Chris Wallace reviews “Internet’s Own Boy” and identifies hackers as modern-day tricksters.

If tricksters are among us, they are probably online, in the digital forest where morally ambiguous “gray hat” hackers and bands of pranksters like Anonymous roam as if they were Robin Hood and his Merry Men. In films, at least, the hacker appears as a kind of complicated folk hero. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/movies/in-internets-own-boy-and-beyond-hackers-on-screen.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3Ar&_r=0

I made a similar point in a blog post for the New Yorker, when writing about Lisbeth Salander in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. In a world that enforces boundaries by technological means, Lisbeth Salander enjoys unparalleled freedom and mobility, mirroring computers, tapping telephones, and deactivating alarms, “leaving the collective magic powerless,” as Lewis Hyde so aptly tells us in his book Trickster Makes This World.  An expert at “unlawful data trespassing,” as Lisbeth puts it, she leaves “no traces” and is able to outwit even top security consultants. As it happens, Lisbeth is most often on the wrong side of the law but on the right side of justice. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/03/sleeping-beauty-lady-gaga-hunger-games-heroines.html

I’m not sure if I agree with Wallace’s opening argument: Woe to the once-hallowed trickster. In ancient mythologies, the riddler-thief and agent of change held a position of prestige. Now, we don’t know what to do with him. In our two Americas, we do black and white, either/or, with us or against us. The trickster is in between, both and neither, a character on the fringes.

We’ve never know how to deal with “him,” because Hermes, Loki, Anansi, Coyote, and Brer Rabbit embody and enact all the contradictions imposed on us by civilization.  And now a skinny hacker from Stockholm has added further complications.