Hacking reinforces - rather than undermining power asymmetries ("The rich have far more resources to figure out how to gimmick the rules"). We are mostly not the hackers - we are the *hacked.*

For Henry, Marty Hench is a hacker (the rare hacker that works for the good guys), even though "he doesn’t wear mirrorshades or get wasted chatting to bartenders with Soviet military-surplus mechanical arms."

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He's a gun for hire, that most traditional of cyberpunk heroes, and while he doesn't stand against the system, he's not for it, either.

Henry's pinning down something I've been circling around for nearly 30 years: the idea that though "the street finds its own use for things," Wall Street and Madison Avenue are among the streets that might find those uses:

craphound.com/nonfic/street.ht…

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Henry also connects Martin Hench to Marcus Yallow, the hero of my YA *Little Brother* series. I have tried to make this connection myself, opining that while Marcus is a character who is fighting to save an internet that he loves, Marty is living in the ashes of the internet he lost:

pluralistic.net/2023/05/07/don…

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But Henry's Marty-as-hacker notion surfaces a far more interesting connection between the two characters. Marcus is a vehicle for conveying the excitement and power of hacking to young readers, while Marty is a vessel for older readers who know the stark terror of *being hacked*, by the sadistic wolves who're coming for all of us:

youtube.com/watch?v=I44L1pzi4g…

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Wolves - Katrina for U.S. Senate

View the launch video for Katrina's campaign for U.S. Senate in North Dakota in 2024, "Wolves"

^YouTube

Both Marcus and Marty are explainers, as am I. Some people say that exposition makes for bad narrative. Those people are wrong:

maryrobinettekowal.com/journal…

"Explaining" makes for *great* fiction. As @mariafarrell writes in her @crookedtimber.org review of *The Bezzle*, the secret sauce of some of the best novels is "information about how things work. Things like locks, rifles, security systems":

crookedtimber.org/2024/03/06/t…

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My Favorite Bit: Cory Doctorow talks about THE BEZZLE

Cory Doctorow is joining us today to talk about his novel, The Bezzle. Here’s the publisher’s description: New York Times bestseller Cory Doctorow’s The Bezzle is a high stakes…

^{Mary Robinette Kowal}

Where these things are integrated into the story's "reason and urgency," they become "specialist knowledge [that] cuts new paths to move through the world." Hacking, in other words.

This is a theme Paul Di Filippo picked up on in his review of *The Bezzle* for @Locusmag:

locusmag.com/2024/04/paul-di-f…

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Paul Di Filippo Reviews The Bezzle by Cory Doctorow

The Bezzle, Cory Doctorow (Tor 978-1250865878, $27.99, hc, 240pp) February 2024. Cory Doctorow is certainly experiencing a “hot hand” run. That sports phenomenon, where one success impels and invit…

^{Locus Online}

> Heinlein was always known—and always came across in his writings—as The Man Who Knew How the World Worked. Doctorow delivers the same sense of putting yourself in the hands of a fellow who has peered behind Oz’s curtain. When he fills you in lucidly about some arcane bit of economics or computer tech or social media scam, you feel, first, that you understand it completely and, second, that you can trust Doctorow’s analysis and insights.

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Knowledge is power, and so expository fiction that delivers news you can use is novel that makes you more powerful - powerful enough to resist the hackers who want to hack *you*.

Henry and I were both friends of Aaron Swartz, and the *Little Brother* books are closely connected to Aaron, who helped me with *Homeland*, the second volume, and wrote a great afterword for it (Schneier wrote an afterword for the first book).

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That book - and Aaron's afterword - has radicalized a gratifying number of principled technologists. I know, because I meet them when I tour, and because they send me emails. I like to think that these hackers are part of Aaron's legacy.

Henry argues that the Hench books are "purpose-designed to inspire a thousand Max Schrems - people who are probably past their teenage years, have some grounding in the relevant professions, and really want to see things change."

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(Schrems is the Austrian privacy activist who, as a law student, set in motion the events that led to the passage of the EU's General Data Privacy Regulation:)

pluralistic.net/2020/05/15/out…

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Henry points out that @GreatDismal's *Neuromancer* doesn't mention the word "internet" - rather, Gibson coined the term *cyberspace*, which, as Henry says, is "more ‘capitalism’ than ‘computerized information'... If you really want to penetrate the system, you need to really grasp what money is and what it does."

Maria also wrote one of my all-time favorite reviews of *Red Team Blues*, also for Crooked Timber:

crookedtimber.org/2023/05/11/w…

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When crypto meant cryptography

I recently caught up with an activist friend I’ve known for twenty-five years. We got into this stuff at the tail end of what were then called the crypto wars, a set of legal and policy battles to …

^{Crooked Timber}

In it, she compares Hench to Dickens' *Bleak House*, but for the modern tech world:

> You put the book down feeling it’s not just a fascinating, enjoyable novel, but a document of how Silicon Valley’s very own 1% live and a teeming, energy-emitting snapshot of a critical moment on Earth.

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All my life, I've written to find out what's going on in my own head. It's a remarkably effective technique. But it's only recently that I've come to appreciate that reading what *other people* write about my writing can reveal things that I can't see.

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I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel *The Bezzle*! Catch me TONIGHT (Apr 17) in CHICAGO, then Torino (Apr 21), Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

pluralistic.net/2024/02/16/nar…

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