The New Ariadne: In a world of mendacious politicians, giant corporations and impenetrable public bureaucracies, the hacker offers the only credible hope of entering the modern labyrinth. Stieg Larsen's character, Lisbeth Salander, is the archetypal fictional representation of the "White Hat" hacker.
LISBETH SALANDER is the archetypal hacker: a damaged outsider;
phenomenally clever; contemptuous of society’s rules; but possessed of an
unflinching, if somewhat quirky, sense of right and wrong. Without Lisbeth, the
journalist hero of Stieg Larsen’s The
Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Mikael Blomkvist, could never have brought the
guilty to justice. In a world of mendacious millionaires, giant corporations
and impenetrable public bureaucracies, the hacker provides the only credible
means of moving the plot forward.
In mythic terms, Lisbeth is Ariadne, the Cretan princess
whose precious linking threads allow the Greek hero, Theseus, to find his way
through the impossibly complex Labyrinth and destroy the Minotaur – the monstrous,
bull-headed man who dwells in its depths.
Another forerunner of the hacker is Arthur Conan Doyle’s
inimitable consulting detective, Sherlock Holmes. There were, of course, no
computers at 221B Baker Street, but Holmes’ phenomenal intellect and his
ability to access crucial information – seemingly out of thin air – singles him
out as Lisbeth’s literary Godfather.
A closer relation, perhaps, is Phillip Marlowe – the hero of
Raymond Chandler’s dark detective novel, The
Big Sleep. Marlowe is a marginal character who moves more-or-less
effortlessly between legality and illegality and yet, in the core of his being,
cleaves unerringly to the right and the good. His antagonists are often corrupt
authority figures: gangster bosses, bent cops, politicians on the take and
crooked businessmen. As a private investigator, operating outside the official
structures of law enforcement and justice, Chandler’s hero embodies all the key
attributes and instincts of the “White Hat” hacker.
Driving all of these literary characters is a determination
to discover what lies behind the locked doors of this world: doors which its frustratingly
incurious inhabitants are happy to leave unopened. These play-it-safers caution
the naturally inquisitive against asking too many questions and tell them not
to go poking their noses into places where someone might feel obliged to cut
them off.
Such advice is ill-received by those who remain unconvinced
that not everything is as it appears to be. That below the placid surface of
the workaday world plans are unfolding about which most of us know absolutely
nothing. Plans hatched by people who are as fascinating as they are terrifying:
inhabitants of a parallel universe; separate from our own but accessible to
those who know which keys unlock what doors.
Think of David Lynch’s cult movie masterpiece, Blue Velvet, in which the chance
discovery of a severed human ear propels the hero into a nightmare world of
corruption, kidnapping, drug-taking, sado-masochism and murder, the existence
of which he’d known absolutely nothing only days before.
It is tempting to dismiss the sort of people who seek to
penetrate the veils that mask these alternate realities as tin-foil-hat-wearers
and “screaming left-wing conspiracy theorists”. And yet, it was no lesser
authority than Benjamin Disraeli, Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1874
until 1880, who remarked that: “The world is governed by very different
personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.”
The sort of person who becomes a hacker is the sort of
person who hears in Disraeli’s words not simply a revelation – but a challenge.
Who are these different personages? How does one get behind the scenes?
In the past one only found out these things by venturing
into the Labyrinth, pursuing the Hound of the Baskervilles, interrogating the
gangster boss, or hiding in the nightclub singer’s closet. Today, however, top-secret
information may be obtained without leaving the room. With a lap-top, an
Internet connection, and the requisite knowledge, getting behind the scenes and
learning the secrets of all manner of personages – familiar and unfamiliar – is
astonishingly easy.
Since January, the real-life investigative journalist, Nicky
Hager, has, like Mikael Blomkvist in Larsen’s thriller, been working with his
very own Lisbeth Salander. The resulting book has, in the manner of David
Lynch, revealed to us the existence of a political world very different from
the one those of us who have never ventured behind the scenes imagined. We have
been introduced to characters every bit as fascinating and terrifying as Arthur
Conan Doyle’s and Raymond Chandler’s.
What remains to be seen is whether life imitates art and the
guilty are brought to electoral justice. It’s one thing to discover the
Labyrinth exists, quite another to slay the monster at its heart.
This essay was
originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The
Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 29 August 2014.
