My next YA novel is Pirate Cinema, which hits stands on Oct 2. The book has been complete for a long time, and now is the part in its lifecycle where it is in ballistic flight, having been launched from my device with all the skill and concentration that I can muster, with nothing else for me to do until it arrives at its destination. It’s a bit of a nailbiting interlude in the lifecycle of a writer, and that’s why it was such a treat to read Daniel Kraus’s starred review of it in the next Booklist. I don’t think I’m supposed to quote the whole thing, so here are some highlights:

…Doctorow’s series starter is his most cogent, energizing call-to-arms to date, an old-fashioned (but forward-thinking) counter-culture rabble rouser that will have dissidents of all ages dying to stick it to the Man…

It’s generally accepted that fussing with computers is a narrative buzzkill, yet Doctorow’s unrivaled verisimilitude makes every click as exciting as a band of underdog warriors storming a castle. It’s not exactly Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book (1971), but with its delirious insights into everything from street art to urban exploring to dumpster diving to experimental cinema, it feels damn close.

Color me delighted! I’ll be on tour with Pirate Cinema in October, and Charlie Stross and I will also be touring our novel-for-adults, Rapture of the Nerds, in early September.

My latest Guardian column is “The problem with nerd politics,” and it discusses the twin evils of “nerd determinism” and “nerd fatalism” — both convenient excuses for people who care about technology policy to avoid politics.

In “nerd determinism,” technologists dismiss dangerous and stupid political, legal and regulatory proposals on the grounds that they are technologically infeasible. Geeks who care about privacy dismiss broad wiretapping laws, easy lawful interception standards, and other networked surveillance on the grounds that they themselves can evade this surveillance. For example, US and EU police agencies demand that network carriers include backdoors for criminal investigations, and geeks snort derisively and say that none of that will work on smart people who use good cryptography in their email and web sessions.

But, while it’s true that geeks can get around this sort of thing – and other bad network policies, such as network-level censorship, or vendor locks on our tablets, phones, consoles, and computers – this isn’t enough to protect us, let alone the world. It doesn’t matter how good your email provider is, or how secure your messages are, if 95% of the people you correspond with use a free webmail service with a lawful interception backdoor, and if none of those people can figure out how to use crypto, then nearly all your email will be within reach of spooks and control-freaks and cops on fishing expeditions.

What’s more, things that aren’t legal don’t attract monetary investment. In the UK, where it’s legal to unlock your mobile phone, you can just walk into shops all over town and get your handset unlocked while you wait. When this was illegal in the US (it’s marginally legal at the moment), only people who could navigate difficult-to-follow online instructions could unlock their phones. No merchant would pay to staff a phone-unlocking role at the corner shop (my dry-cleaner has someone sitting behind a card-table who’ll unlock any phone you bring him for a fiver). Without customers, the people who make phone-unlocking tools will only polish them to the point where they’re functional for their creators. The kind of polish that marks the difference between a tool and a product is often driven by investment, markets and commercialism.

The problem with nerd politics

The Seattle Public Library system’s annual Summer Reading Program is called Century 22: Read the Future, and is tied in with the 50th anniversary of the Seattle World’s Fair. Young people are encouraged to scour the city’s landmarks for 1,000 books hidden throughout town, and then to re-hide them for other kids to find. Among the books in this summer’s program is my own YA novel Little Brother, which is a source of utter delight for me.