Well this is pretty terrific: @PavelAnni was so taken with my 2020 novel ATTACK SURFACE (the third Little Brother novel) that he's created "Mashapedia," a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the real world technologies in the tale.

https://t.co/Z2aLwF1Ez3

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Pavel is both comprehensive and comprehensible, with short definitions and links for the mundane (MIT Media Lab, EL wire, PGP) to the exotic (binary transparency, reverse shells, adversarial preturbation).

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When I was an adolescent, my friend group traded secret knowledge as a kind of social currency - tricks for getting free payphone calls, or doubling the capacity of a floppy disc, or calling the White House switchboard.

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I doted on books that promised more of the same: Paladin Press and Amok Catalog titles, Steal This Book, the Anarchist Cookbook, the Whole Earth Review and the Whole Earth Catalog.

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But when I sat down in 2006 to write the first Little Brother book, I realized that facts were now cheap - anything could be discovered with a single search. The thing in short supply now was search terms - knowing what to search FOR.

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As John Ciardi wrote,

The old crow is getting slow;
the young crow is not.
Of what the young crow does not know,
the old crow knows a lot.

The young crow flies above, below,
and rings around the slow old crow.
What does the fast young crow not know?
WHERE TO GO.

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So I set out to write a book of realistic scenarios, dramatizing what tech COULD do, on the assumption that readers would glean those all-important search-terms from the tale, and that this could launch them on a voyage of discovery.

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That's the ethic I've stuck with through all three novels and the short stories in the series. It seems to have worked. Anni's Mashapedia is the apotheosis of that plan: a comprehensive set of search terms masquerading as a glossary.

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Anni's hosted Mashapedia on Github, and you can amend, extend or contest his definitions by opening an issue in the repo. What a delight!

eof/

More from Cory Doctorow #BLM

Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Criti-Hype; Right to Repair is back for 2021; The free market and rent-seeking; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/pXnzoWKJn2

#Pluralistic

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Criti-Hype: Tech bros will settle for "evil genius."

https://t.co/OyiM1vUS8Y

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Right to Repair is back for 2021: Will Apple sabotage this one too?

https://t.co/3gcyEZQWfk

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The free market and rent-seeking: Unauthorized bread and poor doors.

https://t.co/7Ob6AdmkDz

4/


#10yrsago Diane Duane’s crowdfunded publishing experiment finally concludes https://t.co/qsRnZxiL8b

#10yrsago Inside Sukey, the anti-kettling mobile app https://t.co/puGNKw5XgF

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More from Culture

A thread of very good, wonderful, truly Super Bowls.

Translucent agate bowl with ornamental grooves and coffee-and-cream marbling. Found near Qift in southern Egypt. 300 - 1,000 BC. 📷 Getty Museum https://t.co/W1HfQZIG2V


Technicolor dreambowl, found in a grave near Zadar on Croatia's Dalmatian Coast. Made by melding and winding thin bars of glass, each adulterated with different minerals to get different colors. 1st century AD. 📷 Zadar Museum of Ancient Glass
https://t.co/H9VfNrXKQK


100,000-year-old abalone shells used to mix red ocher, marrow, charcoal, and water into a colorful paste. Possibly the oldest artist's palettes ever discovered. Blombos Cave, South Africa. 📷https://t.co/0fMeYlOsXG


Reed basket bowl with shell and feather ornaments. Possibly from the Southern Pomo or Lake Miwok cultures. Found in Santa Barbara, CA, circa 1770. 📷 British Museum https://t.co/F4Ix0mXAu6


Wooden bowl with concentric circles and rounded rim, most likely made of umbrella thorn acacia (Vachellia/Acacia tortilis). Qumran. 1st Century BCE. 📷 https://t.co/XZCw67Ho03

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