A Respectable Rebel

Reviewing the review. Lorentzen on Snowden. Schloss on L&S.

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His fellow trainees were all ‘computer dudes’ with tattoos, dyed hair and piercings. The scene of a gaggle of wan hipster freaks being handed responsibility for the American spy cult’s technostructure lends an air of inevitability to Snowden’s future revelations.

Christian Lorentzen has written a brilliant review of Edward Snowden’s memoir. He scatters his insights as nonchalantly as a professor bestows his compliments. That said, I believe he gets Snowden’s character wrong. He doesn't understand those ‘hipster freaks’.

It is the quality of the review that allows me to say this. Although, in the interests of full disclosure, I had read previously that Snowden could never fit in with his milieu. The sign of a potential rebel. And a warning to the intelligence services. The one person not to recruit - as the Brits have found to their cost - is the oddball or nonconformist. The odd do not attune themselves to an organisation, are not able to absorb its ethos, or accept its culture. The emotional glue bonding a person to a place is therefore missing. Of course they will betray you, when the irritations overwhelm the minimum commitment they have to your company. The title of this piece - I wasn’t just a brain in a jar - is the clue.

There was a moment when he was an insider. A teenage computer geek in a community of like-minded geeks. An in-group - its own kind of elite - that knew the rules and were safe from the literalism of the mass and the moral policemen. It couldn’t last. Snowden would grow up, and the safe places of the internet would be no more: colonised by Big Tech.

Snowden is different from most ‘computer dudes’. There is the attachment to his parents, and to their history in the American intelligence services. This feels like an army or navy family, with all the conservative ideas associated with it: patriotism, honour, a sense a duty, a certain rigid moralism. Then there is the genealogy that goes back to the founding fathers. Do you recognise the type? A hero. 

His early life on the internet suggests the libertarianism of the Right not the Left. A particular form of conservative belief - that stress on independence and freedom - is taken to an extreme. It is a typical youthful rebellion, where the rebel action takes place within the parameters set by the previous generation and one’s own familial milieu.

The melding of these two aspects of conservatism makes Snowden interesting. The shift from an older style conservative culture, at ease with the state that appears to protect the values of an earlier America; and a new, more aggressive kind, that of the Radical Right, exploding onto the political scene in the 1960s, and which was to take a particular libertarian shape in the computer revolution on the West Coast. 

…the internet…was a zone of freedom and forgiveness where identities could be picked up and discarded without consequence.

We would expect Snowden to grow out of this adolescent stage. To acquire a family and accept the false promises but rich comforts of corporate America. Most do. Why hasn't he? His precocious intelligence is one reason. The precocious risk not growing up: fixed forever in late adolescence. I have written about this before. You should read Jane Gardam’s Crusoe’s Daughter, the best book on the subject. Such characters are either ruined by society - they lack that essential quality of success: the ability to adapt - or, if they do succeed, it is through their will to subjugate others. There is a range of such characters: the brilliant talent, the drop out, the rebel, the tyrant. Some may be leaders in their teens - there is the Motorcycle Boy in Rumble Fish - who will never cross the line into adult hegemony. To enjoy a small, brief fame before the light goes out. Others - think of Baader or Trotsky - impose their personalities onto the adult world by forming cults or taking over political parties. Most of the precocious, unless they can achieve success in a chosen field, remain grousers. A few, given the right circumstances, will become rebels. This is the first reason. Then there is the parents’ culture.

Snowden explains at some length the combination of legislative and budgetary incentives that have caused the US intelligence community to rely on private contractors in ever larger numbers at the expense of career civil servants…. There’s some bitterness in Snowden’s explanation; he wasn’t able to serve his country the way his father and grandfather had: ‘The federal government was less the ultimate authority than the ultimate client.’ Then there’s the fact that after his leaks he was smeared in the press for his status as a mere contractor, as if he were a fly-by-night temp rather than a career cyberspy.

These conservative values are affronted by the corruption and greed of the corporate takeover of the American government; once an embodiment of certain timeless values. Already an outsider because of his personality, the sleaze of this business environment turns Snowden into a malcontent. It only needs a trigger to transform him into a rebel. This is the surveillance state. That total rejection of his adolescent ideals; the end of the intoxicating liberty of his early years; plus the destruction of the one group to which he felt part, and to which mentally and emotionally he still belongs…it is too much. He surrenders to the ideal, closer to him than his work colleagues and an institution wholly contingent and totally corrupt. The smart tend to think in ideas not people.

And the ‘hipster freaks’? Typical conformists. Lorentzen has confused the fancy dress with the person who wears it. Red hair, tattoos, ear-rings…a uniform. In computer-land these are the equivalent of a three-piece suit and a bowler hat. Such characters belong. They ain’t gonna betray anybody.