Day 6: That Just Happened
So, yeah. At the start of every chapter, Doctorow inserts a paragraph plugging a different bookstore. In Chapter 1, it was some sci-fi store in Toronto; here, it's fucking Amazon.
This is the man who is concerned about "freedom of information". This is the great champion of privacy and individual rights on the Internet and free expression and several other buzzwords. He writes a story about a courageous teen fighting a violent, hegemonic order of knowledge and power. And in doing so, he freely and willingly puts advertisements within the text of the novel.
How oblivious can a person get?
I mean, even the pissweak left-liberal critic should be keenly aware of the nefarious influence of dominant booksellers, like Amazon or Barnes & Noble, working hand in glove with large publishing houses, on the free dissemination and exchange of ideas. One doesn't need to be some kind of Marxist to have an understanding of how both readers and authors will find their ideas and expectations shaped by perceived notions of "marketability", "popularity" or "reasonableness", which do not emerge spontaneously, but depend on the profit motive of whoever has a controlling stake in the literary markets.
(If you just happened to be a Marxist, you could take this argument in an even more interesting direction, by noting how Doctorow's endorsement of "free speech", when not paired with an understanding of the political and economic conditions of "speech", is historically in line with the liberal tradition, through which the defense of individual negative rights has, in practice, frequently led to an obliteration of these same rights for enormous groups of people, except in the form of highly ritualized and normalized "freedom performances", like voting. If you were the annoying, pontificating sort of Marxist, you could also point out that, under capitalism, this progression is as paradoxical as it is necessary.
Basically, if you were a Marxist, you would probably be great fun at parties and not at all annoying.)
But nevermind all that. Back to the thrilling story: Marcus and Darryl need to dispose of a library book with a RFID chip (as lovingly explained in another two bloated paragraphs), in case the school tracks them down. Turns out you can just microwave the chip, so they sneak into the teachers' lounge. Darryl, of course, is the guy who's freaking out about getting caught and expelled doing all this shady stuff -- in other words, a regular person. The super-spy Marcus Yarrow, however, gives no shits.
They manage to fry the chip, but as they try to leave the lounge, they spot an adversary in the hallway!
Charles Walker and I don't get along. We're in the same grade, and we've known each other as long as I've known Darryl, but that's where the resemblance ends. Charles has always been big for his age, and now that he's playing football and on the juice, he's even bigger. He's got anger management problems I -- lost a milk-tooth to him in the third grade -- and he's managed to keep from getting in trouble over them by becoming the most active snitch in school.
Remember, kids: physical activity makes you dull-witted and erodes your morals. Unless it's pretending to be an elf hunting goblins in the woods.
My actual complaint is that this whole Nerds vs. Jocks thing has been tremendously lazy so far. I'm not expecting a revolutionary deconstruction of the Nerd-Jock binary, but if this is the US, you could at least show (not tell) how school funding is disproportionately allocated to sports teams and competitions instead of other desperately needed resources, like, say, books. This leads to the formation of bizarre sports aristocracies among the students and teachers, while the needs of everyone else are neglected.
Darryl is freaking out again, but the international teen super hacker "Winston" (I refuse to type that out in leetspeak) gives a grand total of zero shits, because check out how awesome he is:
A few seconds later, Charles's phone spazzed out spectacularly. I'd had tens of thousands of simultaneous random calls and text messages sent to it, causing every chirp and ring it had to go off and keep on going off. The attack was accomplished by means of a botnet, and for that I felt bad, but it was in the service of a good cause.
And then we get another three-paragraph lecture about what a botnet is. God bless you, Cory Fucking Doctorow.