Little Brother

What I like about Cory Doctorow, ever since discovering him and his whole “give away my books as free pdfs” thing in 2007, is that he is the complete lifestyle package. He practices what he preaches, and he's often a veritable wealth of information and enthusiasm for certain predictable causes: most especially, civil liberties in the Age of Internet.

Although I consider Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom his best science fiction book, Little Brother is probably what he considers his (as-of-now) magnum opus. It's a lively, passionate, pedantic YA novel about the dangers of post-9/11 paranoias and how easy it is to invade individual privacy in our Facebooked, Interwebbed world. (What's most alarming, and Cory doesn't touch on it too much in this book, though, is our willingness to give that information away for free. cf: The Facebook prison, the Google empire.)

The story follows 17-year-old Marcus Yallow, a smart, snarky California hacker with a slightly preachy, morally-indignant vibe. i.e. Cory as a young man? Marcus definitely feels like a Mary Sue. But let me emphasize that that is FINE. We need people with such mentalities to shake us out of complacency. Anyway, Marcus is just livin' his life, hacking his way around his school system's invasive Internet measures and palling around with his bff Darryl as they go on geekquests and LARP adventures (live action role playing). Until, that is, Al Qaeda bombs the Bay Bridge and the kids are inadvertently pulled in by the Department of Homeland Security for questioning.

When Marcus is finally released, traumatized and horrified by what he had to endure, he goes on a Christ-like mission to get the DHS out of San Francisco and stop the slow erosion of our fundamental American values (freeedoooom) as freedom/privacy are traded in for “safety”/”security”. There's a slightly libertarian vibe there, now that I think about it, which I seem to often find in hacker culture. But nonetheless, I agree with Cory's politics - a lot of these purported “security” measures don't make us safer, and there have been a LOT of violations of basic civil liberties and just ethics since 9/11 (e.g. the drones...) - even if, at times, the story felt like a dystopian morality play which I had trouble totally believing.

Like For the Win, Cory's other YA work, the story suffers from somewhat extended didactic asides. We learn about Alan Turing, Berkeley in the 1960s, Wavy Gravey, cryptography, and all that. Most of the time, it feels like Cory is talking down to you. “Now, kids...” That sort of thing. But I take that as part of the YA package. Maybe? Now that I think of it, there are a lot of very good YA books (A Separate Peace, The Perks of Being a Wallflower) that avoid this didactic vibe entirely, so maybe I shouldn't cut Cory so much slack. I guess, on a meta level, I did like how he leveraged the Bay Area setting to link our current, apathy-ridden civil rights struggles (the commodification of the “social”) to the more glamorous civil rights struggles of the 1960s. As Mario Savio would say, maybe we should be throwing our bodies onto Facebook and MAKING IT STOP.

Anyway, overall, I really enjoyed it. When Cory's on his A game, it's hard not to get swept up in his politics and passion. I'm not a hacker by any definition, but I do loiter around Wired and BoingBoing and think about these things. This book gave me a lot of new things to think about and loiter around. Definitely recommended, and I'm now happy to be prepped for his newly-released sequel, Homeland.