![]() ![]() Car rental companies and mass transit and traffic authorities are watching where we go, sending us automated tickets, finking us out to busybodies, cops and bad guys who gain illicit access to their databases. The National Security Agency has illegally wiretapped the entire USA and gotten away with it. The computers I love are being co-opted, used to spy on us, control us, snitch on us. In the Soviet Union, communications tools were being used to bring information – and revolution – to the farthest-flung corners of the largest authoritarian state the Earth had ever seen.īut 17 years later, things are very different. My lifelong fascination with activist causes went into overdrive as I saw how the main difficulty in activism – organizing – was getting easier by leaps and bounds (I still remember the first time I switched from mailing out a newsletter with hand-written addresses to using a database with mail-merge). Computers – which had been geeky and weird a few years before – were everywhere, and the modem I’d used to connect to local bulletin board systems was now connecting me to the entire world through the Internet and commercial online services like GEnie. When I was 17, the world seemed like it was just going to get more free. ![]() University students were reduced to numbers on a punchcard, each bearing the legend “DO NOT BEND, SPINDLE, FOLD OR MUTILATE,” prompting some of the students to wear pins that said, “I AM A STUDENT: DO NOT BEND, SPINDLE, FOLD OR MUTILATE ME.” Computers were seen as a means to increase the ability of the authorities to regiment people and bend them to their will. For most young people, computers represented the de-humanization of society. When my dad was a young university student in the 1960s, he was one of the few “counterculture” people who thought computers were a good thing. The book was trying to get out of my head, no matter what, and I missed so much sleep and so many meals that friends started to ask if I was unwell. There were days when I wrote 10,000 words, hunching over my keyboard in airports, on subways, in taxis – anywhere I could type. I’d always dreamed of having a book just materialize, fully formed, and come pouring out of my fingertips, no sweat and fuss – but it wasn’t nearly as much fun as I’d thought it would be. I wrote Little Brother in a white-hot fury between and July 2, 2007: exactly eight weeks from the day I thought it up to the day I finished it (Alice, to whom this book is dedicated, had to put up with me clacking out the final chapter at 5AM in our hotel in Rome, where we were celebrating our anniversary). Afterword by Andrew “bunnie” Huang, Xbox Hacker.Introduction Don’t skip the introduction. ![]() See the end of this file for the complete legalese.
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