Introduction

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 Marcus receiving the sack-over-head treatment 

      The story of Little Brother by Cory Doctorow is set years after the second decade of the 21^st century in a believable world of San Francisco where seventeen year old Marcus Yallow, a technologically capable protagonist, accidentally got he and his friends near the proximity of a terrorist bomb attack and detained by the Department of Homeland Security as mistaken suspects responsible for the adversity. They were punished with utmost brutality at the disciplinary facilities then suddenly released; after finally submitting themselves to interrogators who held them in.

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First Impression

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      When I first started reading, I immediately considered Marcus as your typical shrewd, naughty, and provoking student that dares to challenge against your superiors. The tension between he and his senile principle’s conversation demonstrates the senile trust they shared with each other, respectively attempting to overwhelm the opposition in the dispute. Though despite of being a die-hard freedom advocate, Marcus had always been an unjustly reasoned hacker that violates school regulations to selflessly express his subtle dissatisfactions towards the school. In any case, the school administrative is strange enough to implement surveillances monitors and tracking devices like gait software installed in the perimeters that solely detected silhouettes of ambiguous human movements.

 Marcus Yallow 

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The Theme
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      The conspicuous changes of establishing universal surveillances and other countermeasures after the incident resulted in a new crisis. By involving everyone in the DHS’s large scale investigation, many innocents are accused and persecuted because of these inaccurate detections of “abnormal behaviour”. Such methods used to discover terrorist whereabouts in the nation soils of America are futile; the reality is that the current problem has already surpassed the severity of the former predicament. It isn’t about the attack anymore, but how the government used the situation as an opportunistic excuse to promote its reasons to increase authority over people and to confirm their status. The kind of fake peace achieved when people live in fear defeats the purpose of defending against “terror”, with delusionary protections violating human rights and neglecting its citizens’ justice. I can somewhat agree with Marcus’ decision to forming campaigns to resist against the government’s tactics: "You can't get anything done by doing nothing. It's our country. They've taken it from us. The terrorists who attack us are still free but we're not. I can't go underground for a year, ten years, my whole life, waiting for freedom to be handed to me. Freedom is something you have to take for yourself. (p. 180)" The theme of this book is powerful, teaching us the negative influences of authority manipulation (predictive programming), plus the value of a will to defend the prevailing human principles made by equal beings long since the establishment of the United State’s independence and its scared infrangible Constitutions.

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           To be honest, I wasn’t satisfied with Marcus’ perception until I actually contemplated on the emphasis of the story. Up to this point, I came to a resolve that the government had first-handedly conducted “necessary” actions to advocate public safety, but after seeing forbidden footages featuring a secret meeting between masterminds,  I realized how the DHS took advantage of the Xnet dissidents to fulfill their interests. If the government was truly concerned of their citizens, then it’d be obvious to impede the uproar of the Xnet under all circumstances, since they were convinced that the Xnet dissidents were immoral justified of their rebellion. On the contrary, in the midst of the group’s conversation in the video proved their nonchalance in regards to prioritizing the DHS’s selfish behavior to strengthen citizen acknowledgment. They deceived everyone merely to convert all the people of San Francisco to obedience, which was considerably intolerant. Naturally, Marcus didn’t want to helplessly see his homeland fall to corruption, he exposed his confidential records of the detainment to the unaware public, knowing perfect well of the awaiting consequence. He readily halted his exile as a fugitive, remaining composure even after getting caught and tortured from the mock execution of waterboarding (simulated drowning).  "I (Marcus) was caught, but it didn't matter. I had gotten the information to Barbara. I had organized the Xnet. I had won. And if I hadn't won, I had done everything I could have done. More than I ever thought I could do. I took a mental inventory as I rode, thinking of everything that I had accomplished, that we had accomplished. The city, the country, the world was full of people who wouldn't live the way DHS wanted us to live. We'd fight forever. They couldn't jail us all (p 121)." My ideals at that very moment became on par with Marcus’ radical insight to pursuit contentment, envisioning the consequence of leaving the current supervision unchanged.

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Elusion

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      You probably noticed Marcus and his geeky soliloquies mentioned, elaborating about all the wonders that computers grant us. He claims the straightforwardness of computer programming and how anyone could access this by simply absorbing contemporary knowledge of what the internet has to offer. Initially, I was enticed of these seemingly intriguing and occult concepts that were similar to puzzle solving - such as improvising various techniques of cryptography to infiltrate censorships and provide a means of a securely private communication medium (The Xnet). Later on, I feel that these depictions were not absorbable to the comprehension of readers. These descriptions gradually become tediously repetitive, mostly eluding the readers from engaging back to the main narrations while additionally causing obfuscations. It even made me suspected that the author deliberately included these colossal lectures to expand pages.

A bit off topic for introducing cryptography...

      The literature uniqueness this book possesses is noteworthy, with rather “innovative” world selections (eg. Gitmo-by-the-bay) as well as some unusual sentence structures which can occasionally confuse readers. While several misunderstandings that occur in the text may be caused by some of the advanced vocabularies used extensively, it doesn’t deny the fact that the author favours the usage of pompous prolixity in his paragraphs. The book thoroughly conveys a variety of the author’s own sense of liberty, writing whatever he desires without any restrictions (allowing run-ons, sentence fragments, and so forth as long as it feel right to him). Random remarks of Marcus’ subconscious are also poorly misleading in some cases, often lacking a processed momentum and connections to concrete scenarios. A prominent example would be the 4 passage starting from character 18:
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 Marcus returns to his conscious after reminiscing his LARPing past, although enlightening experience to revisit,  it was  completely redundant and hindered story progression (p. 104) 

 Here is a wall of text consisting of a single sentence, Marcus shared this quote from a novel with his girlfriend Ange. She might found it amusing, but it's quite sophisticated and meaningless in my opinion. (page 79) 

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Conclusion
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           Overall, the book is well-polished with morally vitalized characters in vivid circumstances, an effort from the author being able to passionately sympathize with each segments of the book throughout the contexts of his writing. Cory Doctorow has expressed to its reader to the significance of the book’s theme in terms of preaching to his readers about his philosophies of freedom, observant from a range of condensed nuances of justice, love, and hatred applied in the book. However, many parts of his work are teemed with ideas beyond capacity of younger readers, requiring prerequisite of the profound history behind the beliefs of the novel. The author definitely recognizes the liberty to speech by not censoring minor details, but the amounts of information he wants us to understand can be overwhelmingly complicated and versatile (eg. ciphers, civil rights movements, sex). Therefore, I wouldn’t recommend this piece of work to those not ardent towards political issues, and certainly not suited for children because of minor explicit contents. I give Little Brother a three out of five rating.