Little Brother is consciously of its time—Cory Doctorow’s novel and Bill Massolia’s Griffin Theatre adaptation (reviewed here) both take place in a post–9/11 America in which the Department of Homeland Security is an overwhelming presence, and the story relies on tech standards that either exist in our current world or are plausible in the very near future given how quickly technology is cycling—but surely not even the forward-thinking Doctorow could have predicted just how of-the-moment Little Brother would be when Griffin’s play opened Sunday night.
Massolia’s clever adaptation, directed by Lifeline’s Dorothy Milne, was in previews when last Friday’s Iranian election took place. By Sunday evening, the online world was avidly following that country’s rallies and protests over the apparent sham results not on cable news, but on Twitter. The story in Tehran continues to develop, but as the week has progressed, I’m more and more in awe of the parallels.
In Little Brother, a San Francisco teen fights back against an overreaching DHS and complacent mainstream media by using tech tricks to stay two steps ahead of the establishment, organizing an underground resistance of young people via an untraceable, anonymous network, supplementing it with a “web of trust” established in physical gatherings.
Meanwhile, while the Iranian government cracked down on foreign journalists as opposition rallies drew numbers in the millions, young and/or tech-savvy Iranians battling the Ahmadinejad regime used Twitter to get their message out to the world, and the hashtag #iranelection became the retweet heard round the world (though the noise of irrelevant “messages of support” has now made it practically useless). When journalists were banned by the government from filming outside their own studios and the state tried to shut down its own grid, citizens continued to get video online thanks to proxy addresses set up by sympathetic geeks outside the borders. The future is now?
Yesterday, London-based Doctorow announced on Boing Boing, the influential blog where he’s a contributor, that he’ll fly in to attend Griffin’s production on July 9. See it then or any other night; in the meantime, download Doctorow’s novel for free under a Creative Commons license.
The TOC Blog is for both our writers and readers to talk about what's going on in Chicago. We hope you'll take the opportunity to comment on posts here, with the following caveats:
If you have any questions about this policy, please e-mail John Dugan, our Web Editor, at jdugan@timeoutchicago.com.