Little Brother
Seventeen year old Marcus and his friends are in the wrong place at the wrong time during a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. They are held by the Department of Homeland Security for days before being released only to discover that their city has turned into surveillance society police state. They decide to resist in the only way they know how by taking on the DHS. This book is distributed freely under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license from the author's website.
Stats for nerds
60recommend
152mentions
129people
2008–2026years
47% recommend49% neutral3% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I felt the same way after reading "Little Brother".
- As someone who is somewhat a long time disciple of Cory Doctorow, having read his book Little Brother, when I was 17, which introduced me to Linux, Privacy/Cryptography and the Surveillance State. I think he is really downplaying the core innovations of bitcoin, which are the incentives and game theory it uses to allow adversaries to play together.
For example in bitcoin if you have enough resources to spam the network, you are incentivized to mine instead, thereby securing the network and produce new blocks.
So I think game theory and aligned incentives can be used to address the law issues, allowing different entities whether its States, Corporations and individuals to work together, even if they absolutely hate each other.
Game theory takes over where cryptography ends. Bitcoin gives us a glimpse of this.
- I often wonder these days. When I refuse all this madness, just stick with Linux, put my kids on Linux. Use VPNs that obscure all my traffic, throw key parties (read Cory Doctorow's Little Brother from some suggestions). What are they going to do? Refuse me access? To what then? What if I find a way? What if I work around the madness?
Will they fine me? Drag me to jail?
I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will treat my device as part of me. You shall not pass my firewalls, you don't have my permission. I use my devices to think, my thoughts are my own.
- Thank you Corey Doctorow and "Little Brother". That book was prescient. And free.
Frankly, I never imagined when I read that decades ago, that it could be underselling the horror.
- I feel like what's interesting to the technically minded will stay evergreen? (You mentioned Neuromancer for example)
"A Brief History of Time" was one of my favorite books as a pre-teen beginning to wonder how the world works.
On the fiction side I've heard good things about Cory Doctorow's works -- I purchased a copy of "Little Brother" a while back and enjoyed it. Maybe not as high literature as 1984 or Catch 22 but it was engaging and if I had kids I'd gift it to them when they were the right age.
- Just put a different number of differently shaped rocks in your shoes each day.
(Credit to Doctorow's Little Brother)
