Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

• Title: Little Brother
• Author: Cory Doctorow
• # of Pages: 384

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Marcus is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works – and how to work the system. Smart, fast and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school’s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.

But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison, where they’re mercilessly interrogated for days.

When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state, where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.

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In 2012, my mom read Little Brother. She was shocked that a book written about tech in 2008 could still be so relevant four years later. She immediately told me to read it, and I immediately forgot the name. A recent visit to Waterstones jogged our memory and I followed through with the recommendation. Better late than never, as they say. Well, if my mom was shocked in 2012, imagine what I felt in 2022.

The discussion around privacy has matured a lot in recent years, but if there’s one challenge it has yet to conquer, it’s the face-off against security. The sad truth is that when faced with fear, privacy always loses. Little Brother, unlike various articles I’ve read in The New York Times over the years, manages to bring this discussion to life in a way that’s both engaging enough to keep the pages turning and also simple enough to make us realize what’s wrong, and that we really should start caring a bit more.

It’s not intellectual: there’s no “newspeak” or “Thought Police” that we have to “understand” are just “symbols”. It’s not highbrow, no fanciness or frills. Big Brother is The Department of Homeland Security (and if you’re tempted to say it’s all a conspiratorial exaggeration, let’s not forget some modern horror stories), and its main tool is RFID technology, a very real thing we interact with every day, that since reading Little Brother has made me extremely uncomfortable whenever I use my Oyster card. The problems are all very clearly spelled out by Marcus, as he interacts with the adults and kids around him, and his narration even includes explanations for us, the readers, about various mathematical and technological concepts, ranging from Bayesian statistics, public-key cryptography and the false positive paradox and all the way to Internet protocols, SMTP and DNS. It definitely comes at the expense of the writing, and I’ll admit large parts of the book have an awkward flow to them, at times even slightly cringey, but Doctorow is truly gifted when it comes to breaking things down and explaining them in laymen terms, which completely made up for the literary misses for me.

And Little Brother is not just a one-off for Doctorow. A quick visit to his website reveals an extensive body of work about privacy, tech, and privacy and tech (!), which I plan to tackle now that I’ve found someone I can rely on to explain things to me in such an accessible, user-friendly way. And for those of us with a stronger technical background, the bibliography at the end of this book is enough to spawn another TBR list.

I guess the bottom line is this: while it may not be a literary masterpiece, Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother is important, in a very concrete, tangible way. It’s vital for us as members of a society with tools too powerful for our own good, and not enough powerful people on the right side of things. Do yourself (and myself, and all of ourselves) a favor and check it out (which you can do for free, on Doctorow’s website).