UM Book Club - Little Brother by Cory Doctorow Part II
October 22, 2008 by Greg
Pages 89 - 180 (Ch 6-11)
In the second section of Little Brother we get into the meat of the story. We see the rise of Marcus (now M1k3y) on the underground network Xnet. With bugged computers everywhere, Xnet is accessed via a linux distribution named Paranoid Linux created for an outdated xBox platform. Marcus leads a sneakernet campaign to pass disks out to everyone interested.
As homeland security tightens Marcus’ friends Jolu and Van have grown apprehensive of any insubordination. Not wanting to end up back in the unmarked prison or worse, end up in the same place as the still missing Darryl, they both express issue to Marcus. The worsened government actions have the opposite effect on Marcus. Though he feels guilt for risking many people’s safety with xNet and counter tactics, each raise in security is met with another move from our protagonist.
The technology education continues providing more informative on cryptography and general computing. We also see Marcus getting his first paying job with a computer. At this point he romanticizes the art with this passage.
If you’ve never programmed a computer, you should. There’s nothing like it in the whole world. When you program a computer, it does exactly what you tell it to do. It’s like designing a machine — any machine, like a car, like a faucet, like a gas-hinge for a door — using math and instructions. It’s awesome in the truest sense: it can fill you with awe.
A computer is the most complicated machine you’ll ever use. It’s made of billions of micro-miniaturized transistors that can be configured to run any program you can imagine. But when you sit down at the keyboard and write a line of code, those transistors do what you tell them to.
Most of us will never build a car. Pretty much none of us will ever create an aviation system. Design a building. Lay out a city.
Those are complicated machines, those things, and they’re off-limits to the likes of you and me. But a computer is like, ten times more complicated, and it will dance to any tune you play. You can learn to write simple code in an afternoon. Start with a language like Python, which was written to give non-programmers an easier way to make the machine dance to their tune. Even if you only write code for one day, one afternoon, you have to do it. Computers can control you or they can lighten your work — if you want to be in charge of your machines, you have to learn to write code.
While most of this book feels like a personal trip through my high school years, nothing ignites my memories like the above passage. Cory Doctorow perfectly captures what it’s like to be young and exited by technology.
So, after you posted the video of the author, and then the “we’re starting a book club” regarding the book, I had to give it a read. Thankfully, the author (who apparently put up a post in another thread!) has provided the book online creative-commons style:
http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/
After your description which included “teh suck,” I felt as if I needed to give it a read. What I think I like the most about this book, so far, is to open the heads of young readers to the concept of our liberty and freedom as Americans. — I just wrote a lot more, but realized what I was writing about was several chapters ahead already. Yeah, I managed to kill 19 chapters already… while at work. Whoops!
I was a little late to the book club party, but I finally picked up a copy of Little Brother from the library, and haven’t been able to put it down since! In fact, I finished the book last night after a few hour long reading sessions. (So I’ll be careful not to give anything away!)
In short, Little Brother is fantastic! It speaks directly to anyone that loved to tinker growing up, and uses the occasional word that’s only understood by those in the know, so you feel like you’re part of the club. It’s also a thought provoker, and like Jess said, liberty and freedom in America aren’t as simple of a concept as they might seem, so this is an especially timely read.
The crypto party was an interesting twist, and I loved reading through the description of how all of the crypto encoding worked. It’s not something that I’m very familiar with, so it was fun trying to get my head around what they were describing.
It’s also fun to see Marcus grow as a leader. He’s hesitant and tentative, but you can see that deep down inside, he has what it takes to make this revolution happen. He’s also highly motivated, so it’s interesting to see him try and express those motivations to others so that they have the same passions for this as he does.
Now I just can’t wait to talk about the rest of the book…