To: pnews@conf.igc.org, media%nyxfer@apc.org, activ-l%nyxfer@apc.org,
        paul%nyxfer@apc.org
Subject: "Sneakers" - Hacker Liberalism
From: mim%nyxfer@igc.apc.org (Maoist Intl'ist Mvmnt)
Message-Id: <F8L8VB7w165w@nyxfer.uucp>
Date: Tue, 22 Dec 92 19:36:26 EST
Organization: The NY Transfer News Service
Status: RO
 
Via The NY Transfer News Service * All the News that Doesn't Fit
 
from the Maoist Internationalist Movement (MIM)
 
MIM Notes, Issue 71: December, 1992


               Sneakers reflects hacker liberalism

                           by a comrade

           "Sneakers," directed by Phil Alden Robinson

SNEAKERS is a deliberate acronym for "NSA reeks." The National
Security Agency, one of Amerika's agencies of repression, is
correctly depicted as a bad guy in this movie, but for the wrong
reasons. The message, underscored by post-Cold War references to
the Commonwealth of Independent States, is that now that the Cold
War is over, Amerika's surveillance capacities serve only to
invade Amerikans' "privacy rights." One of this movie's
catch-phrases is that there are "too many secrets."

This analysis totally misses the principal contradiction in the
world before and after the USSR's collapse: the contradiction
between imperialism and oppressed nations. Anybody want to guess
how many NSA satellites are being used to watch and listen to PCP
cadres in Peru? How about Iraq? Libya? Panama? Grenada? Nicaragua?
We won't know the details until a People's Army busts the doors
open, but we can be sure that the collapse of a rival imperialist
power won't stop Amerika from spying on, jailing, bombing and
starving the world's oppressed people.

Sneakers reflects the liberal individualism of the computer hacker
underground. The movie starts in 1969, with college kids Marty
Bryce (Robert Redford) and Cosmo (Ben Kingsley) hacking into the
Republican Party coffers to transfer money to the Black Panther
Party and to a marijuana reform lobby. The hackers' selection of
donation recipients symbolizes the best (Maoism) and worst
(self-gratification) sides of the 1960s settler-left. The
individualism of both the hacker world and the settler-left is
evident: when the pigs bust Cosmo, Marty chooses to cover his own
ass by going underground alone for 20 years rather than mobilizing
the masses in Cosmo's defense.

Furthermore, like many individualist leftists of the 1960s, Marty
did not join a party (except maybe the Demokrats), and his already
mushy politics have therefore degenerated to the point where, in
1992, he is using his hacking skills and contacts as a security
expert for banks.

Marty only has principles when he can afford them. When men
purporting to be NSA agents threaten Marty with prosecution for
his past hacking activities, he agrees to obtain a valuable
microchip for the imperialist agency.

Still, Marty seems to have learned since the 60s that
organizations are more powerful than individuals. He is now part
of a quasi-criminal collective with characters played by Sidney
Poitier, Dan Aykroyd, River Phoenix, and David Strathairn. Mary
McDonnell is recruited into the collective, sort of. She uses her
sex appeal to obtain an ID card and voiceprint for the collective,
and is helpful in other ways, but her role is marginal. This is
reflective of the marginal role of women in the hacker
underground. Under patriarchy, women are taught not to want power,
and Sneakers correctly illustrates that seizing technology is
seizing power.

The collective shows itself to be a powerful force. Together they
are able to rob a bank, to reconstruct Marty's journey in a car
trunk, escape hostile situations, make a difficult-to-trace call
to the NSA's Director of Operations (James Earl Jones). In one
scene, a blind member of the collective (Strathairn), is even able
to drive -- poorly but sufficiently -- thanks to cooperation with
his comrade. Cooperation, discipline, and security all make for an
effective organization, and Sneakers is correct to illustrate
this.

The collective shows by its practice that technology, including
the Amerikan government's technology, can be defeated by people --
if they are properly organized. After using their collective
skills to steal the microchip for what they presume to be the NSA,
they test the chip and find that as one of them says, "It's the
codebreaker -- no more secrets." Their decoder is a hacker's
dream: they quickly break into the databanks of the Federal
Reserve, the National Power Grid, and the Air Traffic Control
System. Here one of the characters demonstrates their interest in
power for its own sake: "Anybody want to crash a couple of
passenger jets?"

Marty's old settler-leftist hacking buddy Cosmo resurfaces as a
bad guy. It's hard to tell who Cosmo is working for, if in fact he
is working for anyone besides himself. He says he helped the Mob
while in prison, and that they sprung him from jail and employed
him. If he is lying, he's still not working for anyone more
palatable than the Cosa Nostra. So regardless, he can be chalked
up as another sixties settler-leftist who didn't join a party and
ended up selling out his already mushy principles.

Perhaps as a defense mechanism against his conscience, Cosmo has a
"left" cover for his role as a capitalist parasite: "We were gonna
change the world, Marty," he says. He explains that he plans to
singlehandedly seize world power, then change the world. "Who else
is going to change the world? Greenpeace?" Cosmo is correct in
understanding that Greenpeace reformism is a dead-end road. He is
also correct in understanding the relationship of power to change.
Where he fails is in believing that individuals make history. It
is the masses who make history. An individual who is isolated from
the masses will inevitably fail to act in the interests of the
masses.

Marty, too, fails to act in the masses' interests. He recognizes
the importance of power (as symbolized by the microchip), but
basically sees it as a tool for his petty-bourgeois liberal ends.
The collective gains leverage over the NSA when they realize that
the chip has no use other than spying on rival Amerikan government
agencies of repression. So they all get to blackmail whatever they
want out of the NSA. What do they want? Marty wants his criminal
record erased so he can enjoy a relaxing, bourgeois lifestyle
without fear. Aykroyd wants a Winnebago. Poitier wants a trip to
Europe with his wife. For good measure, Strathairn asks for "Peace
on Earth and good will toward men," and Phoenix gets a lover
(which incidentally serves to remind audiences that women are
property).

Also, the final scene shows that Marty now has the power to
assuage some of the liberal guilt he feels on the two occasions in
the film when he sees homeless people. The TV reports that the
Republican Party is bankrupt; Amnesty International, Greenpeace,
United Negro College Fund report record earnings. So now the black
bourgeoisie is larger (at the expense of other third world
people), white pseudo-environmentalism can better be used as a club
against third world people, and Amnesty International can better
accomplish its anti-communist mission. These reactionary changes
are what well-intentioned people make when they engage in
focoism -- militant struggle waged by people who are isolated from
the aspirations of the masses.

 
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