Computer Technology in "The Greening of Bed-Stuy"

It was 1984 when Frederik Pohl published "The Greening of Bed-Stuy". War Games had just been a 1983 movie hit, portraying the cracker as anti-hero. More anti-hero cracker movies followed in the early nineties, including Sneakers (1992) and Hackers (1995). That same year, The Net became a smash hit, portraying the cracker not as an anti-hero, but as the villian in a thriller movie. It isn't a surprise that movies about crackers were popular in 1995, when the world wide web was becoming a common term in the average American household (see The Creation of the Internet). Nor is it surprising that the movie-going public was willing to see computer geniuses as both loveable anti-hero nerds and serious potential threats.

But why, in 1984, did Frederik Pohl write a movie in which the cracker was a villian? Was he worried about evildoers messing with his Gameline Atari 2600 system?

"The Greening of Bed-Stuy" struck me as a story without a coherent POV or plot. We are engaged in the adventures of a Brooklyn elementary school student playing hookie, a dying woman, a blind man, an escaping convict, and an ex-hooker. Pohl loosely ties these people together, mostly by family relation and circumstance. But often he spends pages on a scene that has little, if anything to do with the plot of the tale.

For example, early in the story we're drawn into the pathos of a woman whose body is practically dead. She is kept alive by machine. Her vocal chords are gone, and a computer must read her brain waves and turn her thought into speech. Her brain is being slowly poisoned, she is on the verge of death, and she must make an important decision about whether to live the last anguishing days of her life, die, or be frozen in hopes of finding a future cure.

Next we get some insight into the life of a blind engineer. His biological visual apparatus is so ruined, that there is no way his eyes can be repaired. Machines will have to do all his seeing for him. To keep him from bumping into things, his head is fixed with a nifty sf device that allows blobby shapes to be sent into his brain. At work, he is able to continue being productive using a machine that cost him a small fortune to manufacture. It has a camera that turns a picture into a detailed topography that the blind man can caress with his hands, allowing him to "see" the progress of his construction site, to "see" the changing emotions on a person's face.

Do you see the correlation between the dying woman and the blind man? They are both physically deformed, and computers (technology) have to help their brains interact with the outside world.

Then the plot moves to a prison break. We learn about a cracker who has embarked in a life of crime out of sheer boredom. He can make a computer do anything, and lawful employment in the technology field is simply no challenge. When he gets caught, life inside the big house converts him from a bored computer genius to an actual criminal. The cracker is being held in a high security prison. Escape is impossible because of a high-tech, computerized surveillance system. Prisoners can't move from place to place without the ID tags on their ankles being read by scanners. The computers will alert the guards if an inmate takes a single step anyplace he isn't scheduled to go. This computer-reliant system makes escape impossible for most prisoners, but not for the cracker.

There it is again- the insertion of technology between a human and his environment- in this case between human and human. "Shouldn't it be the guards' responsibility to watch the prisoners?" Pohl asks between the lines. "Why is there a layer of technology getting between the human guards and the human prisoners?"

Once seen in this light- as a cautionary tale about what can happen when our thoughts and actions have a computer as a go-between, the disparate concerns in "The Greening of Bed-Stuy" begin to form a coherent story.