The true post-cyberpunk hero is a noir forensic accountant
I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TOMORROW (Apr 17) in CHICAGO, then Torino (Apr 21) Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!
I was reared on cyberpunk fiction, I ended up spending 25 years at my EFF day-job working at the weird edge of tech and human rights, even as I wrote sf that tried to fuse my love of cyberpunk with my urgent, lifelong struggle over who computers do things for and who they do them to.
That makes me an official "post-cyberpunk" writer (TM). Don't take my word for it: I'm in the canon:
One of the editors of that "post-cyberpunk" anthology was John Kessel, who is, not coincidentally, the first writer to expose me to the power of literary criticism to change the way I felt about a novel, both as a writer and a reader:
It was Kessel's 2004 Foundation essay, "Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender's Game, Intention, and Morality," that helped me understand litcrit. Kessel expertly surfaces the subtext of Card's Ender's Game and connects it to Card's politics. In so doing, he completely reframed how I felt about a book I'd read several times and had considered a favorite:
This is a head-spinning experience for a reader, but it's even wilder to experience it as a writer. Thankfully, the majority of literary criticism about my work has been positive, but even then, discovering something that's clearly present in one of my novels, but which I didn't consciously include, is a (very pleasant!) mind-fuck.
A recent example: Blair Fix's review of my 2023 novel Red Team Blues which he calls "an anti-finance finance thriller":
Fix – a radical economist – perfectly captures the correspondence between my hero, the forensic accountant Martin Hench, and the heroes of noir detective novels. Namely, that a noir detective is a kind of unlicensed policeman, going to the places the cops can't go, asking the questions the cops can't ask, and thus solving the crimes the cops can't solve. What makes this noir is what happens next: the private dick realizes that these were places the cops didn't want to go, questions the cops didn't want to ask and crimes the cops didn't want to solve ("It's Chinatown, Jake").
Marty Hench – a forensic accountant who finds the money that has been disappeared through the cells in cleverly constructed spreadsheets – is an unlicensed tax inspector. He's finding the money the IRS can't find – only to be reminded, time and again, that this is money the IRS chooses not to find.
This is how the tax authorities work, after all. Anyone who followed the coverage of the big finance leaks knows that the most shocking revelation they contain is how stupid the ruses of the ultra-wealthy are. The IRS could prevent that tax-fraud, they just choose not to. Not for nothing, I call the Martin Hench books "Panama Papers fanfic."
I've read plenty of noir fiction and I'm a long-term finance-leaks obsessive, but until I read Fix's article, it never occurred to me that a forensic accountant was actually squarely within the noir tradition. Hench's perfect noir fit is either a happy accident or the result of a subconscious intuition that I didn't know I had until Fix put his finger on it.
The second Hench novel is The Bezzle. It's been out since February, and I'm still touring with it (Chicago tonight! Then Turin, Marin County, Winnipeg, Calgary, Vancouver, etc). It's paying off – the book's a national bestseller.
Writing in his newsletter, Henry Farrell connects Fix's observation to one of his own, about the nature of "hackers" and their role in cyberpunk (and post-cyberpunk) fiction:
Schneier, a security expert, broadens the category of "hacker" to include anyone who studies systems with an eye to finding and exploiting their defects. Under this definition, the more fearsome hackers are "working for a hedge fund, finding a loophole in financial regulations that lets her siphon extra profits out of the system." Hackers work in corporate offices, or as government lobbyists.
As Henry says, hacking isn't intrinsically countercultural ("Most of the hacking you might care about is done by boring seeming people in boring seeming clothes"). 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." 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:
https://craphound.com/nonfic/street.html
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:
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:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I44L1pzi4gk
Both Marcus and Marty are explainers, as am I. Some people say that exposition makes for bad narrative. Those people are wrong:
"Explaining" makes for great fiction. As Maria Farrell writes in her Crooked Timber 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":
https://crookedtimber.org/2024/03/06/the-bezzle/
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 Locus:
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.
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). 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."
(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:)
Henry points out that William Gibson'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:
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.
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.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
The most comprehensive and coherent book on data collection and surveillance I have stumbled upon: Data and Goliath, by security expert Bruce Schneier. Because I’ve read it in parallel with others, I cannot tell if it is this one, or another, or the whole reading process, that has put forth a really good accound of bulk collection of data, but from the very beginning, the book puts it transparently: just by carrying a phone in your pocket, you are telling phone companies where you are. This is not a bargain you signed for, but it’s how phones work. This data can (and has been used) by governments to determine where citizens are and if they had been at a certain place at a certain time (ex. Kiev 2014 protests, Michigan 2010 labor protest). Mass surveillance can single out profiles of people, censor and discriminate on any criteria: race, religion, class. Even when it is just metadata, it covers an amazing amount of information (for example, you can tell what is someone’s network of close friends and aquaintances by their phone calls, and can figure what’s going on if they call an abortion clinic). „Data is content, metadata is context”, Schneier writes to explain, and metadata is enough to say lots about anyone, and much easier to process (in 2014, former NSA director Michael Hayden said „we kill people based on metadata”). To the author, the future is one in which store clerks, your car, and even billboards, will know you and what you want. Video footage is like „herd immunity, but in reverse” – once enough people will record it, you’ll be in one. Information-age surveillance looks like a panopticon more efficient than Bentham could have ever imagined. Even anonymized collection can be easily de-anonymized if one has access to the large google search database, for example. Schneier likes to turn it around: „Imagine that the US government passed a law requiring all citizens to carry a tracking device. Such a law would be immediately found inconstitutional. Yet we carry our cell phones everywhere. If the local police department required us to notify it whenever we made a new friend, the nation would rebel. Yet we notify Facebook.”
One can’t go no-where on the internet, as long as surveillance is its business model. „Our relationship with many of the Internet companied we rely on is not a traditional company-customer relationship ... we’re products those companies sell ... the relationship is more feudal than commercial. The companies are analogous to feudal lords, and we are their vassals, peasants, and – on a bad day – serfs. We are tenant farmers for these companies, working on their land by producing data that they in turn sell for profit. ... we trust the feudal lords to treat us well and protect us from harm.” US is the internet hegemon because it has a larger intelligence budget than the rest of the world combined, because the physical wiring causes the traffic to cross its borders, and because the most popular hardware and software is subject to its laws. Corporate and government interests collide, and technology can be used both ways, as corporate tools for blocking employees from „emailing confidential data can be used by repressive governments for surveillance and censorship.... the same anti-censorship tools that Saudi and Iranian dissidents use to evade their governments can be used by criminals to distribute child porn.” If we are generating so much data and storing it indefinitely, what can we do to control what will be known and used about/against us in the future? The situation can look like Minority Report, mixed with some Orwellian fear and Kafkaeque surrealism: you won’t even know what could be held against you, and maybe you haven’t even done anything yet. According to Schneier (& research), post 9/11 surveillance has already caused self-censorship – a study conducted after the first Snowden articles found that people didn’t want to talk about NSA online, and another poll found that half of Americans have changed what they research because of surveillance. If all laws could have always been enforced through such overwhelming surveillance, then we probably would have never had black rights, women rights, gay rights. The controls we put on the governments that rule over us „need to work not only when the party we approve of leads the government but also when the party we disapprove of does”. Depending on how our data will end up being used, it could influence the way we are treated not only in employment, but also by insurance companies, by banks or by educational institutions (in 2000, Wells Fargo bank created a website to promote home mortgages, its calculator referred white residents to white neighborhoods). And of course, it can be used to manipulate public opinion, by filtering what you are shown. Unfortunately for the US, this is starting to cost it some money: people are fleeing US cloud providers, not buying US equipment and not trusting its companies.
Schneier makes another, very important, argument: data mining doesn’t work for finding terrorists, although it is collected with this excuse. For advertising, it can be successful even with a large error rate, so it works best when „you’re searching for a well-defined profile, when there are a reasonable number of events per year and when the cost of false alarms is low”. When billions are wasted on masss surveillance programs, they are not being invested in investigation and emergency response, „tactics that have been proven to work”. Although attackers have the upper hand, as it is easier to find a vulnerability than it is to patch up all of them, „widespread encryption has the potential to render mass surveillance ineffective and to force eavesdroppers to choose their targets”. This would finally be a step towards security, as having systems with backdoors for governments to get in certainly isn’t safe, despite the NOBUS promise („nobody but us”, a NSA saying for zero-day vulnerabilities that no one else could find or use, of which the US is stockpiling in the hundreds, probably).
Not all is lost, and Schneier urges us to not be fatalists. He writes that „the general principle here is that systems should be designed with the minimum surveillance necessary for them to function, and where surveillance is required they should gather the minimum necessary amount of information and retain it for the shortest time possible”. Secondly, we need transparency in the algorithms that judge us on the basis of our data, from search engines to credit score systems. Ceding power to others is essential for societies to fuction, and for democratic societies, we need „transparency, oversight and accountability”. The first question is – are the rules imposed the correct ones?, and the second – are they being followed? Third, we need laws to protect whitsleblowers (law professor David Ponzen contends that „democracies need to be leaky”, and etnographer danah boyd calls whistleblowing „the civil disobedience of the information age”) - they provide an extra oversight mechanism. Fourth, we need international agreements that „would recognize a country’s duties don’t entirely stop at its borders”, and protecting foreigner’s privacy is just as important. Fifth, Schneier proposes NSA’s espionage mission to be separated from its surveillance mission – NSA should deal with foreign millitary targets, while the Department of Justice should do targeted and legally permissible surveillance activities. Sixth, we need open spaces on the internet that are not government or corporate controlled, „common-carrier social networking areas that the owners are not allowed to monitor or censor”. Seventh, data controllers should be held accountable, as right now the cost of privacy breaches falls on the people (an idea from law professor Michael Froomkin is requiring agencies to file Privacy Impact Notices, similar to Environmental Impact Reports). Because Schneier writes extensive suggestions for companies, governments and citizens, I might have missed some, however, he leaves us with an important question: „how do we design systems that make use of our data collectively to benefit society as a while, while at the same time protecting people individually?”.
ps. I’ve also started reading Ferrante’s third book in the Napoletan Novels series, “Those who leave and those who stay”, and I’m checking from time to time “The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us” by Christophe Bonneuil.
Defense Against the Dark Arts: Networked Propaganda and Counter Propaganda
I came across This Very Interesting Article on modern propaganda tactics by Johnathan Stray, a journalist and data scholar, and figured I’d pass it on.
And while I’m at it, I figure I’ll also share one of my favorite Security blogs, Schneier on Security.
It’s easy to draw the wrong conclusions from a selective slice of a society’s communications. Medieval Norse sagas made us imagine a culture of mostly Viking warriors, since poets rarely described the farming majority. Chivalric romances focused on kings and courts, and long made us see the middle ages as a world of monarchies, erasing the many medieval republics. Statistically, we’ve been led to believe ancient Romans cared deeply about their republic, but 10% of all surviving Latin was written by one man, Cicero, whose work contains 70% of all surviving Roman uses of the word republic. Training language models on only certain human writings may introduce similar distortions. AI might make us seem more quarrelsome, as we are online. It might inflate the cultural significance of political topics primarily discussed on Twitter/X or Bluesky, or the massive topic-specific corpuses of LinkedIn and Goodreads.
[...]
We don’t pretend to know what the best solutions might be. But one has to imagine if there’s ingenuity to develop AI models, then surely there’s ingenuity to come up with a way to train them on informal human speech instead of us only at our most stylized, veiled and sometimes worst. By excluding the overwhelming majority of language production on the planet – people talking, fully and naturally, to each other – these models are being trained to mirror everything but us at our most authentically human.
- Ada Palmer and Bruce Schneier, "AI learns language from skewed sources. That could change how we humans speak – and think"
The Illusion of Privacy: From Snowden to Pegasus, Why the Lock Icon Isn’t Enough
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September 12, 2025
“From Snowden to Pegasus: The illusion of privacy exposed. Encryption promises protection, yet surveillance persists through metadata, device compromise, and state spyware. Credits; Image created by: DALL·E (OpenAI), under the editorial directive of Akashma News.Edited by: Akashma News (watermark, text overlay).Usage rights: Free to use,…
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AI convenience is real, but only human spirit, creativity, and vigilance can reveal the three layers of illusion behind the lock of false privacy. Credits/Attribution: Note on DALL·E in attribution:“DALL·E” is OpenAI’s image generation system. It doesn’t create independently but generates outputs based on human-given directives. Attribution…
