Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

Marcus aka "W1n5t0n" may be only 17, but he is far from stupid. When he hears that his favorite ARG (alternate reality game) is about to release a new clue, he knows he'll do whatever it takes to get out of class. Once upon a time, that may have meant slipping past a security guard. In today's age of modern technology, it involves fooling the gait recognition software (putting rocks in your shoes, check), deactivating RFID signals that may be emitting from your friend's library books (teacher's lounge microwave, check), distracting your arch enemy (flooding his phone with enough data to nearly brick it, check), and they were out! Harajuku Fun Madness was the best ARG ever made, and the grand prize was a trip to Japan.

With Darryl, Van, and Jolu in tow, the team made their way to the Tenderloin to find their clue. Everything was going great...until the earth moved. The sound was deafening, and massive clouds of smoke were rising from the Bay. There had been an explosion! Sirens were going off. Tinned voices repeated, "Report to shelters immediately." Where were shelters? The BART! The street was in chaos. As they made their way to the transit station, someone in the crowd stabbed Darryl! Is this really happening? After trying to flag someone down for help, a military-type vehicle stopped, but not to help. They were thrown on the ground and tied up, heads covered...and all piled into the back of a semi. Along with a bunch of other schmucks. Their captors didn't look like Al Qaeda, they looked like they were from Nebraska. Some of them even wore U.S. military uniforms. What was going on?

After only a few days of this treatment they are released, all but Darryl, with the caveat that they keep their mouths shut about what went on. Marcus is so afraid of being locked up again, he convinces Van and Jolu to stay quiet as well. That doesn't mean he wants to roll over and die. At home, he realizes his laptop has been compromised, and that is what inspires him to start using Paranoid XBox. It's a way for he and his friends to get online without their data being monitored. He starts sharing discs, and pretty soon, Xnet's gone viral. His new handle M1k3y has become the face of the teenage tech revolution.

After the bombing, Homeland Security puts cameras in schools, starts profiling people's public transit passes for "aberrant behavior," monitoring FasTrak toll tags to track citizen locations, all in the name of safety. People are getting stopped for taking the train to a place out of their routine "too often," and being accused of an alleged crime. The police and a lot of older generations are touting this as crime prevention. M1k3y and the XNetters just see this as a blatant violation of their civil rights. Haven't the terrorists won if we are all living in fear of each other?

Soon, the XNet is a target. Teenagers are a target. How far will it go? Even the media seems involved in the coverup of the abuses of Homeland Security. Can a few teenagers really make a difference? Marcus isn't even sure who to trust anymore. He's lost friends over this already. He isn't the leader of an army, he's just a kid...right?

I was inspired to finally write this blog by San Francisco. The city chose this title as their citywide One City One Book title for this past fall. As you can tell from the synopsis, it's a pretty subversive book. It challenges the reader to take a closer look at our government and hold them accountable. It asks hard questions about how we are handling the new threats our society faces. It asks our children to stand up to us because we may be too set in our ways. We may have forgotten that many people gave up their safety (and their lives) to secure our freedom. If the city in which this novel was set can choose this as their One City One Book, I have hope. For anyone interested, you can obtain a free copy (from the author) in ebook format just by clicking on the cover above.

"'The Yippies loved to say, 'Never trust anyone over thirty.' They meant that people who were born before a certain time, when America had been fighting enemies like the Nazis, could never understand what it meant to love your country enough to refuse to fight the Vietnamese. They thought that by the time you hit thirty, your attitudes would be frozen and you couldn't ever understand why the kids of the day were taking to the streets, dropping out, freaking out.  

'San Francisco was ground zero for this. Revolutionary armies were founded here. Some of them blew up buildings or robbed banks for their cause. A lot of those kids grew up to be more or less normal, while others ended up in jail. Some of the university dropouts did amazing things - for example, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who founded Apple Computers and invented the PC," (Doctorow pg. 177-78, 2008).

*Library Link*

 If you liked this, check out:
Homeland by Cory Doctorow (Little Brother, Book 2)
1984 by George Orwell
Feed by M.T. Anderson

Doctorow, Cory. (2008). Little Brother. New York: Tom Doherty Associates.