Where have all the spy gadgets gone?

This is one of the most vivid memories I have as a youngster. ThunderballJames Bond steps out, puts on an actual, functioning jetpack and takes off. It’s a stupid thing to do, because everyone, except for the Rocketeer and Mandalorians, looks dumb in a jetpack. The jetpack was an actual prototype. It was easy to put on, and he hovered slowly away. My love for Bond films was now real.

Since then, I’ve watched a lot of spy shows and films. And sure, I’ve appreciated ones like Slow HorsesYou can also find out more about the following: The Recruit, which strive for a kind of realism, and I’ve watched a whole mess of Tom Clancy spy bro shows (largely on Amazon Prime). My favorite spy shows are those with a lot of strange gadgets. The moment that the Q-style character gives the hero all their cool gadgets to battle bad guys is my favorite. They walk the hero through the various functions and explain how they will probably be useful 20 minutes or so before the final credits. But that kind of scene, and those gadgets, just aren’t as common as they used to be. It’s like they’ve disappeared, and I’ve been trying to figure out why.

“I think what we expect to see in spy movies is something cutting edge,” Dr. Alexis Albion, of the International Spy Museum’s Curator of Special Projects, told me over the phone. “We want to see something that’s kind of a little bit ahead of its time, right? Want to know that we are always ahead with our intelligence agencies?.”

What Albion means is there’s a fine line between cool gadgets and absurd gadgets. When you go over that line, it starts to look less and less like an action film. There’s a relatability required of our spy heroes and even their gadgets. For an example of what not to do, she points to the paragliding apparatus Pierce Brosnan’s Bond quickly builds and rides in Die Another Day.

Don’t worry, I also worked hard to forget it. So let’s take a moment to remember it together.

The entire film sequence is unrealistic, including Bond’s surfboard made of fuselage. It’s even more impressive when compared to the Jetpack Sequence in Thunderball,It feels worse. The jetpack is as ridiculous as you can imagine. Thunderball is, it’s still based in reality. Bond is wearing a helmet that’s dorky but protective. He’s gliding through the air like an action figure on a string, but he’s gliding through the air on a real working jetpack. He’s not defying physics like Brosnan’s Bond but bending them just a touch.

Nowadays, we have tiny personal helicopters, and you’ll occasionally see a drone that works just a little smarter than it should in reality. In general, however, TV and film spy shows no longer feature goofy devices that border on reality. Increasingly it seems the most powerful tools in a spy’s arsenal are the ones they can pick up at Best Buy.

What… does it make sense? Watches that are capable of taking phone calls, and tracking our movements. Our phones are as powerful (and often just as capable as) traditional computers, and they have all of our information. Even smart glasses are available that do some of what is promised in spy movies, despite being ugly.

It’s no secret that we are pretty tech-savvy. So it feels more difficult to find that sweet spot of tech that’s close enough to reality without leaping into science fiction, which is where the hacker comes in. As Dr. Albion and I spoke, it became clear where the gadgets had all gone: they’d been subsumed by a new kind of Swiss army knife, a do-everything tech person.

And it’s not just the hackers who control computers via USB sticks and use Bluetooth sniffers and watches that can kill anyone’s wireless connection. That’s stuff many of us can do right now if we’re shopping at the right DIY stores and hanging out in the right discords. In the spy genre, hackers have advanced to god-like levels of skill. They “can do pretty extraordinary amazing things,” Dr. Albion told me.

And when you stop and think about it, I bet half a dozen “hackers” come to mind. True LiesThe Mission Impossible franchise. Even less spy-fi shows like Slow HorsesYou can also find out more about the following: Killing EveCount super hackers as part of their cast. In the spy genre, you now can’t shake a stick without hitting someone capable of hacking into every mainframe ever mentioned.

James Bond’s jetpack and the amazing things hackers are capable of doing with computers sometimes strike that same sweet-spot. We’ve all now seen, again and again, in the news what our information can do when it’s in the wrong hands. So there’s something both disquieting and comforting about an intelligence community full of people who sift through that data like savants and only ever use it for good.

There’s not that much difference between a spy who dons good-looking smart glasses with incredible facial recognition technology and one who pops open a computer stolen from a coffee shop and hacks the NSA. Though, if you’re like me, you’re probably more willing to believe in the hacker than in the idea of someone making smart glasses that look good.

But there’s one big issue I have with replacing gadgets with hackers: they’re not nearly as fun to look at. The thrill of watching someone on the computer type is not comparable to a jetpack in 1963 or wireless pager. You Will Love RussiaOr even spyglasses. It’s not even as fun to watch as a fake tooth filled with poisonous gas. Hackers, even the overly powerful ones found in most modern spy shows, might be more believable than a jetpack — but they’re not nearly as entertaining.

Correction, April 26, 11:05 am ET A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Dr. Alexis Albion’s name was Alexia. The error is regretted.