![]() ![]() Think about climate change: for decades, climateĬhange activists were primarily engaged with convincing people that climate change was happening at all. There are ways in which this pattern is similar to other policy fights, particularly those in which activists are trying to avert something that is a long way away. Second (and ironically), a widespread recognition that technological activists were 100% right to be worried about what would happen if the networked world were to develop without any kind of human rights framework, and, *simultaneously*, a widespread revisionist history project that condemns those same activists for their supposed naïve blind optimism that such a thing would happen automatically, without any human intervention. The activism of those supposedly naive days was (and remains) as much motivated by stark terror of networked authoritarianism as it is by hope about the liberating power of technological resistance movements.īut things have changed in the past decade! The past decade has seen two things:įirst, the rise and rise of networked authoritarianism, abetted by monopolistic tech companies, realizing the worst fears of technological activists. ![]() if we don’t screw it up.”Īfter all, you don’t build an oppressive-regime-proof encrypted messenger or stealth VPN because you think that the other side isn’t *also* using technology! Nor do you get involved in policy fights over making it easier to censor and surveil the internet if you think everything is going to work out great in the end. While there were certainly some people - call them “techno-triumphalists,” maybe - who felt that way, the people I hung out with, the people who were offering aid and support to (or participating directly in) radical democracy movements had a more nuanced position: not “this will all be so great” but rather “this will all be so great. Looking back on those two novels (and the short story, Lawful Interception), what does the world look like, more than a decade on?Ĭory Doctorow: There’s a (largely false) narrative about the prevailing view of networked computers and their relationship to human thriving in the 2000s and early 2010s, which is that “techno-optimists” were convinced that some kind of great force of history, multiplied by networked resistance movements, would free the world from tyranny. Polygon: You initially released Little Brother and Homeland in 20, respectively. I spoke with Doctorow about this upcoming novel, and how he looks back on how his works have changed since he began writing. ![]() 13, and Tor will reissue both Little Brother and Homeland as an omnibus edition on Aug. Those novels are set in a near-future dystopia, in which a teenager-turned-hacktivist works to undermine the Department of Homeland Security after it establishes a police state in the aftermath of a terrorist attack, and were passionate arguments against the erosion of civil liberties and privacy that’s occurred in the last two decades. ![]() His next novel is Attack Surface, which is set in the same world as his novels Little Brother and Homeland. Through his novels like Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Little Brother, Makers, Homeland, and most recently, Walkaway, he’s explored everything from the future of copyright, totalitarianism and technologically-enhanced police states, internet communities, and more. Cory Doctorow made a name for himself by writing about the changing world of the internet and technology, both on the website Boing Boing, as in his science fiction. ![]()
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