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October 7 - December 17, 2019
This isn’t the kind of fight we win, it’s the kind of fight we fight.
The way Salima found out that Boulangism had gone bankrupt: her toaster wouldn’t accept her bread.
that class of nefarious fraudsters who bought a discounted Boulangism toaster and then tried to renege on her end of the bargain by inserting unauthorized bread, which had consequences ranging from kitchen fires to suboptimal toast (Boulangism was able to adjust its toasting routine in realtime to adjust for relative kitchen humidity and the age of the bread, and of course it would refuse to toast bread that had become unsalvageably stale), to say nothing of the loss of profits for the company and its shareholders. Without those profits, there’d be no surplus capital to divert to R&D, creating
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Salima knew these arguments, even before her stupid toaster played her the video explaining them, which it did after three unsuccessful bread-authorization attempts, playing without a pause or mute button as a combination of punishment and reeducation campaign.
This was a new kind of toaster, a toaster that took orders, rather than giving them.
Salima had got good at being bored over her five years in the camp, mastering a kind of waking doze where her mind simply went away, time scurrying past like roaches clinging to the baseboard, barely visible in the corner of her eye.
“The elevators work. They just give priority to the market-rent side. You’ll get an elevator when none of these folks need one.”
even the pettiest amenity would be spitefully denied to the subsidy apartments unless the landlord was forced by law to provide it.
But there was another world, vast beyond her knowing, of people who didn’t know her at all, but who held her life in their hands. The ones who thronged in demonstrations against refugees. The politicians who raged about the scourge of terrorists hidden among refugees, and the ones who talked in code about “assimilation” and “too much, too fast.” The soldiers and cops and guards who pointed guns at her, barked orders at her. The bureaucrats she never saw who rejected her paperwork for cryptic reasons she could only guess at, and the bureaucrats who looked her in the eye and rejected her
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Now there was a new group in that latter class, distant as the causes of the weather: the building management company and its laser printer, blasting out eviction threats to people whose names they didn’t know and whose faces they’d never seen over transgressions so petty and rules so demeaning.
This was the antidote, she realized, to the feeling of distant people whom she’d never meet who held the power of everything over her. To be able to control the computers around her, rather than being controlled by them.
“You see, if someone wants to control you with a computer, they have to put the computer where you are, and they are not, and so you can access that computer without supervision. A computer you can access without supervision is a computer you can change, because all these computers are the same, deep down. When you get down to the programs underneath the skin, a toaster and a dishwasher and a thermostat, they’re all the same computer in different cases. Once you can seize control over that computer, all of them are yours.”
Unspoken: no one good at their job, who cared about anything, was involved in the poor-floors of Dorchester Towers.
“Oh yes, my boy. We’re not going to stop breaking the rules. We’re just going to be smart about it.”
Did they see them as just weirdly nonfunctional gadgets they had to work around, like the bad touchscreens at the shelter? Or did they see them as the enemy, something that they were at war with, the weapons of a distant adversary who wanted to subjugate them to its will?
They were bright kids, she thought, kids who’d spent their whole lives outsmarting gadgets that were designed to control them.
When I bring a notepad to school, I can write anything I want on it. I don’t need to ask the company that made the pen or the store that sold me the notebook how I can use it. I can tear out the pages and make paper airplanes, or doodle, or copy down what the teacher says. When I put on a pair of shoes, I can wear any socks I want. I can walk anywhere I want to go on my shoes. I can wipe myself with any sort of toilet paper—” That got a laugh. “But I can’t toast any bread I want in my toaster.”
Right up until that moment she’d felt like she had some intuitive sense of which things were objects-with-rules and which ones were objects-without-rules, felt it so readily that she hadn’t even named the two categories until just that instant.
“Do you have a Boulangism?” Salima nodded. “Do you?” The woman snorted. “God, no. I mean, that business model, authorized bread? I wouldn’t put one of those in my house if you paid me. Why’d you buy one?” “I didn’t. It came with the apartment.”
Though they were in a very public place, Salima felt a bubble of inattention around them—that urban thing, where you pretended you couldn’t see the people pressed up against you.
The sense of hopelessness at being surrounded by sensors and devices that were designed to push her around was transformed into a sense of inevitable triumph over the fools who thought they could make that work. What had Wye said? “It’s not that those coders were stupid, but they were sure doing something stupid.”
But it’s not the bread that’s copyrighted, it’s the software in the toaster, all the stuff we change when we jailbreak it. The part where you have to reset it and do something weird and complicated to get the fix to work, that’s the cir-cum-vent-ing”—she could tell he’d practiced the word—“and the copyright, that’s the code we’re changing. So if it has code in it, and there’s an access control, you’re not allowed to change the code. Even if it belongs to you!”
“It’s Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998.”
“They wouldn’t do it. They’re kids. If they understood risks, they wouldn’t join uprisings and march in the streets and the world would be a simpler place. Not a better one, of course. But simpler.”
she cried because she had something to lose, for the first time since she’d lost her parents. It was a terrible realization, like she’d been betrayed by her own happiness. Everything she’d attained was something she had to lose.
Salima’s heart broke for him. After all he’d been through, he’d found a way to take charge of a world that had never given him the tiniest amount of control, and she was going to make him undo it all. She wanted to cry, and she could only marvel at his self-control.
It was a crime if she did it, a product if they sold it to her. Everything could be a product.
“It’s a pyramid scheme?” “It’s an affiliate program.
There was a space in the conversation here where Salima would say something positive. Everyone in the room wanted her to say something positive. The conversation had a shape, or maybe a direction, and she could pat it on the back, give it a little push in that direction, and the next stop would be something glad from Paul or Wye or the white guy, and then back to her, push and push and push, until it had picked up enough velocity that no one could stop it.
“Nothing is fair.” He said it so nonchalantly that it shocked her. Such a small boy, such a big thought.
Cautiously, one muscle at a time, they relaxed.
Working in an ER had taught her some fast-footed diplomacy.
“Right now, you are white, but that’s a wholly contingent proposition. I mean, no offense, but you aren’t a white man because you aren’t a human. You aren’t even a man, are you?”
“You’re also not white. You ever hear those heritage-not-hate types, that myth that the Irish were the first slaves in America? They’re an interesting bunch. They’re so close, you know, so close to understanding that whiteness is a thing that other people choose for you. People are white if whiteness is endowed upon them by the wider whiteness.
You can’t punch racism until it sees the error of its ways.”
Think of me like a random audit. The IRS doesn’t have to check everyone’s tax returns, just pull enough at random that everyone else colors inside the lines.”
The American Eagle had once stared down a whale.
there was no way to separate the American system from whether a foursome of Staten Island cops should be allowed to beat the shit out of Wilbur Robinson, lie about it, and then send him to jail.
“If I could explain one thing to the American Eagle, it would be that: he should be hanging city officials by their ankles out of their office windows until they explain how this fucked-up, ridiculous situation came to pass on their watch. Then he can move on to the police union. Then the software developers. I understand how a guy like that can end up feeling like he’s just tinkering in the margins of the problem and wants to draw a line in the sand, but drawing it in front of Wilbur Robinson is a no-win situation.”
“Well, the thing is, the time to ask me what I wanted from you was before you created this situation. I would have told you to record it, put the video on YouTube, give it to my lawyer.
The band picked up the tempo, and the chant split—“NO JUSTICE NO PEACE” and “WHOSE STREETS? OUR STREETS!” in counterpoint, coming together on the “eace” in “peace” and “eets” in “streets,” getting funkier.
I will stipulate that you’re right about everything, but this isn’t about right and wrong. You can be right, or you can be effective.
You are stronger than any of us, and you can fly and see through walls—but you don’t have superpowers of persuasion. The people who are pissed off at you? That’s their superpower. They can convince people of anything.
It was why he hadn’t been there when Bull Connor released the dogs. Why he’d ignored all the other Wilbur Robinsons along the way. Some things, America would tolerate, but other things, it would never, ever forgive.
Joe couldn’t be angry at cancer, but he could be coldly, murderously enraged at an insurance company and the people who worked there.
The words on his screen seemed to come straight out of his own head. They were secret things, things he’d never dared say to any other human, because Lacey was right, they were the kinds of things that you couldn’t say aloud without risking incarceration or involuntary commitment.
Here were men saying those things. And other men who heard them and told them that they understood, that they had felt the same unspeakable feelings and they understood those feelings.
Joe never did stop visiting Fuck Cancer Right In Its Fucking Face, which surprised him.
Fuck Cancer Right In Its Fucking Face was a forum for very angry people whose loved ones were dying or dead.
The people who got over their furious grief left FCRIIFF, chased away by its rage culture. The people who stayed were really into their anger, clinging to it like a drunk refusing to let go of a bottle.
