Crypto is a tool - not a tool for obviating politics, but a tool for doing politics. But the fact that it’s not impregnable doesn’t disqualify cryptography from being significant to political struggle. I can’t believe that anyone who claims networked computers don’t change how politics work has ever wheatpasted a single handbill.Ĭryptography 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 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. There’s a kind of nerd determinism that denies politics (“Our superior technology makes your inferior laws irrelevant”). 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. 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 started in politics - my parents are activists who started taking me to protests when I was in a stroller.
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? 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:Īttack 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. Janu/ Cory Doctorow / Attack Surface, Little Brother Talking Attack Surface in the LA Review of Books
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