MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In the opening sequence of Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother , his young protagonist is illegally detained. He takes a brutal blow to the head from a riot cop and narrates: “I didn’t like these people. I decided right then, they would pay a price for all of this” (19).

And he does make them pay. Using a variety of tools—jailbroken Xboxes, data encryption, and clever coding, he trips them up in every way that he can, waging a guerrilla war against sovereign control run amok. It really is a thrilling tale, complete with a faceless, oppressive villain, a brilliant white-boy protagonist complete with a spread of multi-ethnic sidekicks, and occasional bits of gray morality sprinkled throughout. Doctorow outlines his introduction that this is more than just a sci-fi story about computer hackers—this is real life, people are tortured, surveiled, tracked, and identified:

“We don’t have to go down that road. If you love freedom, if you think the human condition is dignified by privacy, by the right to be left alone, by the right to explore your weird ideas provided you don’t hurt others, then you have common cause with the kids whose web-browsers and cell phones are being used to lock them up and follow them around” (2).

But we have gone down that road. Doctorow’s impotent rage about the fundamental freedoms that Americans are guaranteed rings hallow when contrasted with the ra-ra capitalism message he espouses throughout the text. His arguments, masked in plucky freedom fighting teenagers, mask a privilege embedded deep within the American psyche—that somehow our freedom is better than other freedoms, that rebellion functions through the exercise of capital, and that there’s nothing more punk rock than telling old people to fuck off. My paper will question these notions, and offer some of my own thoughts about what it means to be “free” in the 21st century.