If you can express yourself with sufficient precision, a computer will do your bidding perfectly, infinitely. The typical journey of a technologist is to start out besotted with technology, transported by the way that a computer can deliver incredible self-determination. These novels worked - many technologists, cyberlawyers, activists, and others have approached me to say that reading Little Brother and Homeland set them on their way.Īttack Surface, by contrast, dramatizes and enacts the contradiction of the technologists involved in that confiscation of our digital freedoms. But Homeland and Little Brother addressed themselves to computer users, people who might not understand what was being taken from them and what was theirs to seize. I wrote Homeland five years after Little Brother, propelled in part by the same factors that fueled Little Brother - increasing dismay at the way that the liberatory power of technology was disappearing into the two-headed maws of surveillance-happy states and greedy, indifferent tech monopolies.Īttack Surface arose from similar circumstances.

In the following conversation, we discuss why cryptography is a crucial political tool, what tech workers can do to take responsibility for the systems they build, and how the manner in which Attack Surface was published evinces the precise themes the story grapples with.ĮLIOT PEPER: What’s the origin story behind Attack Surface? How did it go from a nascent idea to the book I’m holding in my hands right now?ĬORY DOCTOROW: Neither of the Little Brother sequels were planned. You will keep turning pages late into the night because this is the kind of fiction that creates space for truth to reveal itself. This is a novel about reinventing democracy and imagining new institutions for the internet age. Having established that dystopia is a state of mind and how to fix the internet, Doctorow uses Attack Surface to explore what it means to build a better future.

Computers play a role as important as any other member of the diverse cast, and computing is treated with a rare technical rigor that reveals the extent to which our tools shape our lives and world. The story follows a self-taught hacker from San Francisco who helps build the American digital surveillance apparatus out of a genuine sense of patriotism, only to discover that she’s propping up exactly the kind of unjust, predatory system she’d set out to defeat. CORY DOCTOROW’S NEW NOVEL, Attack Surface, is inseparable from the zeitgeist - both are riven by insurrection, corruption, misinformation, and inequality - and the near-future it portrays illustrates how technology and politics are inseparable.

Homeland cory doctorow