Hopeful Prospects: A Review of Cory Doctorow's The Lost Cause

Cory Doctorow has been an incredibly generous interlocutor and influence on my work, especially since I read Makers, which should be a required text for all museum practitioners. His non-fiction is also indispensable for creators in the digital age, particularly Information Doesn't Want To Be Free, Chokepoint Capitalism with Rebecca Giblin, and The Internet Con.

I'm also an avid reader of Cory's book reviews, which are published in his Pluralistic blog and beyond, and are as good as the excellent books he unerringly recommends. I once remarked that about the best thing that can happen to an author is to have their book reviewed by Cory Doctorow!

Cory deserves equally engaging reviews of his own books and I am not up to that task, but I do want to make a recommendation: as a companion to The Lost Cause, read (or listen to) his short story, “Model Minority,” in the book, Radicalized. While Lost Cause is set in a hopeful future, in “Model Minority,” superheroes are active participants in contemporary law enforcement. The figure of the “American Eagle” is not just a thinly veiled Superman, but a personification of the hubris of “the great white hope.” As a white, lefty, would-be activist, I took its cautionary tale very personally.

With this in mind, I looked forward to reading The Lost Cause with great anticipation. I come from the southern U.S., so the title of the book alone unleashed for me an El Niño of familiarity and revulsion. I was also eager to enter a world that confronts our climate realities with hope (as opposed to optimism), and was hope-ful that I'd emerge from his narrative a bit less angst-ridden than I usually am when reading Cory’s work.

Not to compare myself with Cory Doctorow as a writer, The Lost Cause reminded me how hard it is to create convincing utopias or even just write happy endings. That oversimplifies the plot because lots of bad shit goes down in the story, but sadly I remain skeptical that the 'first generation in a century to grow up not fearing for its future' could arise from the toxic soup of MAGA and climate change. It's lazy to be cynical, however, and much more important to imagine a better future.

The lead character in the novel posed a bigger challenge to my suspension of disbelief. Cory’s protagonists always make me feel inadequate (especially the heroines, because, endearingly, Cory lionizes - if you will - women), but Brooks Palazzo was so earnest and naive as to render me supercilious. He was that person you feel you should like but just can’t stand being around through no fault of their own, so you end up resenting them for your self-loathing as well as your unwarranted animus. A relatable foil and vehicle for that pessimism would have been a welcome addition to the book’s cast of characters. I also wish that the figure of Gramps could have been more lovable without diminishing the odiousness of his politics. That would have helped readers like me identify with Brooks’ simultaneous love and rejection of his grandfather as more complex and nuanced, and made that tension a helpful mirror in which to reflect on how we navigate our own family relationships and can learn good things from bad examples. Brooks’ sparring with bitcoin advocate Ana Lucia comes close to modeling this tension, albeit on a purely intellectual level, and opens up a question that I look forward to exploring more in Cory’s work: can a person be sincere in their good intentions, but also a monster?

All that said, The Lost Cause is still classic Cory Doctorow. You learn about a myriad of new technologies that really could make life better, like compostable political banners, and activist aphorisms, e.g. there is no law that can be enforced if enough people disagree with it. Most helpfully for me, he provides the best insight I’ve come across as to why the same voters could vote for Obama in one election and for Trump the next: they agree that the system is rigged, but differ on how to fix it. As Brooks reflects on the Magas, “They weren’t wrong because they were cruel. They were cruel because they were wrong.”

In short, you should read this book. It’s not my favorite Cory Doctorow, but it’s a salutary story for our times and offers, if not a radical optimism, perhaps an alternative geography of hope.

Image: Cory Doctorow at Gibson's Books with The Lost Cause 1, Concord, New Hampshire, USA, from Cory Doctorow's Flickr stream (CC BY-SA 2.0)