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Spill, part four (a Little Brother story)

/ / Little Brother, Podcast

Will Staehle's cover for 'Spill': a white star on an aqua background; a black stylized fist rises out of the star with a red X over its center.

This week on my podcast, I read part four of “Spill“, a new Little Brother story commissioned by Clay F Carlson and published on Reactor, the online publication of Tor Books. Also available in DRM-free ebook form as a Tor Original.

I didn’t plan to go to Oklahoma, but I went to Oklahoma.

My day job is providing phone tech support to people in offices who use my boss’s customer-relationship management software. In theory, I can do that job from anywhere I can sit quietly on a good Internet connection for a few hours a day while I’m on shift. It’s a good job for an organizer, because it means I can go out in the field and still pay my rent, so long as I can park a rental car outside of a Starbucks, camp on their WiFi, and put on a noise-canceling headset. It’s also good organizer training because most of the people who call me are angry and confused and need to have something difficult and technical explained to them.

My comrades started leaving for Oklahoma the day the Water Protector camp got set up. A lot of them—especially my Indigenous friends—were veterans of the Line 3 Pipeline, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and other pipeline fights, and they were plugged right into that network.

The worse things got, the more people I knew in OK. My weekly affinity group meeting normally had twenty people at it. One week there were only ten of us. The next week, three. The next week, we did it on Zoom (ugh) and most of the people on the line were in OK, up on “Facebook Hill,” the one place in the camp with reliable cellular data signals.


MP3

Spill, part three (a Little Brother story)

/ / Little Brother, Podcast

Will Staehle's cover for 'Spill': a white star on an aqua background; a black stylized fist rises out of the star with a red X over its center.

This week on my podcast, I read part three of “Spill“, a new Little Brother story commissioned by Clay F Carlson and published on Reactor, the online publication of Tor Books. Also available in DRM-free ebook form as a Tor Original.

I didn’t plan to go to Oklahoma, but I went to Oklahoma.

My day job is providing phone tech support to people in offices who use my boss’s customer-relationship management software. In theory, I can do that job from anywhere I can sit quietly on a good Internet connection for a few hours a day while I’m on shift. It’s a good job for an organizer, because it means I can go out in the field and still pay my rent, so long as I can park a rental car outside of a Starbucks, camp on their WiFi, and put on a noise-canceling headset. It’s also good organizer training because most of the people who call me are angry and confused and need to have something difficult and technical explained to them.

My comrades started leaving for Oklahoma the day the Water Protector camp got set up. A lot of them—especially my Indigenous friends—were veterans of the Line 3 Pipeline, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and other pipeline fights, and they were plugged right into that network.

The worse things got, the more people I knew in OK. My weekly affinity group meeting normally had twenty people at it. One week there were only ten of us. The next week, three. The next week, we did it on Zoom (ugh) and most of the people on the line were in OK, up on “Facebook Hill,” the one place in the camp with reliable cellular data signals.


MP3

Spill, part two (a Little Brother story)

/ / Little Brother, Podcast

Will Staehle's cover for 'Spill': a white star on an aqua background; a black stylized fist rises out of the star with a red X over its center.

This week on my podcast, I read part two of “Spill“, a new Little Brother story commissioned by Clay F Carlson and published on Reactor, the online publication of Tor Books. Also available in DRM-free ebook form as a Tor Original.

I didn’t plan to go to Oklahoma, but I went to Oklahoma.

My day job is providing phone tech support to people in offices who use my boss’s customer-relationship management software. In theory, I can do that job from anywhere I can sit quietly on a good Internet connection for a few hours a day while I’m on shift. It’s a good job for an organizer, because it means I can go out in the field and still pay my rent, so long as I can park a rental car outside of a Starbucks, camp on their WiFi, and put on a noise-canceling headset. It’s also good organizer training because most of the people who call me are angry and confused and need to have something difficult and technical explained to them.

My comrades started leaving for Oklahoma the day the Water Protector camp got set up. A lot of them—especially my Indigenous friends—were veterans of the Line 3 Pipeline, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and other pipeline fights, and they were plugged right into that network.

The worse things got, the more people I knew in OK. My weekly affinity group meeting normally had twenty people at it. One week there were only ten of us. The next week, three. The next week, we did it on Zoom (ugh) and most of the people on the line were in OK, up on “Facebook Hill,” the one place in the camp with reliable cellular data signals.


MP3

Spill, part one (a Little Brother story)

/ / Little Brother, News, Podcast

Will Staehle's cover for 'Spill': a white star on an aqua background; a black stylized fist rises out of the star with a red X over its center.

This week on my podcast, I read part one of “Spill“, a new Little Brother story commissioned by Clay F Carlson and published on Reactor, the online publication of Tor Books. Also available in DRM-free ebook form as a Tor Original.

Doctors smoke. Driving instructors text and drive. Dentists eat sugary snacks before bed. And hackers? Well, we’re no better at taking our own advice than anyone else.

Take “There is no security in obscurity”—if a security system only works when your enemies don’t understand it, then your security system doesn’t work.

A couple of years ago, I decided I wanted to move off the cloud. “There’s no such thing as the cloud, there’s only other peoples’ computers.” If you trust Google (or Apple, or, God help you, Amazon to host your stuff, well, let’s just say I don’t think you’ve thought this one through, pal).

I Am Good at Nerd, and managing a server for my own email and file transfers and streaming media didn’t seem that hard. I’d been building PCs since I was fifteen. I even went through a phase where I built my own laptops, so why couldn’t I just build myself a monster-ass PC with stupid amounts of hard drives and RAM and find a data center somewhere that would host it?


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Vigilant (a Little Brother story)

/ / Articles, Little Brother, News, Podcast

Will Staehle's cover for 'Vigilant': a stylized, shattered mobile phone on a mustard-colored background.

This week on my podcast, I read “Vigilant“, a new Little Brother story commissioned by Nelda Buckman and published on Reactor, the online publication of Tor Books. Also available in DRM-free ebook form as a Tor Original.

Kids hate email.


Dee got my number from his older brother, who got it from Tina, my sister-in-law, who he knew from art school. He texted me just as I was starting to make progress with a gnarly bug in some logging software I was trying to get running for my cloud servers.


My phone went bloop and vibrated a little on the kitchen table, making ripples in my coffee. My mind went instantly blank. I unlocked my phone.


> Is this marcus


I almost blocked the number, but dammit, this was supposed to be a private number. I’d just changed it. I wanted to know how it was getting out and whether I needed to change it again.


> Who’s this?


Yeah, I punctuate my texts. I’m old.


> I need help with some school stuff some spying stuff at school i heard your good at that


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Talking Attack Surface in the LA Review of Books

/ / Attack Surface, Little Brother

In an interview in the LA Review of Books, Technology and Politics Are Inseparable: An Interview with Cory Doctorow, Eliot Peper digs into the backstory and ethos of the Little Brother books in general and Attack Surface in particular:

Attack Surface explores how technology is not the solution to social problems, but a morally neutral accelerant to political action, and that ultimately only politics can solve social problems. How did you learn this lesson? How did it change your worldview? What does it mean for someone who wants to contribute to building a better future?

I started in politics — my parents are activists who started taking me to protests when I was in a stroller. But in 1977, when I was six, we got our first computer (a teletype terminal and acoustic coupler that let me connect to a DEC minicomputer at the university my dad was studying at). I never thought that computers on their own could solve our political problems — but I always thought that computers would play an important role in social and political struggles.

Technology and politics are inseparable. There’s a kind of nerd determinism that denies politics (“Our superior technology makes your inferior laws irrelevant”). But just as pernicious is the inverse, the politicos who insist that technology is irrelevant to struggle, sneering about “clicktivism” and “solutionism.” I have logged innumerable hours wheatpasting posters for demonstrations to telephone poles. I can’t believe that anyone who claims networked computers don’t change how politics work has ever wheatpasted a single handbill.

Cryptography cannot create a stable demimonde that is impregnable to oppressive, illegitimate states — over time, you and your co-dissidents will make a mistake, and the protection of math will vanish. But the fact that it’s not impregnable doesn’t disqualify cryptography from being significant to political struggle. Nothing is impregnable. Crypto is a tool — not a tool for obviating politics, but a tool for doing politics.

Moreover, the existence of crypto — the fact that everyday people can have secrets that can’t be read without their consent — changes the equilibrium in oppressive states. The privilege of the powerful — secrecy — has spread to the general public, which means that leaders who are tempted to take oppressive action have to take account of the possibility that the people they oppress will be able to plan their downfall in ways that they will struggle to detect.

Mashapedia

/ / Attack Surface, Little Brother

Well this is pretty terrific: Pavel Anni was so taken with my 2020 novel ATTACK SURFACE (the third Little Brother novel) that he’s created “Mashapedia,” a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the real world technologies in the tale.

https://pavelanni.github.io/attack-surface-tech/attack-surface-tech.html

Pavel is both comprehensive and comprehensible, with short definitions and links for the mundane (MIT Media Lab, EL wire, PGP) to the exotic (binary transparency, reverse shells, adversarial preturbation).

When I was an adolescent, my friend group traded secret knowledge as a kind of social currency – tricks for getting free payphone calls, or doubling the capacity of a floppy disc, or calling the White House switchboard.

I doted on books that promised more of the same: Paladin Press and Amok Catalog titles, Steal This Book, the Anarchist Cookbook, the Whole Earth Review and the Whole Earth Catalog.

But when I sat down in 2006 to write the first Little Brother book, I realized that facts were now cheap – anything could be discovered with a single search. The thing in short supply now was search terms – knowing what to search for.

As John Ciardi wrote,

The old crow is getting slow;
the young crow is not.
Of what the young crow does not know,
the old crow knows a lot.

The young crow flies above, below,
and rings around the slow old crow.
What does the fast young crow not know?
WHERE TO GO.

So I set out to write a book of realistic scenarios, dramatizing what tech COULD do, on the assumption that readers would glean those all-important search-terms from the tale, and that this could launch them on a voyage of discovery.

That’s the ethic I’ve stuck with through all three novels and the short stories in the series. It seems to have worked. Anni’s Mashapedia is the apotheosis of that plan: a comprehensive set of search terms masquerading as a glossary.

Anni’s hosted Mashapedia on Github, and you can amend, extend or contest his definitions by opening an issue in the repo. What a delight!

Danish Little Brother, now a free, CC-licensed download

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Science Fiction Cirklen is a member-funded co-op of Danish science fiction fans; they raise money to produce print translations of sf novels that Danes would otherwise have to read in English. They work together to translate the work, commission art, and pay to have the book printed and distributed to bookstores in order to get it into Danish hands.

The SFC folks just released their Danish edition of Little Brother — translated by Lea Thume — as a Creative Commons licensed epub file, including the cover art they produced for their edition.


I’m so delighted by this! My sincere thanks to the SFC people for bringing my work to their country, and I hope someday we can toast each other in Copenhagen.

Free copies of Attack Surface for institutions (schools, libraries, classrooms, etc)

/ / Little Brother



Figuring out how to tour a book in the lockdown age is hard. Many authors have opted to do a handful of essentially identical events with a couple of stores as a way of spreading out the times so that readers with different work-schedules, etc can make it.

But not me. My next novel, Attack Surface (the third Little Brother book) comes out in the US/Canada on Oct 13 and it touches on so many burning contemporary issues that I rounded up 16 guests for 8 different themed “Attack Surface Lectures.”

This has many advantages: it allows me to really explore a wide variety of subjects without trying to cram them all into a single event and it allows me to spread out the love to eight fantastic booksellers.

Half of those bookstores (the ones WITH asterices in the listing) have opted to have ME fulfil their orders, meaning that Tor is shipping me all their copies, and I’m going to sign, personalize and mail them from home the day after each event!

(The other half will be sending out books with adhesive-backed bookplates I’ve signed for them)

All of that is obviously really cool, but there is a huge fly in the ointment: given that all these events are different, what if you want to attend more than one?

This is where things get broken. Each of these booksellers is under severe strain from the pandemic (and the whole sector was under severe strain even before the pandemic), and they’re allocating resources – payrolled staff – to after-hours events that cost them real money.

So each of them has a “you have to buy a book to attend” policy. These were pretty common in pre-pandemic times, too, because so many attendees showed up at indie stores that were being destroyed by Amazon, having bought the books on Amazon.

What’s more, booksellers with in-person events at least got the possibility that attendees would buy another book while in the store, and/or that people would discover their store through the event and come back – stuff that’s not gonna happen with virtual events.

There is, frankly, no good answer to this: no one in the chain has the resources to create and deploy a season’s pass system (let alone agree on how the money from it should be divided among booksellers) – and no reader has any use for 8 (or even 2!) copies of the book.

It was my stupid mistake, as I explain here.

After I posted, several readers suggested one small way I could make this better: let readers who want to attend more than one event donate their extra copies to schools, libraries and other institutions.

Which I am now doing. If you WANT to attend more than one event and you are seeking to gift a copy to an institution, I have a list for you! It’s beneath this explanatory text.

And if you are affiliated with an institution and you want to put yourself on this list, please complete this form.

If you want to attend more than one event and you want to donate your copy of the book to one of these organizations, choose one from the list and fill its name in on the ticket-purchase page, then email me so I can cross it off the list: doctorow@craphound.com.

I know this isn’t great, and I apologize. We’re all figuring out this book-launch-in-a-pandemic business here, and it was really my mistake. I can’t promise I won’t make different mistakes if I have to do another virtual tour, but I can promise I won’t make this one again.

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Paideia School Library
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Helios School
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