by Kerry Howley

Format: ebook

Primary Doorways: Character, Plot

Genre: Cultural Commentary Non-Fiction

Read for: A quick tour of the surveillance state and its impacts

Kerry Howley’s non-fiction book Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs runs through a quick tour of several of the most infamous whistle-blowers and deep state critics of recent years. The book hits its stride when Howley begins to document the events leading up to Reality Winner’s leak and the aftermath of it.

Howley’s strongest thesis regards the timelessness of the internet — you write content in one context and publish it for a certain set of people, but it gets sucked up into vast data sets. You have no control who will read it in the future and in what context. The trial of Reality Winner —-where direct messages between Reality and her sister are dissected on the stand in the context of an espionage trial — is strong evidence backing Howley’s point.

I only wish the book had been slimmer or organized differently. I spent a good chunk of it wondering why are we talking about this guy???