Have you read The Children’s Story? Or 
? Do you read xkcd? If you do, you might have noticed the name Cory Doctorow features. But you might not know who he is, as despite the fact that he lives in this country, his books are not easy to find here.
Which is kind of odd, because you can download them free from his website under a Creative Commons License. I suggest you start with this one, Little Brother (Little brother at hive
for if you prefer a real book). You may not be able to stop there though.
And if you’ve got or you know any teenagers, you might want to pass them a copy too, it is marketed as a young adult book, though like all the best stories, it transcends that kind of categorization.
So what’s it all about, and why am I recommending it? Well, I’m recommending it because I’ve just been glued to it for the afternoon, and given I was reading it on a netbook scrolling up and down to read both columns of the pdf, and it has to be pretty good to survive that experience!
It’s a vision of a future not very far removed from our present. It’s set in the US, but it could so easily happen here. A terrorist attack leads the Department of Homeland Security to clamp down in San Francisco, and some of the ppl they clamp down on are teenagers. Who decide they didn’t like being clamped down on, and find a way to fight back, with the technology that is being used to track and control them.
I’d be proud if my children grew up to be teenagers like the ones in this book (not least because it would mean they understand way more about technology than I do, and that is quite a lot really 😉 ). But in the world we’re living in right now, the only way my children will have that much freedom is if we, the adults, do the fighting back right about now. No to increased surveillance. No to more databases tracking our lives. No to snooping on our fellow citizens, and no to the dcsf.
Disclosure: Hive links are affiliate links.
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