Attack Surface

Do I have anything intelligent to say about zero days or self-driving cars? Cory Doctorow does, and after reading his book Attack Surface, I feel more confident in speaking about the social implications of these technologies. When speaking about technical aspects of hacking and coding there's always someone better than we are: hacking is in this way a lot like running.  None of us are Eliud Kipchoge.  But what we often do is overestimate how technical we are, and Attack Surface abounds with self-deluded hackers who think they are more technical or are better hackers than they actually are. Your code must be perfect.  Otherwise you are open to attack.  This is the principal driver of the idea of 'zero days' which are exploitable bugs that the programmers don't yet know about, and that allow a hacker into the program, within which it can be hijacked.  

Such a scenario plays out around the hijacking of self-driving cars which through such hacking activities become driven by interests of police control in a non-democratic state.  The targets of the now non-self-driven cars are protestors, and a scenario come in which this kind of activity is translated into Oakland, and protesting around the acquisition and use of surveillance software by its police force.  Cars are literally being driven into the protest groups.  

The main character, Masha, is the best, and she is perfect.  But she is playing both sides, initially because she can: her ability to generate revenue for herself is a product of her truly superlative knowledge of programming and the systems in which various surveillance and control tools are embedded.  But Masha's friends happen to be very savvy professional protesters with legitimate grounds for grievance.  The evolution of Masha revolves around how the weight of her loyalty shifts, over 500 pages of breathless narrative, from the power/control group to the radical democratic one.  

A fictional country, Slovstakia, offers a kind of foil, a usefully corrupt and easy-to-loathe totalitarian state for whom Masha initially works.  But through the evolution of her story, we come to see that the totalitarianism is being adopted closer to home, that the dodgy banana republic has become the model for the so-called developed territory. In fact map and territory are flipping as one becomes the other, as all subject positions come to be suspect, as Slovstakian activists become themselves totalitarian control freaks; and power/control hackers in 'democratic' states are bled into the radically-distributed ideologies of the do-good left.  

That I could be convinced of the validity of becoming a professional protester, of going on your gut, and protesting 'just because' it 'feels right' is a change that I did not foresee in myself.  Doctorow convinces me, and he has also made me just that little bit more technically intelligent, and less self-deluded about my own level of technicality.  Unless you're Masha, who is literally a fictional construct, an unobtainable essence, then forget about competing at this level.  Go out, instead, and protest the all-pervasive power of the police state; the permeation of AI into everyday lives; the indiscriminate use of databases; the squashing of the immanence of collective power of the crowd, of labour, and mutual aid.  Read this book 'just because' it's great!