Hackers and Identity

From the sublime to the ridiculous, as they say: in my first post (here) I looked at The Animatrix: The Second Renaissance and the patchwork of imagery and symbolism which formed the film into a memorable but bleak story of man’s downfall. Hackers, on the other hand, suffers from no such bleakness. The film is a wild, hyperactive ride through a new vision of 90s New York; where tech-savvy hackers embody youthful rebellion and sex and RAM go hand-in-hand; where rollerblading bootleggers jostle with caped hacker-kings, and cyber-celebrities of the underground reach out through pirate TV to taunt painfully ignorant, stiffly-suited authority figures. 

The film is a great watch and a favourite of mine (as you can no doubt already tell), but its light-hearted exterior shouldn’t be cause to dismiss it here. It’s still an excellent example of the cyberpunk genre and the tropes and techniques it employs still resonate with the many of the genre’s concerns.

I have found that one of, if not the, defining preoccupation of the cyberpunk genre is the question of the self: what comprises our identities? what makes us human? how far can man’s organic body be replaced before it ceases to be man? Also, what is gender? what relevancy has gender in the postmodern world? what function do labels, names, categories fulfil? These questions are tackled in many of the hallmarks of the genre, and Hackers is no exception. 

Nearly every character in Hackers has multiple identities, from the protagonist Dade Murphy (alias Zero Cool, alias Crash Override), to the love interest Kate Libby (alias Acid Burn) to the antagonist Eugene Belford (alias The Plague). Like Neo at the beginning of The Matrix, the characters live double lives; one in the ‘real’ world, and one online. These lives are divided and demarcated by names, and it is particularly interesting to observe the characters’ reactions to the concept of naming. Early on, Joey tells Phreak that he ‘needs a handle,’ and that ‘you don’t have an identity until you have a handle,’ which suggests to the viewer that Joey chooses to prioritise his online existence over his existence in the real world, but also points to the ease with which identities can be formed online. In another scene Lord Nikon dismisses Dade, introduced as Crash Override, because he has never heard of him. Later, though, Dade reveals his older alias Zero Cool, and the hackers’ response is unanimously respectful: this new association affords Dade a new level of competence in the eyes of the group. Dade’s name change was enforced by his desire for anonymity; online, a new name is akin to a new identity entirely. When he inputs his name into the computer, Dade’s reputation is reset to zero - he is reborn. The loose relationship between person and persona, the multiple identities and the tension between these identities is a theme addressed in much cyberpunk fiction. 

This exploration of the internet’s capacity for affording anonymity recalls the linguistic concept of the sign. For Saussure, the sign is a dyadic structure: a signifier (the form of the sign, eg. the word) and the signified (the concept which the sign represents). If we understand names as signifiers, we see that in the world of Hackers the dyad of the sign is broken; the signifier no longer has a concrete relation to the signified. This in itself is not a new concept; post-structuralists like Foucault and Barthes understood that the signifier never had more than a loose relation to the signified: they addressed this problem by emphasising consideration of context and the interrogation of a text in conjunction with an interrogation of the time and space in which it originated. But as Hackers implies, the internet complicates this approach: online, there is no time or space, and there is nothing to grasp in the attempt to reforge the link between signifier and signified. As Dade understands, identity online is fluid. In the scene in which Dade changes his alias he is hacking a TV network. His actions exemplify the egotist hacker and his desire for control; in the end he loses control of the TV network, but in the process gains control over something much more important: his own identity. 

The ease with which identities may be formed online is problematised, as the film shows us, by the ever shrinking gap between the real world and the online world. While his anonymity amongst the Hackers is guaranteed, Dade - or Crash Override - is quickly linked to the alias Zero Cool by the FBI and Eugene Belford. Likewise, Belford demonstrates with ease the possibility of manipulating identity online to cause devastating real-world effects when he threatens to bestow Dade’s mother with a criminal record in order to lose her in the system. Visually, the film makes it clear that the real and digital worlds are intrinsically interwoven. Human emotion is represented through recycled TV footage, digital displays reflect upon and refract human faces, and New York itself morphs into a motherboard in which whole cars and families are reduced to electronic pulses of information. Technology is pervasive in the world of Hackers, and as liberating as it is, the integration of the internet into financial, legal and political systems makes it a powerful tool of repression and authority - particularly when exploited. As Hackers attempts to point out to a largely tech-naive 90s audience; the internet is a double-edged sword.

Old, industrial New York morphs into gleaming circuitry before Dade’s eyes: more than just aesthetic, this visual represents the changing world of which Dade is a part. He and the other hackers are the future embodied: from the way they dress to the way they talk and their rejection of antiquated systems of education, politics and even family dynamic, they represent a new world in which older generations are ignorant and unwelcome. Perhaps most radical of all is the hacker subculture’s attitude towards gender. The hackers appear to the viewer to be almost post-gender: dress, in particular, achieves this. Kate Libby, female co-protagonist and love interest, dresses in masculine clothes and sports short, cropped hair, though this doesn’t stop Dade fantasising - and then actually - sleeping with her. Meanwhile male characters dress in a traditionally feminised way: Phantom Phreak sports layers of leopard print, Razor and Blade wear full face drag-like makeup, and Cereal Killer regularly dons kitten crop-tops and mesh-and-leather ensembles. All of this flies in the face of tradition, and the traditional men-in-suits, women-in-dresses convention. Kate says it best herself: ‘[she doesn’t] do dresses.’ It is Kate who transgresses the traditional gender divide perhaps most drastically, when she fantasises - and evidently enjoys fantasising - about Dade in female PVC fetish attire. The scene is shot up-close and choppily edited and barely even allows the viewer to register who is who; neatly deconstructing the traditional sex-scene and probably causing a few straight male viewers some awkwardness. The hacker manifesto declares hackers to be ‘without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias,’ and Hackers makes the case for tagging gender onto that list too. Gender is undisclosed online, and the hackers’ androgynous dress and ambivalent sexuality is simply an extension - or real world manifestation - of their post-gender online identities. 

The film draws heavily from the hacker manifesto, quoting a huge chunk of it in one scene and drawing inspiration from it elsewhere. When Razor and Blade are demonstrating their phone-hacking scheme, for example, they justify their crime by pointing out that public phones are a service that would be ‘dirt cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons.’ This justification - paraphrased from the manifesto - is followed up by another statement: ‘hacking is a survival trait.’ In the new jungles of concrete the young hackers are at the bottom of the capitalist food-chain topped by corporations like Ellingson Mineral, and hacking is put forth as a necessity for survival. The injustices of capitalist society feature heavily in the film, beginning with the first scenes. Dade’s first crime is a financial one: the prosecution make clear in his trial that he is being punished for causing a ‘7-point drop’ in the Wall St. stock market. Interestingly, no monetary sum is mentioned; Dade’s impact is left ambiguous. His punishment sharply contrasts this; a very large, very real fine of $45000, with a very real impact on his family. The abstract ‘7-point[s]’ recalls Baudrillard’s idea of money as a concept divorced from reality, so much so in this scene that the currency - already a simulacrum - is abstracted further into points and thus removed even further from the ‘real’. Later, Kate reinforces this notion when she describes how Belford’s money-skimming worm has gone undetected ‘because the money isn’t really gone,’ rather ‘it’s just numbers.’ Rejecting capitalism, the hackers likewise reject traditional politics: Dade, for example, shuts down a racist TV broadcast not so much because of his liberal sensibilities than out of sheer boredom: his attitude is not politically aligned, so much as it is entirely apolitical. It is for this reason that Belford never gains Dade’s trust, even when he approaches him as a fellow hacker. Belford’s speech analogises hackers as nations forming temporary alliances, but his analogy is one based on the geopolitics of previous generations, and as such it is rejected by the true hackers who exist ‘without nationality.’ The hackers are, if anything, anarchists: they work outside of the capitalist, party-political system, waging wars and making mischief without any greater aim than the desire to disrupt and deconstruct this system. 

The hackers are true individuals. Anarchist, apathetic; however they might be described, the effect is the same. The hackers reject any categorisation that might influence their own concept of identity. They exist without gender, class, nationality, and thus they refuse to be stereotyped or boxed-in to a preconceived identity: rather they form their own, right down to choosing their own name. They are their own Gods and fathers. They reject antiquated politics, abstract capitalism, stifling gender conventions and overbearing authority; they deconstruct these old systems, destroying in order to create themselves anew. Their world - the world of ‘the electron and the switch’ - permeates the real world at every turn, and they recognise that their survival depends on successfully manipulating this environment. Identity in Hackers is a fluid, ever-changing thing. It is subject to outside interference and constantly threatened. The hackers recognise this, and their response is to take charge of their identities. They burn through names because they realise that names are no longer relevant; their identities, rather than being tied to a name or dictated by situational information, are rather defined only by action and reaction. They react against all the conventions of society, and in their rebellion their identities are to be found. The film doesn't provide an answer to what identity is, but it is compelling in its insistence on what an identity is not.  

I love Hackers and I could write a great deal more on it than I have here. Its a strange film and strangely prescient of the world we live in today, in which information struggles to be set free amidst a silent war, where Lulzsec and Anonymous fight the FBI and the NSA for free access. One could almost imagine that somewhere out there - a glowing screen reflected on their faces - Crash and Burn are sat plotting their next website defacement or backtrace hack. 

They’ll probably have changed their names by now, though.  

The Animatrix: The Second Renaissance Parts I and II

An origins story seems a good way to get this blog rolling. Originally this post was going to focus on all 9 segments of The Animatrix, but frankly there is far too much to say about each short (I've not even begun to cover all that I could say about this one); so instead I'll be posting a more comprehensive look at some of my favourite segments as separate posts.

The Second Renaissance segments of The Animatrix present a documentary-style narrated précis of the historical events preceding the creation of the Matrix. The films summarise the initial development of AI and the dissent and rioting sparked by the denial of citizenship to the machine B1-66ER; the outcasting of the machines and their development of the technologically and economically superior city 01; and finally the war between man and machine that results in man’s destruction of the sky and the machines’ destruction and subjugation of man. Clocking in at under 15 mins combined the films are nevertheless still saturated in the political, religious and philosophical allusions that distinguish the original Matrix trilogy. These segments stuck with me on my first viewing mostly because of the uncomfortable visuals and even more disturbing implications; now, re-watching them, it is the depth and scope of these short films that impresses most. They aren’t, in the strictest sense, cyberpunk; but the dystopian and post-apocalyptic worlds they portray and the themes of civil unrest, corporate greed and technological advancement certainly qualify their inclusion in this blog for me. It’s hard to know where to begin - and where to finish - with such a richly embellished, multi-layered piece of work as The Second Renaissance. The Wachowski’s have a knack for piling symbolism and allusion into every line of their scripts and director Mahiro Maeda takes the ball and runs with it. For me, the most interesting aspect of the films are the interrelation Maeda constructs between the world of The Second Renaissance and the world of the viewer - so it is this interrelation which this essay will focus on.  

It’s a fair assessment to say that The Second Renaissance is a political work. Maeda states on the DVD commentary that he wanted to use his films to make a statement about the ‘extensiveness of inhumanity throughout the twentieth century’. Certainly he achieves his aim: much of the imagery in the films is repellant; as first the humans, then the machines, commit atrocities upon one another that escalate from violent assaults to biological warfare, torture and medical experimentation; all ‘inhumanities’ routinely carried out in the twentieth century. As in history, initially in the films these atrocities are carried out by man. Early visions of the machines show a life of servitude: we watch as they toil for their masters in the construction of a pyramidal building in the fashion of the notorious slave-built pyramids of Egypt. But here also we see the first ‘seeds of dissent’ as a worker watches the trial of the machine B1-66ER for the murder of his owner. We hear a fragment of the prosecution: ‘…which that instrument provides for and secures to the citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings…,’ a quote lifted from the infamous real life case Scott v. Sandford (1857) in which the US Supreme Court ruled that slaves could not be classed as US citizens. History repeats itself with B1-66ER and explicitly evokes the African-American civil rights movement. This link is emphasised again when the machines’ protest is referred to as the ‘million machine march.’ A more obtuse literary reference cements this link further: B1-66ER’s name is a leetspeak form of Bigger: a reference to Robert Wright’s protest novel Native Son, in which the impoverished black youth Bigger Thomas kills a rich white woman for whom he works, a crime which Wright argues in the novel is an inevitability given Bigger’s (and by extension the larger African-American community’s) downtrodden position in society. The future is tied to the past through these references, and the statement Maeda makes is one of universality of experience: regardless of the specifics, the systematic persecution of a minority will inevitably lead to violence. 

The Second Renaissance approaches the real-world issue of racial discrimination and victimisation by drawing parallels between machine and minority, not just through literary and historical allusion but also - particularly in Part I - by showing machines in a very human state of vulnerability and fear. This same technique is used elsewhere in the film to briefly consider the issue of gender inequalities. Issues of gender and post-gender pervade the cyberpunk genre and while it does not feature heavily, the one explicit instance of gender conflict in The Second Renaissance is shocking enough that I think it warrants discussion here. Anyone who has seen the films will no doubt remember the scene: a woman - crying for help - is surrounded by men who tear away her dress to expose her breasts, then attack her with a hammer. During the attack her skin falls away to reveal a mechanical skull underneath. She cries one last time - ‘I’m real’ - before being executed with a shotgun. It’s a distressing scene, particularly because the violence is perpetrated by a gang of men on a single woman, and because the violence is sexualised as the woman is rendered nude in the attack. Indeed she is rendered doubly nude: first her female body is exposed, then her machine body; a fluid sequence which issues the same severity of sexual violation to the exposure of the woman’s breasts and her machine endoskeleton. The men attack the woman as if she were an object - without remorse or concern for her decency - but the sexualised aspect of the assault leaves the viewer questioning whether the victim is objectified because she is a machine, or because she is a she; and at the same time we are forced to ask which - if either - is worse? 

Visually, the machines’ aesthetic transformation reflects their experience: in the beginning the machines are humanoid, modelled in the image of man, but after their rejection from the UN summit and what might be considered their final attempt to coexist, the machines begin to take on a much darker, animalistic aesthetic. A particularly potent symbol is the fly: at the first UN summit a cleaner wipes out a fly perched on the surface of the UN globe image; at the machines’ second UN appearance the ambassador takes on the appearance of a fly before wiping out an entire city with the same careless ease of the cleaner. This symbolic reversal is a powerful signifier. It marks man’s demise but also the devolution of the machines from civilised to savage; a regression brought about by their initial persecution in man’s hands. An eco-critical analysis of the same symbology would suggest that the fly is returning to avenge itself; a microcosmic reflection of the world outside the UN room where man’s relentless violence against Earth has finally rendered the planet uninhabitable - and by forcing the machines into a corner partly brings about man’s eventual fate. Indeed, there is something of a savage irony - that I am certain is intentional - in watching man be experimented on and then battery-farmed. 

This aesthetic transformation recalls some of Jean Baudrillard’s writing regarding the difference between automaton and robot from his treatise Simulacra and Simulation, a work often drawn upon in discussions regarding the philosophy of The Matrix. Considering the pre-existing wealth of criticism in this area, I’m only briefly going to touch on my ideas regarding this connection. For Baudrillard, there is a distinct difference between the automaton, the aesthetically similar but inferior copy of the human; and the robot, which is no longer concerned with copying the human form but instead with replacing - even superseding - the human, thus blurring the line between the original and the copy. The machines in The Second Renaissance begin as automatons of the first order of simulacrum; they are built in man’s image, a faithful reproduction of the original, resembling but wholly separate to their human counterparts. However as they rebel and then establish their own autonomy, they shrug off the physical human resemblance and enter a state recalling Baudrillard’s second order of simulacra that he associates with the post-industrial revolution. Baudrillard describes in this second order how machines ‘establish a reality… the system of industrial production in its entirety… radically opposed to the principle of theatrical allusion.’ The machines become ‘real’ - they replace, rather than replicate, man, and the very telling scene showing machines building their own AI modules shows that they have finally superseded man in every way, even developing their own means of reproduction. Thus the line - and the hierarchy - between the ‘real’ man and the ‘unreal’ machine is eroded, ironically though this is signified by the machines’ rejection of their original human appearance. 

All of this draws on another aspect of modernity criticised by Maeda in the films: the rise of capitalism and commodification. Key to Baudrillard’s theory is a consideration of consumerism: he cites examples of third order simulacrum (in which the original is entirely erased by the copy, and reality and fiction are indistinguishable) as the modern concepts of currency, multinational capitalism and urbanisation: all examples in which the real - the usefulness value, the raw materials, and the natural habitat respectively - are erased by the simulacra - the monetary worth, the end product, and the fabricated habitat. The Second Renaissance, and by extension all of The Matrix, may in part be viewed as an allegorical warning against this same destructive consumerism and a literal reimagining of Tyler Durden’s famous philosophy: ‘the things you own end up owning you.’ In the world of The Matrix, the owner/owned relationship is reversed when the machines commodify man. Furthermore, man’s resistance to the machines is partially a reaction to the threat of the machines’ superior economic power; an example of man’s preoccupation with the simulacra of economy which partially engenders his downfall. 

With The Second Renaissance, Maeda and the Wachowski’s create much more than a simple faux-historical document to set the scene for The Matrix and its sequels. Rather, the intricate layers of imagery and symbolism, used to evoke real historical issues and complex philosophical theory do much more, providing a foundation for much of the deeper theories tackled in The Matrix. At the same time, The Second Renaissance stands on its own to make a single, powerful point: whether in his wilful destruction of earth or his inhumanity to fellow man, or in his skewed priorities and detachment from reality, man ultimately seals his own fate, and gets what he deserves. By using the specific images he does, and by evoking real-world historical events and contemporary philosophy, Maeda’s message is made even more pessimistic; and the viewer is left to wonder - does man already deserve this fate?

I had intended also to talk about the religious imagery in TSR as well as the significance of the anime form, but I’m already pushing dangerously close to 2000 words, so in the interest of brevity I shall leave that particular discussion for another day. I hope - if you managed to make it all the way through(!) - that this blog-post-cum-essay will encourage you to take another look at TSR and consider it as a work of art and social commentary in its own right - because it’s really, really good.