Creeva’s World 2.0

Pic­ture from here by Pablo Defendi

Thurs­day I started and fin­ished Cory Doc­torow’s lat­est novel “Lit­tle Brother”.  I had been mean­ing to read this since it came out, I had it down­loaded from his site (he gives it away for free in dig­i­tal form) shortly after it was released but had put off actu­ally read­ing it.   Iron­i­cally I had man­aged to score a print of the above art­work from Pablo Defendi a lit­tle over a week ago.  So this helped up the ante of time before I was going ot read the novel.

If you had read Cory Doc­torow in the past (my pre­vi­ous favorite being “Down and Out in the Magic King­dom”), you should know a lit­tle bit about him.  He is big on per­sonal rights, anti DRM, and huge on tech­nol­ogy.   This comes out mas­sively in this novel.   The idea is that the world has faced another ter­ror­ist attack and every­one is sus­pect, a group of teenagers start stick­ing it to the depart­ment of home­land secu­rity which has over­stepped it’s bounds.   While the ubuiq­ui­tous use of the tech­nol­ogy in the novel is not yet a real­ity, from any­thing that he did in within in the novel, noth­ing was out of the realm of 2–5 years.

While I’m not going to give you a full review of the novel (cause I’m just a guy with a blog), what I am going to relate is what this has accom­plished.  First and fore­most “Lit­tle Brother” is the first novel to to make it on the New York Times best­seller list that has also been released with a cre­ative com­mons license.  This means any­one can pub­lish the book on their site and give it away, com­pletely free and com­plet­ley legal.  The sec­ond thing is this novel has secured a sale to me.  This week I plan on order­ing 2–3 copies of “Lit­tle Brother” from Amazon.com; one to keep (and try to get signed), one to give as a gift, and one that I will use as my loaner novel.  The third and final thing is that I have my mother-in-law agreed to read it (though the print ver­sion is going to be eas­ier to nav­i­gate for her then a dig­i­tal copy).

After read­ing the novel I had a dis­cus­sion about the novel with my mother in law.  Part of the prob­lem that’s she has always had is that she never under­stood the legal sys­tem and gov­ern­ments pow­ers that have been given in the last seven years and how they per­tain to her.  She’s been one of those peo­ple that state they have done noth­ing wrong, so the gov­ern­ment would never peer into her life.  I explained how this is wrong and how this book can show what soon would be pos­si­ble.   She thought using cash would keep her anony­mous, I explained that with trend track­ing stores like wal-mart can tell their cus­tomers apart by the items they pur­chase, even if they are using cash.  Peo­ple like my in-laws do all their shop­ping on one day a week, they go to the same stores in the same order in about the same times every week.   Once at these stores they buy cer­tain things every week.   I explained how if the stores were plugged into a gov­ern­ment agency that even using cash would not keep them anony­mous.   The stores could aggre­gate the data, get cus­tomer pro­files, go over weeks of data and see cer­tain flags that iden­tify the per­son, and one video cam­era which goes through facial recog­ni­tion soft­ware would put them for­ever into a data­base.  She thought that this was fan­tasy until I started men­tion­ing Wal-Mart’s trend analy­sis that they do, and how this is pretty accu­rate por­trayal of who you are and what you are likely to buy.   This allowed me to con­vince her to give this book a chance.

To pick up your own copy of “Lit­tle Brother” you can get it here from Amazon.com or down­load it from this site.

I would also rec­om­mend to watch Pablo Defendi’s site to pur­chase the above print when he fin­ishes his full run.

Finally check out the Para­noidLinux Dis­tri­b­u­tion inspired by the book.