Cory Doctorow – Wis[s]e Words

Remember the scene in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress where Manny sketches a structure for an underground organization? Now imagine that, done properly. With X-boxes.
— Ken MacLeod

You may already have seen the hype for Cory “Boing Boing” Doctorow’s latest novel, Little Brother all over the internet; certainly I’ve seen it mentioned on a fair few of the blogs I frequent. There’s a reason for this, as it’s not just another science fiction novel, or even another young adult science fiction novel, but an attempt to inoculate a new generation against the phony security mindset that swept America in the wake of the September 11 attacks and arguably the UK some years earlier. We’ve all have had to deal with the results, in everything from having to carry an ID with us at all times to stupid rules about how much fluid you can take along on your airplane trip. But for anybody under twentyone it’s worse and it has been worse for much longer. Every inch of their lives is controlled and regulated these days because it has become so much more easier to do so. As Cory puts it in the preface to Little Brother:

The 17 year olds I know understand to a nicety just how dangerous a computer can be. The authoritarian nightmare of the 1960s has come home for them. The seductive little boxes on their desks and in their pockets watch their every move, corral them in, systematically depriving them of those new freedoms I had enjoyed and made such good use of in my young adulthood.

So what Cory does is to give them the tools to take their lives back. Little Brother is basically one long infodump on, well, hacking, in the good old-fashioned sense of the word, packaged in a neat near-future thriller. It’s a novel in the best tradition of didactic science fiction –Ken MacLeod makes the comparison with Heinlein, while the title itself is of course a reference to 1984. But didactic doesn’t mean dull, as the synopsis makes clear:

Marcus, a.k.a “w1n5t0n,” is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works –and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high schools intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.

But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where theyre mercilessly interrogated for days.

When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.

Best thing about Little Brother? It’s not just a book, it’s a movement. And Cory is putting his money where his mouth is and made the book available as a free, Creative Commons licensed e-book. In all, this is a noble attempt at not just making people aware of the encrouching security society, but help them find the tools to fight against it, circumvent it, pervert it.

I’m not sure I actually like Cory Doctorow, either as a blogger or an esseff writer. Boing Boing used to be on my blogroll until it got too up itself for me, and I’ve tried his fiction but haven’t managed to finish any of it. Part of what annoys me about him is his relentless self promotion, part his equally relentless, somewhat naive techno exuberance. The combination just sets my teeth on edge.

A good example was linked to by Making Light the other day, a short called “Other People’s Money“, which was written for Forbes. The excerpt below showcases what I dislike about Doctorow’s writing:

“You’d have thought I’d learned my lesson by then, but no, sir. I am the original glutton for punishment. After Bubble 2.0, I took my best coders, our CFO, and a dozen of our users and did a little health-care startup, brokering carbon-neutral medical travel plans to Fortune 500s. Today that sounds like old hat, but back then, it was sexy. No one seriously believed that we could get out from under the HMOs, but between Virgin’s cheap bulk-ticket sales and the stellar medical deals in Venezuela, Argentina and Cuba, it was the only cost-effective way. And once the IWWWW signed up 80 percent of the U.S. workforce through World of Starcraft guilds, no employer could afford to skimp on health insurance.
The word would go out during that night’s raids and by the morning, you’d have picket lines in front of every branch office.

The whole story is like that, one long infodump laced with buzzwords and jargon to show what Doctorow thinks could be our future. It’s near future and of a type that I should like, like much of Doctorow’s work, as it’s simular to what people like Neal Stephenson and Bruce Sterling have also written. There’s one great difference though, in that their stories were grounded in a political and sociological awareness that I find lacking with Doctorow.