Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

[grarpamp]

http://craphound.com/littlebrother/Cory_Doctorow_-_Little_Brother.txt
http://craphound.com/

INTRODUCTION

I wrote Little Brother in a white-hot fury between May 7, 2007 and
July 2, 2007: exactly eight weeks from the day I thought it up to the
day I finished it (Alice, to whom this book is dedicated, had to put
up with me clacking out the final chapter at 5AM in our hotel in Rome,
where we were celebrating our anniversary). I'd always dreamed of
having a book just materialize, fully formed, and come pouring out of
my fingertips, no sweat and fuss -- but it wasn't nearly as much fun
as I'd thought it would be. There were days when I wrote 10,000 words,
hunching over my keyboard in airports, on subways, in taxis --
anywhere I could type. The book was trying to get out of my head, no
matter what, and I missed so much sleep and so many meals that friends
started to ask if I was unwell.

When my dad was a young university student in the 1960s, he was one of
the few "counterculture" people who thought computers were a good
thing. For most young people, computers represented the
de-humanization of society. University students were reduced to
numbers on a punchcard, each bearing the legend "DO NOT BEND, SPINDLE,
FOLD OR MUTILATE," prompting some of the students to wear pins that
said, "I AM A STUDENT: DO NOT BEND, SPINDLE, FOLD OR MUTILATE ME."
Computers were seen as a means to increase the ability of the
authorities to regiment people and bend them to their will.

When I was 17, the world seemed like it was just going to get more
free. The Berlin Wall was about to come down. Computers -- which had
been geeky and weird a few years before -- were everywhere, and the
modem I'd used to connect to local bulletin board systems was now
connecting me to the entire world through the Internet and commercial
online services like GEnie. My lifelong fascination with activist
causes went into overdrive as I saw how the main difficulty in
activism -- organizing -- was getting easier by leaps and bounds (I
still remember the first time I switched from mailing out a newsletter
with hand-written addresses to using a database with mail-merge). In
the Soviet Union, communications tools were being used to bring
information -- and revolution -- to the farthest-flung corners of the
largest authoritarian state the Earth had ever seen.

But 17 years later, things are very different. The computers I love
are being co-opted, used to spy on us, control us, snitch on us. The
National Security Agency has illegally wiretapped the entire USA and
gotten away with it. Car rental companies and mass transit and traffic
authorities are watching where we go, sending us automated tickets,
finking us out to busybodies, cops and bad guys who gain illicit
access to their databases. The Transport Security Administration
maintains a "no-fly" list of people who'd never been convicted of any
crime, but who are nevertheless considered too dangerous to fly. The
list's contents are secret. The rule that makes it enforceable is
secret. The criteria for being added to the list are secret. It has
four-year-olds on it. And US senators. And decorated veterans --
actual war heroes.

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.

What's more, kids were clearly being used as guinea-pigs for a new
kind of technological state that all of us were on our way to, a world
where taking a picture was either piracy (in a movie theater or museum
or even a Starbucks), or terrorism (in a public place), but where we
could be photographed, tracked and logged hundreds of times a day by
every tin-pot dictator, cop, bureaucrat and shop-keeper. A world where
any measure, including torture, could be justified just by waving your
hands and shouting "Terrorism! 9/11! Terrorism!" until all dissent
fell silent.

We don't have to go down that road.

If you love freedom, if you think the human condition is dignified by
privacy, by the right to be left alone, by the right to explore your
weird ideas provided you don't hurt others, then you have common cause
with the kids whose web-browsers and cell phones are being used to
lock them up and follow them around.

If you believe that the answer to bad speech is more speech -- not
censorship -- then you have a dog in the fight.

If you believe in a society of laws, a land where our rulers have to
tell us the rules, and have to follow them too, then you're part of
the same struggle that kids fight when they argue for the right to
live under the same Bill of Rights that adults have.

This book is meant to be part of the conversation about what an
information society means: does it mean total control, or unheard-of
liberty? It's not just a noun, it's a verb, it's something you do.