(2020-10-13) His Writing Radicalized Young Hackers Now He Wants To Redeem Them

His Writing Radicalized Young Hackers. Now He Wants to Redeem Them. Set the first and last books in Cory Doctorow’s epic, three-book Little Brother cypherpunk saga side by side, and they read a bit like a creative writing master class on telling two starkly opposite stories from the same prompt. The common premise: Islamist terrorists bomb the Bay Bridge. Thousands die. The Department of Homeland responds by turning San Francisco into a fascist, total-surveillance police state

In the first Little Brother installment, which Doctorow published in 2008, the answer seemed righteously inevitable: The hero uses his hacker skills to fight back

In Doctorow’s third work in the series, publishing this week and titled Attack Surface, the protagonist takes an altogether different path. And while that path threads through the same alternate-world timeline of events, it’s tinted with all the shades of gray that the world has accumulated in the dozen long years since the series’ first, wide-eyed story. This time the hero—or antihero, more like—instead chooses to go work for the DHS

Doctorow doesn’t want the reader to choose between the two. He wants you to see yourself in both Marcus and Masha, equally, to live out his morality tale from both perspectives. And he argues that second perspective may be far more relatable: His latest book is designed not for the fresh-faced Marcuses who are still ethically unblemished, but for the far larger population of Mashas who have already made moral compromises in their tech careers—who already work at a privacy-invasive social media giant, an adtech firm, a surveillance contractor, or an intelligence agency.

documentary filmmaker and journalist Laura Poitras was reading Homeland while exchanging PGP keys and encrypted emails about bombshell NSA documents with a source she knew only as “Citizenfour.”

A few months later, Poitras traveled to Hong Kong with Guardian journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewan MacAskill to meet Citizenfour, whose real name was Edward Snowden. She gave Snowden a copy of Homeland

Snowden himself says he's been reading Doctorow since his early twenties, long before Poitras handed him that copy of the second Little Brother book. "He is to me a radical idealist, because no matter how bad things get, his mind goes to the stories of cooperation and creation-sharing," Snowden wrote.

Little Brother and Homeland were young-adult novels, a two-part teen radical’s primer. Attack Surface, by contrast, is for actual adults, Doctorow says. Not because it has more adult language, violence, or sex—Doctorow cut the only sex scene in the book from the final draft—but because it deals with the very adult problem of having lived an ethically imperfect life.

Doctorow says the book is meant to stand alone for new readers—even non-techy, civilian observers on the sidelines of the crypto wars—but that it’s also meant to speak to the core, cypherpunk audience of the first two Little Brother books. And that includes the ones who didn’t turn out to be the heroes of their own story. “A bunch of people who grew up reading Little Brother, imagining that they would become revolutionaries, woke up one day and realized that they're not revolutionaries, that in fact they're helping to make things worse, that they're part of a system that harms people,” says Eva Galperin. (social media, advertising)