We thought it was fiction: anti-surveillance from an abolitionist perspective
Please check out May First board members Alfredo Lopez, Melanie Bush, Hamid Khan and Ken Montenegro’s article recently published on [Radical Ecological Democracy](https://www.radicalecologicaldemocracy.org/we-thought-it-was- fiction/).
Years ago, there was a movie genre known as “hacker fiction,” a kind of science fiction with plots that revolved around computers, nerdy people who spend their lives using them and the outrageously intrusive and controlling things they could do. The last great film of this genre was probably Robert Redford’s “Sneakers,” a film about government and corporate spying that beautifully captured the light-filtered, screen-framed “alternative universe” world of the hacker/technologist. It perfectly sculpted a scary world of intrusiveness where most of us have lost control of our lives without even knowing it. Among the many wonderful things about that masterpiece of moviemaking, one stands out: Every usurpation of power that it assigned to the powerful, presented as a warning about the nightmare that could develop, however, these rarely provoke more than a shrug today. “Sneakers” now feels less like a cautionary, science-fiction prophesy than a dramatized documentary. The government has all the abusive powers the movie displays and we, the people of the world, have no privacy.
Continue reading [the full article](https://www.radicalecologicaldemocracy.org /we-thought-it-was-fiction/).
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