BookBITS: “Red Team Blues” by Cory Doctorow

Book reviews are unusual for TidBITS, and I don’t intend to share my Libby activity with you regularly. But Cory Doctorow’s novel Red Team Blues merits mention. In part, that’s because the fictional world it depicts could be pulled from Silicon Valley headlines and backchannel forums of today. But I also found it intriguing based on some things that Cory has written about the role of fiction in the modern world.

I’m not close friends with Cory, and we’ve met in person only a handful of times. Nor have we exchanged significant amounts of email or interacted much in online communities. But we have orbited similar spaces in the Internet world for decades, him with Boing Boing, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and his books, and me with TidBITS, Info-Mac, the Internet Starter Kit, and Take Control. He’s one of those people who has long been a fixture of my Internet firmament, even if that means exchanging email only every 5 or 10 years.

Our last exchange came in 2020 after I read a piece he’d written for Slate titled “The Dangers of Cynical Sci-Fi Disaster Stories.” I was drawn in by the subtitle: “I’m changing how I write fiction—for the benefit of the real world.” I’m suspicious that our shared fictions subtly affect our responses to real-world problems, and that was the focus of Cory’s piece.

Made-up stories, even stories of impossible things, are ways for us to mentally rehearse our responses to different social outcomes. Philosopher Daniel Dennett’s conception of an intuition pump—“a thought experiment structured to allow the thinker to use their intuition to develop an answer to a problem”—suggests that fiction (which is, after all, an elaborate thought experiment) isn’t merely entertainment.

In response to that, I emailed Cory, writing:

I’ve long been uncomfortable with a great deal of mainstream entertainment, whether we’re talking about science fiction books, movies, TV shows, or video games. It’s easy to brush aside concerns by saying that people can tell the difference between fact and fiction, but I think our fiction has gotten so good and so compelling—and in the case of visual genres, so realistic—that at some low level, we really are having trouble separating what’s real from what’s imagined. The intuition pump is a nice way to encapsulate that. The stories may be compelling, but they seldom resonate with how I see real people acting in everyday life or address the messiness of the real-world issues we have to deal with.

His reply drew a fine-line distinction between how we act and how we expect others to act. We know we’re good people because we’re in our own heads. But we’re not in other people’s heads, so their actions are often mysterious, allowing the fiction we consume a stronger vote in how we imagine others might behave. He said:

I think there’s a subtle, crucial difference between the idea that fiction inspires us to violence and the idea that it makes us anticipate violence on the part of others.

In the Slate piece, he explains that he realized this after moving to California from firearm-free London, where he lived after growing up in Toronto. Initially, he was shocked by the prevalence of gun stores—did all his neighbors really possess lethal weapons? The gun stores faded into the background until the pandemic hit and people lined up around the block to buy handguns. Why? To protect themselves once civilization broke down. He writes in the article:

I think that our pulp fiction has done us a disservice, creating a commonsense assumption that we are one power failure away from Mad Max: Fury Road. The reality is ever so much messier, full of people trying to do the right thing—which still causes high-stakes, serious conflicts, but they’re conflicts of good faith and sincere disagreement.

The conflicts in Red Team Blues aren’t so much good faith and sincere disagreement, but each of the main parties acts rationally within its worldview, lending a frustrating sense of “Well, of course they’re going to do that” to the plot while leaving our hero to navigate the rocky rapids of a situation beyond his direct control.

Red Team Blues is the present-day story of Martin Hench, a 67-year-old “digital forensic accountant” who specializes in recovering money squirreled away by modern-day thieves in cryptocurrencies, holding companies, and offshore accounts. He’s called in by Danny Lazer, a long-time friend who spent decades writing cryptographic code and battling with the NSA before hitting it big with a company that sold crypto libraries and workflows to the tech world. Lazer has leveraged his fortune to create Trustlesscoin, a new cryptocurrency that avoids the environmentally damaging proof-of-work approach by—with some poetic license—running code on the secure enclaves embedded in iPhones and other smartphones.

To have the option of rolling back an early mistake, something that’s generally impossible with a blockchain, Lazer has illicitly acquired the signing keys for the secure enclaves. The laptop containing those keys was stolen and Lazer’s hardware key was pickpocketed, meaning that the keys used by Apple, Samsung, and other manufacturers are in the wind, and the billion dollars in Trustlesscoin is at risk. Given that Hench’s fee is a flat 25% of the value of the recovered assets, $250 million is impossible to turn down.

Getting the MacGuffin laptop back is the first order of business, but Hench’s success there lands him in a war between a Mexican drug cartel and a powerful Azerbaijani family bent on revenge for the killing of a member who participated in the laptop theft. An ethically dubious Department of Homeland Security seems happy to let it all continue in the name of the status quo. Leads crop up, friends weave in and out of the plot, and Hench motors around northern California in the Unsalted Hash, a very slightly used forty-foot touring bus acquired in lieu of payment from a rock star whose manager absconded with $2 million. At 67, Hench avoids physical confrontation but isn’t above going to ground—literally—in a homeless camp when he needs to lie low for a few days.

I haven’t spent much time in San Francisco since Macworld Expo ended in 2014, but the Bay Area of Red Team Blues feels real, and I can’t help but wonder if Cory had first-person sources for his gut-wrenching depictions of homelessness. What felt the most real, however, were the characters. Not the specific people in the book, but the old tech world types. The aging crypto hacker, the data center security guy, the early-days secretary who works her way up through customer service and documentation to retire as a VP. (Whose finances Hench rescues from a grifter ex-husband, triggering a romance subplot.) I don’t know these people, but I know people like them, and Cory’s characters rang true. They’re part of that tech world orbit I was talking about, the outer rings of which contain those of us who connected via UUCP, harangued against DRM and shrink-wrap licenses, tilted at the windmill of digital identity, and worried that AOL would be the end of the Internet. Our lives aren’t as interesting as Martin Hench’s or his friends, but that’s merely because we don’t have Cory Doctorow scripting them. And the world of Red Team Blues may be more exciting than ours, but its solutions still prime your intuition pump with well-intentioned people trying to do the right thing rather than copping out with a hail of bullets.

If you have memories of that 1990s tech universe, you’ll enjoy Red Team Blues. Like all of Cory’s books, you can buy it direct as a DRM-free EPUB or MobiPocket. It’s $15, or $20 for an audiobook version read by (of course) Wil Wheaton, or a bit more if you want a dead-tree hardcover copy.

Oh, and the title? In the security world, red teams play offense—they attack systems and look for holes that will grant them entry. Blue teams are defensive; they design and maintain internal defenses and react to red team attacks. As Martin Hench—a lifelong red team guy—says, when you’re on the blue team, you have to be perfect, whereas the red team merely has to find a single mistake. Once you’ve finished the book, you may gain a better appreciation for what it’s like for companies like Apple that are stuck playing on the blue team.