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.