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Little Brother

May 8, 2017 • Category: reading

This weekend, I read Little Brother, a fast-paced Young-Adult novel about government surveillance by Cory Doctorow. You might have guessed the surveillance plot from the resemblance to “Big Brother” in the name. And yes, at the core Little Brother deals with the same questions as George Orwell’s 1984. It demonstrates what it actually takes for our current society to turn into an Orwellian dystopia: Fear, Propoganda, Misinformation. The book came out in 2008, in the pre-Snowden era; but you wouldn’t know that reading it in 2017, because that’s how relavant it is.

Little Brother is foremost a Young Adult techno-thriller, and it is crazy fun to read. Doctorow is a self-professed geek and he captures the whole Internet subculture phenomenon (where the Internet gave rise to various small and weird subcultures with their own memes and rituals) with incredible accuracy. And this book spoke to the inner geek in me. I have been part of subcultures at Reddit, and been slightly obsessed with privacy and security, after the Snowden leaks (I still am, but more reasonable and less paranoid). I run Linux on my laptop, install custom ROMs on my Android phone, and customize them to no end; I keep strong passwords and frequently use TOR. So I related to a lot of things being a geek myself. Even for the non-geeks it is a gentle introduction to security and surveillance in our digital world; Cory keeps the tech based in reality, without making it sound overly complicated. At times it reminded me of Fight Club, where a central protagonist commands an army of fervent followers.

Apart from the sugary layer of adventure on top, it packs a serious punch at the core. There are a lot of ideas and questions you are exposed to in the book. Why is privacy important? Who is to blame for terrorism? How much privacy need to be sacrificed to catch a handful of terrorists? Do the privacy-sacrificing methods actually catch terrorists? The book doesn’t give easy answers (because there are none). For my generation, it is hard to picture otherwise, but the world wasn’t always like this; everyone did not enjoy the same freedom as they do today. A lot of hard fights had to be won (civil-rights movement, womens movement) to get where we are, and we cannot affort to regress back. Little Brother tells this struggle, when a generation has forgot the meaning of independence and is willing to be controlled by fear, to give it up.

Recently a bill was passed in congress, approving ISPs to sell your browser history to advertisers. With new FCC chair under Trump administration, Net Neutrality faces serious challenges. Privacy is an issue that needs debate, discussion and awareness, now more than ever. And Government is not the only threat to privacy, corporations turn evil as well. Together they form the 2 pillars of oppression, that we need to keep in check.

I would suggest reading Noam Chomsky, for anyone trying to get more into the serious themes of the book. He has some harsh things to say about the US government, in relation to terrorism. You can also read/listen Glenn Greenwald (the journalist who published the Snowden leaks), on why privacy matters.

Some Tips to Protect your privacy:

In conclusion, I really liked Little Brother both in content and the writing style. It is very prescient in describing the kind of society we are degrading into. I am looking up more of Cory’s work, because he is such an awesome human being. He is a writer, blogger, activist, and lawyer who defends civil liberties; he even uses Creative Commons(an Open source license) to license all his books. Here’s his “War on general purpose computation” talkin which he talks about corporations trying to control how users run their software or consumer their media.

I was vaguely familiar with Cory’s work before, but this recent story, of him and Snowden discussing his latest book, brought my attention back to him. It’s a very eye-opening session, with 2 intellectual juggernauts talking about topics ranging from 3d printing to Ayn Rand. That kind of derailed my evening and weekend to spiral into this where I wanted to read all his work. Sigh

Happy Reading!