News of secret courts being introduced in the world's oldest democracy should scare any rational human. The right to a public trial has survived feudalism, Henry VIII and the industrial revolution, but couldn't stand up to the forces of global capitalism. Secret courts could be an idea from Alan Moore's polemic on Thatcher's Britain, V for Vendetta (today enjoying a second life inspiring Occupy protestors and the Anonymous hacker group) or from Homeland, the latest novel from science-fiction author Cory Doctorow.

Doctorow's 2007 young adult novel Little Brother introduced teenage readers to the writer's outspoken ideas on technology and personal freedom. The novel's title is of course a play on Big Brother, from the granddaddy of all dystopian SF, George Orwell's 1984. Orwell's devastating vision of totalitarian state rule remains chilling, but it has dated with the advance of technology. Orwell was writing at a time when governments, whether the totalitarian dictatorships of Russia and China, or the democracies of western Europe and America, ruled with near absolute power. Today national governments seem increasingly impotent in the face of global economic forces and technological change they cannot begin to keep pace with.

Homeland sees protagonist Marcus Yallow older and somewhat wiser, but once again dragged in to a conflict with the same shadowy powers within the Department of Homeland Security responsible for torturing him in Little Brother. Doctorow, perhaps because of his background in adult SF writing and his long history of political activism, is unflinching both in his portrayal of torture, and in his radical scepticism of state and corporate power. Homeland, like Little Brother before it, aims to give teenagers a manual of techniques for resisting corruption and oppression, wherever it happens to arise. It's a sign of the pressures inherent in our post-9/11 society that we feel need to educate young citizens in how to resist the authority of both their government and of big business.

Today we perhaps have less to fear from the iron fist of Big Brother (although force is never far out of the picture) than from the insidious manipulation of big data. Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier's new book (Big Data: A Revolution) cracks open one of the most revolutionary aspects of modern technology – the huge amount of data on our behaviour it gives us access to. Technology that we take for granted, from smartphones to social networks, harvest a vast array of data on the minutiae of our lives. What we buy. Where we go. Who we talk to. What we believe. Why we believe it. And the bulk of this data is delivered, unquestioningly, in to the hands of a just a few technology providers – Google and Facebook being the market leaders.

Big data has many positive applications, but the potential for oppressive uses is undeniable. Whether it's manufacturing consent for an election campaign to deliver the right candidate, or developing consumer products so perfectly targeted to our psychological weaknesses that we can barely resist buying them, the data is now there to facilitate unparalleled levels of control over the public. And it's for sale, an explicit and ever more profitable part of the business of modern technology companies.

As technology becomes an ever bigger factor in day-to-day life, we need writers like Doctorow to help us direct it to support freedom over oppression. In his other writing, including Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Makers, Doctorow has explored the more optimistic futures that technology might shape. I took some inspiration from Doctorow's work recently in thinking through the potential of an emerging creator culture, one where the great potential of technology is harnessed not to manipulate people for greater profit, but to liberate their natural creativity. It's my gut instinct that our future, much like our today, will be a stark mixture of both Big Brother and creator culture, with all the possibilities in between also represented. But what do you think? Where is the technology of today leading us tomorrow?