which is basically the hardcover and mass market paperback model of olde.
And we saw the exact same happen with PC gaming. I don’t know the exact steps that led to it (and now realize I really want to) but in the late 00s/early 10s we rapidly noticed our stores that had became aisles were rapidly becoming single shelves on a rack that was mostly the latest Warcraft expansion.
And at first that sucked. I remember rushing to Gamestop the day that KOTOR 2 released only to have to basically fight the goblin at the counter to get the one copy they had and the number of times I had to explain that I did not want Halo instead. But, once we no longer had the ability to browse in stores, we saw various digital distribution platforms rise up and we started to have games like Warlock that shockingly launched at 30 USD instead of 50. And, much like above, we started to see a lot of new voices in a way that was reminiscent of the golden age of the 486 where you might buy access to an FTP server on a BBS because you liked a game that dev/studio had put on one of the 101 game CDs.
And we are seeing the same with film. COVID took away theatres. So a lot of people either started focusing on tv/netflix for a more convenient version of the big budget stuff. Or they went basically “indie” which led to the massive youtube/twitch boom. Or they realized that they could get “good enough” with a medium sized TV, some blackout curtains, and a soundbar (or a 5.1 setup if you are fancy). It wasn’t quite as good as a movie theatre but you also had fewer people screaming along with the movie or ordering grubhub in front of you.
Which is why I very much think that movie theatres as we know them are going to be gone before 2028 (maybe even 2026). And it will be replaced with a very limited selection of “alamo drafthouse” level theatres that people rent for events and watch parties. Instead of “Hollywood” deciding that everyone wants to watch Mission Impossible 20 in theatres, it will be enthusiasts deciding they want to buy screen time to show the new Sailor Moon OVA and either selling tickets on their own or crowdfunding it.
Good insight there with the gaming industry, hadn’t thought of that (as I haven’t been a gamer for a while).
In the end though, this buttresses Sander’s point I think, which is that having the theatres protected their industry for longer. The theatre isn’t just the shop or shelf but the whole product, experience and marketing activity rolled into one.
youtube.com
Active