Enjoy an RSS feed.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is looking for public feedback as part of the Open Gov Initiative. Vote up my suggestion to make Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother required reading to DHS employees. You can read my review from a previous post.
http://openhomelandsecurity.ideascale.com/a/dtd/31748-7043
My dad is a newly retired member of DHS. Dad, I’ll work on you directly.
This older cover is my favorite.
Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother is a call to those that are keeping quiet and just waiting for things to blow over. It’s a clarion to those waiting for our freedoms to come back. And it’s an instruction book for how to fight back rather than sit at home and complain about warrantless wiretapping.
Little Brother is about how authority without limit turns into state sponsored terrorism. It’s post 911 San Francisco and the Bay Bridge is blown up. Homeland Security reacts by apprehending anyone they feel is a terrorist. Without any due process, these people become victims of state sponsored oppression: interrogation, torture, and some shipped to other countries (rendition) where there is even less of a chance of rescue by people who value freedom and human life.
This is one of those books that every American near the voting age and of the voting age should read. Anyone with an interest in computer science and surveillance will love this book.
When I was at my hometown of Fairfield, Montana,
a mother told me about her son Mike, who was a friend of mine. Mike had gone to Iraq as a sergeant in the army and had recently returned home. She sensed he had a lot to get off his chest but the only things he would talk of were the weather and family news. But this wall around him was always disturbed by the information form the outside world: TV news, and newspapers. Finally he summarized to mom his feelings about the war as this: he was ordered to do some bad things, things he couldn’t talk about. And that was as far as he would go.
When I was in Redmond, Washington,
a woman who I used to work with was telling me about her Tyler who I hadn’t seen in years. When I asked if he was going to be a computer guy like his dad, she said, her tone ringing with pride: ‘Oh no. He only uses the computer to play games. He enjoys playing the sniper game the most, and says he wants to kill terrorists when he grows up.’ Everyone else in the office went quite. You see, the problem is that the government had been labeling too many people terrorists for the liberal Puget Sound Area’s taste. American’s have been declared terrorists during the Bush administration, and they have been held without due process, and as the case with most all the prisoners held as enemy combatants, they were freed once the justice system decide to step in. So when someone’s son says, “I want to kill terrorists,” we all wonder what kind of terrorist will be in that kid’s cross hairs–the ones that were unjustly held for years or the ones that actually did anything wrong.
I really hope people like Mike from Fairfield will get a chance to tell their story to the youth like Tyler who see the world through sniper sights of black and white.
As a work of activist science fiction, Little Brother meets the criteria I’ve developed through study of this area:
That this is a work of activist science fiction from the ground up shouldn’t be a surprise as Cory Doctorow worked with other activists at the Electronic Freedom Foundation.
I’m buying a few copies of this book for my high school’s library and hometown public library.
Little Brother is an important story for people to hear, and the more stories like this we share as a society, the more we can develop a group intelligence about such issues in society. (An example of group intelligence: most everyone in America knows you should wear a seat belt, that smoking causes lung cancer, that you should drive on the right-hand side of the road. How they act upon that information is another thing.) And having a group intelligence increases the odds that as a culture, we develop superior mechanisms (the first ones will suck, but society evolves) for handling the problem, and the problem gets handled quickly.
So Mike, I hope you get this message. I hope you will share your stories and experiences with others that go deeper than a sniper game. I also ask you, the audience to post your stories somehow: write editorials, write blogs, post comments on this blog. I invite you to tell me your post 911 story of activism or what you feel are important post 911 readings using the comment field below.
Until today, I never really understood products that were “New AND Improved.” I mean, doesn’t it have to be one or the other: New something-something, or Improved something something?
But now I understand: spinning any improvement as “new” (like a new feature), or anything that is New has to be an Improvement (like Vista over XP–er… OK. Maybe an exception.) just makes me feel like I’ve spent a bunch of money on R&D and got twice as much Bang!
OK, now back to what is “New AND Improved!” (Wow, I really love saying that!)
I’ve always felt that it’s important to have a good education and I’ve relied on YOU to ‘learn me a thing or two.’
I’ve made some adjustment to my website to make it more satisfying to tell me how I could be so wrong. No more hiding your pearls of wisdom beneath a tiny ‘comments’ link. Comments are now in the front row and in full font size, beneath each posting.
(But wait, there’s more: you’ll be associated with a cool Avatar. Yes, that has been an existing feature, but that small detail can’t stop this marketing machine.)
Now you can REALLY let me have it! Enjoy!
==>Lancer—
Click to get the eBook!
Yes, love is a wonderful thing. Speculative Realms has now been released as an eBook which can be shipped anywhere, instantly! (Or as fast as you can enter in your payment information.) Within it, you can read about how a boy from Wyoming finds love with a woman named KanjiKiss. It’s quite scandalous really. His family wants him to stay home and help his Dad, but they had a fight at his high school graduation party so he takes a long, long drive–a drive that ends in Seattle. He’s always loved escaping country life via the Internet. But the Internet in Seattle is incredibly more advanced. And there, he meets KanjiKiss in an online bar.
This turns into a big family fight about love and commitment. He’s in love. His family tries to stop him from committing to this woman. Read the whole story of “KanjiKiss” in Speculative Realms, an eBook filled with thirteen other great stories. And get this: buy it before February and you can have the ebook edition for only $1 using Coupon Code: ST94L at the checkout. (It comes in pretty much every eBook format known to man, including the Kindle and IPhone).
It seems fitting to receive a story about Internet love in a format that is delivered instantly via the Internet. However, if you want to read it in digital form, you will need a steady internet connection, like rise broadband internet, for example. But if you are still a caveman who likes books, you can click on one of the book covers you see on the right side of this web page and buy yourself something that has a good “thud” factor. After all, you can’t kill a deer with an eBook.
Here are the other stories and their authors in Speculative Realms:
I went to Avatar last weekend and let me just cut to the chase: I loved it. I was practically hoping out of my seat in agony for the main characters, gasping when ex-marine Jake leaped over cliffs, and wishing the bad guys would just this once, stop being so damn bad. I absolutely love Sci Fi movies, and Avatar is probably one of the best Sci Fi movies that I’ve ever seen. It was incredible!
The movie touches on real issues:
Of course I’m biased by own readings and political leanings. A way of validating this would be to poll neoconservatives, free market anti-environmental policy types, and pro military industrial complex types. Since I don’t have any of these people nearby to consult with, so let me imagine their responses:
was all wrong. First you get them TVs and light bulbs, and then tell them they need to build damns and infrastructure to keep the lights and TV going, and then you give them loans for those things, and once that happens, you have them by the balls. (See Confessions of an Economic Hit Man for step by step instructions.)
— “Those tree huggers are living together in communes, shackling their GDP to “green-only” technology and that will never work. Still, it’s too bad about the blowing up the giant tree. That would have been good for the tourism industry. The company should have tried a littler harder at getting the Na’vi on board by giving them good jobs to mine their own planet. Then everyone would have been happy. You say Pandora is sentient? Hmm… I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that. Try explaining free market theory to a planet…”
‘the best military to rule them all’ guys–“The company tried to do it on the cheap. They needed more guns, gunships, mercs. Nothing like a good surge to show everyone what end of the rifle is the business end. And the mercs…. why don’t they have nukes? They could have just nuked the planet from orbit and solved the problem quickly. Anyhow, this movie just goes to show that only the best industrial complex wins. The Na’vi won round one. But the Na’vi will eventually lose unless they find a way to build up their military.”Is this movie a work of activist science fiction? Here is what the movie showed us:
Does the movie show how the viewer could take action (take action == become active == activist)?
The plight of the natives showed us that without doing something about it, the planet would be lost. The movie didn’t acknowledge (or I don’t recall) what the cost was back home for not getting the Unobtainium, where in reality, we enjoy running about in our cars and polluting and often wish that eating Salmon wasn’t so expensive. So this movie doesn’t give us the conversation about giving something up in order to keep the world we love. If the viewer is able to make the connection between today’s energy corporations and the one in the film, and then realize that there is a lot of funny business going on to give them the ability to refuel their tank, then maybe this would cause some people to become active.
The movie’s solution to Plight of the Natives is to organize resistance. This is a tough road in that most of the viewing audience will never be in the position to do this. The movie does show us the mercenary pilot and scientists becoming active members of the resistance. This is something that more of the viewers can relate to as many of them will become part of the “machine” that is doing these things and could, like the characters in the movie, organize change within.
The movie does accurately depict Shareholder Profit as God but it’s not clear to me that many people actually understand that this is the reality of how many corporations govern themselves, and the movie doesn’t try to make this connection to reality.
The movie does a phenomenal job of creating awe of Nature and its Mysteries which I hope will translate into caring about today’s environment. But I fear that the most action this movie will create is to get people hungry to play the MMOG so they can enjoy living on virtual Pandor.
There isn’t clarity of how the problems in the movie reflect what is happening today, which is critical to cause a call to action among viewers. But it doesn’t have to be activist science fiction to be a great science fiction movie. Go pay some money to see this wonderful 3-D film in the theater and enjoy.
Oh, on another note, apparently the Chinese Government disagrees with me and feels that Avatar IS effective activist SF. This Saturday, Jan 23, they are discontinuing the the 2D screenings of Avatar to make way for a biographical film called Confucius, starring Chow-Yun Fat.
I don’t plan on seeing Confucius in the theater. Sorry Chow-Yun, but I don’t like to encourage government interference any more than corporate malfeasance.
Or at a minimum, I’m sore about being disagreed with.
