the Onda

My brother was recently telling me about grounding my thirteen year-old nephew for 3 weeks. He lost his ability to invite friends over, watch TV, play Xbox, and even putter around on his laptop. Despite this, the kid remained surprisingly smug about his prospects for the next 3 weeks bored. Apparently his dad forgot to take all of his screens away— and with his iPod touch still in hand, he felt that he had beaten the rap's worst consequence: being disconnected.

Having just finished reading Cory Doctorow's wonderfully entertaining tale of teenage Geek culture in his polemic against the Patriot Act and all of our loss of privacy in recent years, I was again reminded of how fast kids can take ownership of new technologies in ways that leaves the grownups scratching their heads and... just generally feeling old.

Doctorow's novel, "Little Brother," has a really rich description of this world being conquered by teenage geeks, one that struck me as both incredibly realistic, and quite telling of how the first post-PC, post-Internet generation expects to be able to own their electronic fates— from media to communications to the interaction between the virtual and the physical worlds, the narrative serves as much better guidepost for what is coming than all of the artificial "teenage panels" that seem to come at the end of every tech conference these days ("what will you kids pay for?" is always my favorite dumb question at these), or even the ethnographic academic studies that always seem to conclude that kids really like to "socialize."

In the book, three teenagers wage war on an out-of-control Homeland Security by employing crypto, open source, hardware hacking, and social engineering, all without seeming like the contrived movie characters who are always a little too glib, a little too knowledgeable. In fact reading the book on the 25th anniversary of War Games is fitting, for not since Broderick's everday geek have I seen such believable kid-hacker characters, and enjoyed so thoroughly the honest portrayal of self-discovery and confidence building that comes from twisting technology to tweak the system.

Update: The real world imitates art with kids hacking the MBTA, "arphids" and all...

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