This is Cory Doctorow. Looks interesting, doesn't he? He certainly is. His widely praised book, Little Brother is a story about high school students in San Francisco who must use their technological skills to defeat an armed, totalitarian invasion force. This terrorist group uses citizens’ own technology to keep track of their movements, and, little by little, to control them.
Seventeen year old Marcus is the most skilled hacker of his high school (the blurb calls him “smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world”.) Marcus grows increasingly uneasy at the way his parents accept being tracked through their EZPasses and various other technological devices, and finally leads his friends in an open struggle (the book's title is an obvious reference to Big Brother). In the course of their resistance, they are kidnapped, imprisoned, and even tortured by the terrorists, who are as cutthroat and well-equipped as they are frightening and believable. The friends work out ingenious ways of outwitting and defeating them, as they question just how far the government should be allowed to go in monitoring the movements and behavior of its citizens.
Little Brother is exciting, fast-paced, and very intelligent. Its greatest selling point is Doctorow’s incredible mastery of the world of computers and cyberprivacy. Doctorow’s greatest fear is clearly that we are all in danger of losing our privacy – and ultimately our freedom – armed takeover or not - if we don’t pay attention to the ways in which we are defined by our cell phones, our EZPasses, and our computers.
So I am recommending that you might really want to read this book by Cory Doctorow, because he is a fascinating and brilliant student of our culture, as well as an excellent author. Doctorow is a past director of the Electronic Freedom Frontier, a “leading civil liberties group defending your rights in the digital world. “(quote taken from the EFF website.) And you will not believe his blog, Boing Boing, which describes machines, gadgets, gizmos, and happenings that are incredibly bizarre BUT TRUE. Just a couple:
Embroidered MRI
HOWTO knit a skeleton cardigan
Splenda Tablecloth
Steampunk sewing machine
World's creepiest ski mask
Prison converted to housing
If you’re interested in some more serious and profound implications of our electronic rights, check out EFF’s links to breaking news in this area at: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archive
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