Cory Doctorow wears a number of hats in his day-to-day life: He's the author of two short-story collections, the near-future science-fiction novels Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom and Eastern Standard Tribe, and the weird fantasy Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town. He's a prolific columnist who's contributed intelligent, eminently readable commentaries on technology and society to the likes of The Guardian, Wired, and The New York Times. He's a widely consulted and quoted Internet personality who co-produces the ultra-popular "directory of wonderful things" blog BoingBoing.net. For many people, he's the face of the Creative Commons copyright movement; by making all of his books freely available in electronic form via his website as well as through traditional publishers, he's convinced he finds more fans, who drive more sales, offsetting any profits he might lose by giving his work away, and he's been an outspoken supporter of Creative Commons as a distribution method. He's an activist in other areas, too, writing and speaking about freedom of speech and of the Internet; he spent four years working for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit civil-liberties group dedicated to defending online privacy and free-speech rights.
Most recently, he's spent four weeks on the New York Times Children's Chapterbooks Bestseller list with Little Brother, his new thriller about a technophilic 17-year-old driven to resist America's increasingly fascistic surveillance and internment policies after a terrorist attack in his San Francisco hometown. In spite of its young-adult designation, it's a terrifically compelling all-ages read with immediate relevance for the Patriot Act age, and it serves as a primer on electronic rights and current public policy, while still bringing a gripping story. The A.V. Club recently spent an hour on the phone with Doctorow, talking about the RIAA, the issues Little Brother raises, why movies about technology are so dumb, why oat-bag manufacturers don't have the guaranteed right to exist, why he's afraid of his daughter being Photoshopped, what he'd do in the fourth dimension, and much, much more.
The A.V. Club: What was the process of writing Little Brother like? How did it compare with writing your other novels?
Cory Doctorow: It was really different, for reasons that had nothing to do with the subject matter. This book kind of wanted to batter its way out through my fingertips. I wrote it in eight weeks, from the day I thought of it to the day I wrote the last page of the first draft. I actually finished it at 5 in the morning in a hotel room in Rome where I was supposed to be celebrating our wedding anniversary—I have a very, very patient wife. Literally, there were days when I would type until I couldn't move my hands any more, like 10,000 words in a day. Normally, I work kind of a page or two a day, and it takes me a year to do a book. This was just crazy.
AVC: Did you do any research in the process, or did it come directly out of current events and technologies you were already familiar with?
CD: Actually, the answer is kind of both and neither. Boing Boing and the other stuff I do is actually research for books that I don't actually know I'm writing yet. Boing Boing is where I put everything that is a piece of an article or a story or a book that I don't know what it's going to be yet. I add articles there, and eventually, the book comes along that matches the piece, and it turns out I have already done the research. There are elements of Little Brother that came out of Boing Boing posts. I was looking up my own posts as I was going—they were kind of like my research notes—and some of the posts went back five or six years. So in some ways, I've been researching it for over half a decade.
AVC: Was there any one thing in particular sparked the novel? A specific news story or event?
CD: Well, there were a few things. One was, I did some consulting on a children's touring museum thing called "The Science Of Spying." They asked me to come in and kind of just spitball ideas, and I started talking about "Well, what about a story based on…" and they said, "What about a story about a kid who's a spy?" And I said "I don't think kids are spies, I think kids are spied upon." So we talked a little about that. And about the same time, my wife got pregnant, and we were going to have our first baby, and I started noticing just how much kids are spied upon. Just recently, Scotland Yard here in England proposed that kids as young as 5 who exhibit criminal tendencies should be DNA-logged, so that if they grow up to be criminals, we can pick them up more readily.
Lastly, I was going through a season of summer blockbusters, and as a science-fiction prose writer, I go see a lot of science-fiction movies so I can feel bad about the fact that those movies make much more money than I do. So I would go see these techno-thrillers, and the technology was totally wrong. You wouldn't make a movie about ancient Rome in which people were driving hot rods, unless you're Mel Brooks or something. It just doesn't make any sense, right? If the movie is a historical film about Victorian England, you wouldn't egregiously stick a bunch of televisions in the background. But there are all of these movies that are putatively about the technology we all use. In all those Tom Cruise Mission Impossible movies and so on, there's technology that we all use. And presumably, from the last word of the screenplay being written to the last cut of the edit being made, hundreds and hundreds of people look at this film who use computers every day. And none of them seem to know that computers actually don't emit a soft chime every time you type. It's like they're running Hollywood Operating System. It's not Windows, it's not Mac, it's Hollywood OS, and Hollywood OS not only doesn't exist, it's kind of dumb. And they're doing it to create these artificial moments of plot tension, and you don't need it, because technology is incredibly, inherently exciting. So wouldn't it be great to write a techno-thriller that really just tried to talk about technology as it is, or as it plausibly could be, and still made it thrilling?
AVC: It is strange how no one in Hollywood seems to know that people don't slowly read everything they're typing or receiving out loud under their breath.
CD: Oh yeah, the lady on Alias, her father only uses the caps lock when he IMs people. He's like Shoutyman. The other thing that always inevitably happens is, whenever anything involving computers happens, someone has to hack into a mainframe. So I just saw Iron Man, which contains theoretically the most technologically advanced company in the history of the world, which Mr. Iron Man commands, and yet everything comes down to a mainframe. Now when I hear "a mainframe," I don't think sexy cutting-edge high-quality computer, I think creaking 30-year-old IBM OS360 device managed by an old greybeard who refuses to wear shoes, and who nurses it along so it can run the vestigial accounting software. Right? It's like none of these people know anything about computers, and yet they're purporting to—you know, M*A*S*H at least had the decency to hire doctors to advise them on medical terminology. It's like these guys can't even bother to go out and find a 12-year-old to tell them how computers work.
AVC: Well, is that because the people making the movie don't understand the technology, or because they assume their audiences are stupid and need things spelled out, with familiar words and concepts regardless of the state of the art?
CD: I don't think it's either of those. I think they understand technology, but they just don't understand how exciting technology is. And they think the same of their audience. They really think technology as it exists is really about spreadsheets, and the occasional exotic word-processing document in script form. Or e-mail, or little viral greeting cards. It's not that they don't know about technology—they use technology all day long. They just don't like it very much. They are not like stoned technology junkies the way the kids in this book are, like me, and the way so many people in the audience are. They really just don't care for it, I think.
AVC: With Little Brother, did you worry about readers not getting the technology? Was there anything you left out because people wouldn't get it, or anything you felt you had to simplify for a general audience?
CD: No, you know, just the reverse, actually. Little Brother was the place where I indulged all the technology detail that I wanted to put in, because the point-of-view character is this kind of superheated technology-enthusiast 17-year-old. That character, I know very well, because I was one of those kids. And when you're that kid, you have this conversation that goes "Oh my God, I just saw the most amazing thing!" And you start to explain, and the person you're explaining it to, their eyes go blank. And you go, "Okay, wait a second. You know there's this thing called the Internet, right? On the Internet, there are these things called web pages…" And you go back and back and back until you reach some point where you can communicate it. And you know, if you're talking to a friend or colleague, sometimes they will hear you out, and sometimes they will even catch your excitement. But because it was true to the character in Little Brother, it was possible to have these lengthy discursions into how some of the technology works, and why it's exciting. You know, key-signing parties, and dual-key encryption, and onion routing, and all this stuff that requires a certain amount of exposition to get your head around, actually made sense as a plot element in this story.
AVC: A blogger friend of mine actually just wrote an interesting essay about how he's putting too much time and energy into getting worked up about things that happen online, so he's decided from now on to apply "the grandma rule" to everything. If he's upset or angry about something on the Internet, and he realizes he couldn't explain it to his grandmother because it would involve too much complicated terminology about RSS feeds and modded communities, he's going to declare that it's ephemeral and not worth getting excited about. Pretty much everything that stirs you to advocacy or activism seems to violate the grandma rule.
CD: Well, you know, my grandmother grew up in the Soviet Union, and I think that while she's not a super-duper Internet user, saying to her that the Internet is a tool that can be used to communicate freely and in private, except that the President wants to wiretap every Internet connection and listen in on all of them to find the bad guys, and that an untold number of people have access to every communication that passes through the country… I think my grandmother would understand, and believe it to be of some importance.
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