Edward Snowden, disaffected young American

Edward Snowden’s preferred moniker is Verax (“Truthteller”).He is known more generally as ‘‘the 29-year-old source behind the biggest intelligence leak in the NSA's history.” He believes that “the greatest danger to our freedom and way of life comes from the reasonable fear of omniscient state powers kept in check by nothing more than policy documents.” He rejects “a society that does these sort of things” as “not something I am willing to support or live under.’’ In a conversation with the journalist Barton Gellman, he warned that the US government “will most certainly kill you if they think you are the single point of failure that could stop this disclosure.” This is not, in other words, someone in danger of underestimating his place at the centre of the historical moment. Nor is this perception unjustified: predictably, he has become a figure of inflated proportions, hovering between the sharp distinctions of hero and traitor.

But Snowden’s story is significant in another way. To read his interviews and trace his history is to recognise an increasingly familiar social type: the disaffected American, who drifts through society and fearlessly assesses it, though not in terms that suggest concrete or sustained engagement with its complexities. In 2004, having dropped out of high school and having failed to complete his first stint at community college, he joined the Army "to fight in the Iraq war because I felt like I had an obligation as a human being to help free people from oppression.” After four months as a training recruit, he concluded that his trainers were not interested in “helping anyone” and left. In 2007 he began working in information technology security for the CIA in Geneva, and in 2009 moved to a private company in Japan. By May 2013, he had been working for defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton in Hawaii for less than three months. He calls himself “a spy for almost all of my adult life.”

This personality type tends toward extremes: his loyalties are unanswerably broad (“freedom,” “world I love”) and his rejections equally so (“a society that does these sorts of things” is “not one I am willing to support or live under”). The style here is self-aggrandising and tends toward romantic hyperbole: this is an IT specialist whose preferred self-descriptions include a “spy for almost all of my adult life” and a “Truthteller” who “risked my life and family” for “democratic governance.”

Life on this frequency is full of options: it is possible to go from would-be imperial saviour to spy to truth-teller in only ten years. There is no space for the mundane or consistent or understated, whether that means completing high school and army training, remaining in a single location for an extended period of time, or describing the effect of current government surveillance techniques in measured terms. Consequently, there is not much space for adaptability: the dominant mode is unapologetic, if precocious, naiveté. (“The NSA,” Snowden told the Guardian, “has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting.” This statement is correct, but it has also been widely reported and debated since at least 2006; the impression is of an energetic student who has seized on a fact and inflated it without examining its context.)

The most obvious corollaries for Snowden’s brand of determined suspicion and persistent drift are the radical anti-institutionalists of the right and left. On one side, there is the libertarian movement, whose standard bearer, Ron Paul, received two donations of $250 from Snowden for his 2012 presidential campaign. On the other, there are the anarchists, whose most articulate proponent is David Graeber. Both deal in models of constantly encroaching power in which the Federal Reserve, the NSA and Wall Street have become interchangeable scrims, the main obstacles to natural and apparently unlimited individual or collective flourishing. But for many of the members of these movements, anti-institutionalism appears to be less a political philosophy and more the political expression of an apolitical trait: an extreme and unrelenting alienation from the culture at large, a condition which produces idealism unmediated by facts and judgments unrestrained by nuance.

In America we have seen some of these people at Tea Party rallies and at Occupy protests, though neither movement appears to be primarily composed of them. Many are young, middle or upper-middle class, fairly well educated and apparently aimless. They seem to have arrested their drift, however temporarily, by finding a cause that justifies it. Now we are seeing in Snowden someone who does not need a movement to express his alienation, but can create a plausibly heroic narrative with himself at the centre. For a country with an uncertain economy, widespread social fracturing and an already polarised political system, the proliferation of these personality types is not a promising sign.