Snow Crash Notes

Dear Readers,
It has been a pretty crazy month.  I finished writing my dissertation for my Masters, while also beginning to get ready to head back to the States.  Things being what they are, I have not been able to finish the post I was planning for you.  I was going to do a brief review of all of the movies I have seen over the summer, but since there is a pretty large number, and I want to do them justice, I am going to put that off, potentially until next month.  Anyway, in the mean time, I have a bit of a different post.  These are notes I made for a presentation I gave on Snow Crash by Neil Stevenson in my Cyberculture course I took last year.  While they might be a bit fragmented, hopefully it provides an interesting look at the interaction between myth and literature in the cyberpunk text.

Enjoy.
 

Snow Crash- Hiro Protagonist and the Hacker as Trickster

In our first reading from Timothy Leary, he equates the cyberpunk with the Japanese archetype of the ronin, then points to similar characters within western culture.

“The West has many historical parallels to the ronin archetype.  The term free lance has its origin in the period after the crusade when a large number of knights were separated from their lords…Maverick, derive from the Texan word for unbranded steer, is used to describe a free and self-directed indivitual.” (254)

The ronin, freelance, and maverick types, however, all bear similarities to another archetype, that of the mythological Trickster.  One of the most fascinating aspects of Snow Crash is the distinctively mythological nature of the story.  By tying in references to Sumerian and Judeo-Christian mythologies, Stephenson is able to weave his story with a sense of history and weight.  But Stephenson is not simply rehashing old mythologies, he is recontextualizing them into a modern framework.  One way in which he does this is embodying the mythological figure of the trickster into the computer programmer, in particular, in Hiro Protagonist.

In her essay “Hackers as Tricksters of the Digital Age,” Svetlana Nikitina outlines four basic characteristics of a trickster myth.  These are:

1.            The motif of duplicity (propensity for lying and deceit)

2.            The motif of boundary crossing (propensity for long-distance travel and connection             making);

3.            The motif of subversion of power (propensity for pranks and deconstruction of power             hierarchies);

4.            The motif of creativity and craftsmanship (propensity for finding creative solutions and             making original discoveries).

Motif of Duplicity

As opposed to morality, which we will discuss in a moment, duplicity is more about the process of deception in order to accomplish certain goals.  Nikitina describes it this way,

“As Hermes uses cowhides to conceal his identity and as Coyote, a trickster god in Native American folklore, impersonates a Creator, hackers assume different names and personae (such as Skel, Dark- Viper, Executioner, Genocide, Prophet) when they emerge in the silicon underground.” 

While Hiro tends to be very honest about his identity, he is not above using his skills for disguise and deceit,

 “In other places, invisible avatars are illegal.  If your avatar is transparent and reflects no light whatsoever- the easiest kind to write, it will be recognized instantly as an illegal avatar and alarms will go off.  It has to be written in such a way that other people can’t see it, but the real estate software doesn’t realize that it’s invisible.” (353)

But there is also a sense in which Hiro’s duplicity is not entirely the result of his desire to deceive others, but may, in fact, be a result of a lack of self-awareness,

“You’re a really smart hacker and the greatest sword fighter in the world—and you’re delivering pizzas and promoting concerts that you don’t make any money off of.” (410)

Motif of Boundary Crossing

This is the most obvious and developed Trickster trait developed in Hiro.  Both in Metaverse and Reality, Hiro is the most widely traveled character, entering forbidden locations in the Street like the Dark Sun and the tunnels of the Graveyard Daemons, to traveling from LA to Canada to the Raft, Hiro is constantly crossing physical borders.  It is not just the physical boundaries, however, that the trickster transcends.  Nitkitina,

“Trickster is a boundary crosser. Every group has its edge, its sense of in and out, and trickster is always there, at the gates of the city and the gateways of life, making sure there is commerce. He also attends the internal boundaries by which groups articulate their social life. We constantly distinguish – right and wrong, sacred and profane, clean and dirty, male and female, young and old, living and dead – and in every case trickster will cross the line and confuse the distinction. Trickster is the creative idiot, therefore, the wise fool, the gray-haired baby, the cross-dresser, the speaker of sacred profanities. Where someone’s sense of honorable behavior has left him unable to act, trickster will appear to suggest an amoral action, something right/wrong that will get life going again. Trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox.”

Hiro crosses racial boundaries; being of mixed ethnicity, an “Army brat,” who works for the Mafia and is a resident of Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong.   As a perpetual outsider, he is most comfortable with boundaries and the potential for transgression,

“Besides, interesting things happen along borders—transitions—not in the middle where everything is the same.” (122)

Hiro is also constantly transcending boundaries in the Metaverse, and between the Metaverse and reality.  With many of the previous hackers we have encountered in our reading, there has been a division between the mind of the hacker in the net, and the body of the hacker, with the mind generally being privileged over the body.  In Hiro, however, both mind and body are important, and his great strength is that he is able to move fluidly from the Metaverse to reality and back again, as he does when attempting to rescue Juanita and YT on the Raft.

It is in the Metaverse, however, that Hiro demonstrates the trickster ability to transcend barriers most clearly.  He has access to the tunnels used by the Graveyard Daemons, an ability that no other person has.  He also can “hack” his way into closed systems,

“This is a hack.  It is really based on a very old hack, a loophole he found years ago when he was trying to graft the sword-fighting rules onto the existing Metaverse software…That is the whole purpose of a wall in the Metaverse; it is a structure that does not allow avatars to penetrate it.  But like anything else in the Metaverse, this rule is nothing but a protocol, a convention that different computers agree to follow…When you are connected to the system over a satellite uplink, as Hiro is, out here on the Raft, there is a delay as the signals bounce up to the satellite and back down.  That delay can be taken advantage of, if you move quickly and don’t look back.  Hiro passes right through the wall on the tail end of his all-penetrating katana.” (435)

While the laws of the Metaverse require adherence to certain rules and protocols, Hiro is able to trick the system and transgress borders.

Motif of Subversion of Power

While the world of Snow Crash is precludes the institutions against which a trickster would normally transgress, there are several examples of Hiro rebelling against institutional power.  First, in his position as an independent hacker.  Hiro could make good money if he was willing to write code for a corporation, but he considers such institutions devoid of creativity, and would rather work as a pizza deliverer than work for such a corporate entity,

“There’s no place for a freelance hacker anymore.  You have to have a big corporation behind you.” (70)

Even within the Metaverse, however, Hiro transgresses the imposed rules of institutions.  Upon entering the Dark Sun, Hiro opens Bigboard, a program that allows him to see the names of the other people in the club.

“It’s all unauthorized data that Hiro is not supposed to have.  But Hiro is not some bimbo actor coming here to network.  He is a hacker.  If he wants some information, he steals it right out of the guts of the system—gossip ex machina.” (55)

This program is illegal and highly disruptive to the system.  5David has informed Hiro that his program causes a glitches in the system, but HIro prefers to get his information by his own skill, rather than relying on 5David.

Motif of Creativity

The fourth characteristic that Nikitina outlines is that of creativity and craftsmanship.  Here again, Hiro stands out from some of the previous hackers we have encountered.  Gibson’s hackers are very reliant upon programs created by others for their major incursions into the depths of the matrix.  Hiro Protagonist, however, is a highly creative force.  He helped design the Metaverse, and because he is very self reliant, ends up writing his own programs in response to his situations.

“And in Flatland, when you need a tool, you just sit down and write it.  So Hiro starts by writing a few simple programs that enable him to manipulate the contents of the scroll without ever seeing it.” (352)

Indeed, when the Stephenson first introduces us to Hiro at the beginning of the story, he does so with the statement,

“If life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator’s report card would say: ‘Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills.’” (3)

Creative, but lacking cooperation skills could be the business card for archetypal Trickster; constantly innovating and pushing the boundaries, but doing so in such a way as to offend everyone around him.

Some Other Traits

Those are the four traits that Nikitina describes, I would like to add two more to the list.

First, the concept of the trickster as a guardian of the dead.  I mentioned this earlier when talking about the crossing of borders, but it bears a further look.  In classical mythology, Hermes would guide the souls of the dead into the underworld.  This has direct similarities to Hiro’s role in the Metaverse, where he constructed the Graveyard Daemons, and the tunnel system that allows the disposal of destroyed avatars.  Hiro is, in effect, the guide to the Underworld in the Metaverse, a fact that comes clear in his battle with Raven, where he tells YT:

“I control the Graveyard Daemons.  So all I have to do is kill the bastard once.” (439)

The second idea is the link between the hacker, the trickster, and language.  One of the most common appellations for a trickster is “silver tongued,” and more often than not, it is quick wit and fast talking that get tricksters into and out of trouble in stories.  Stephenson makes this connection through Enki, the Sumerian trickster god and master of language,

“Enki somehow understood the connection between language and the brain, knew how to manipulate it.  The same way that a hacker, knowing the secrets of a computer system, can write code to control it—digital nam-shubs.” (277)

Hiro also maintains some of the silver tongued glibness of a Trickster.  When attempting to buy the display model of a prototype motorcycle, he easily enters the role of a con man, ingratiating himself with the salesman, implying relationships with the manager, and paying a slightly higher price in order to avert suspicion about his actions.

Conclusion

In many ways, Hiro embodies a re-conception of the traditional Trickster fro the modern audience.  He is talented, intelligent, capable, but still dangerous and unpredictable.  The moment when he first kills a man in Reality is startlingly uncomfortable, as he has no sense of guilt over his actions, and his initial response is merely to compare it to his previous experience in the Metaverse.  It is moments like this where Hiro truly embodies the Trickster spirit, because, as Nikitina puts it, “Trickster gods defy our expectation of divine benevolence and challenge us to be prepared for deceit and pranks as part of the god’s exercise of creative powers.”  While one might enjoy the trickster, one does not trust him.  While Hiro Protagonist is one of the most likeable characters we have encountered in cyberpunk, it is good to look on him with a certain amount of distrust in the reading, and to realize, as much as you might like him, you probably wouldn’t want to rely on him in real life, and this is why he is the person he is; the Deliverator, the best sword fighter in the world, a brilliant hacker, unemployed, living alone.

Well, back to reality.