Little Brother, Cory Doctorow
I’ve heard about Cory Doctorow, but never really knew what he did. Turns out he’s a writer! And a Canadian, and a computer geek and a proponent of free sharing of all digital media. In some ways, I am very sheltered.
Needless to say, Little Brother is the first of Cory’s books that I’ve read. For context, I want to point out that this book was written in 2008, which was the year of the US subprime mortgage crash and subsequent global economic collapse, Stephen Harper formally apologized to Canada’s First Nations People, CERN comes to life and SpaceX makes orbit with the Falcon 1, and Barack Obama is elected 44th President of the United States.
Within this backdrop, Little Brother is a terrifying account of how easily the USA (or a part of it) could become a police state in the aftermath of a terrorist event and how quickly, in turn, it becomes a matter of course to monitor and track the activities of every single citizen looking for anomalies in order to identify and arrest potential terrorists. In the book, the police are the Department of Homeland Security, and, they whittle down the freedoms of San Franciscans in the name of “national security”. This is a Young Adult book, so of course it takes the precocious computer talents of a 17 year old high schooler to find the cracks in the armour of the DHS’s high tech security and eventually bring the system to it’s knees.
The terrifying part is how 9 years later, under the 45th President, Donald Trump, we are closer than ever to that becoming a reality. Donald Trump is gas-lighting America, and they don’t even know it. He’s already managed to convince people to believe whatever “truth” they want and to disregard the rest as “alternative facts” or “fake news” and NRA has eluded to the idea that using their precious guns to shoot democrats and “liberal elites” would be good for the country. In Little Brother, they find a way out of the insanity. I hope we will be as lucky…
Rating; READ THIS BOOK RIGHT NOW! Buy many copies and give them away. In fact, if you asked, Cory Doctorow might even let you have electronic copies for free. Just tell him M1k3y thought it was a good idea.