Radicalized: Four Tales of Our Present Moment

by Cory Doctorow

That first time he logged back in, he understood in a flash that for all that it had helped him—saved him—to see the thoughts from his own endless mental loops on the screen, coming from other people, it would also have destroyed him.

It’s because some random asshole earning half a million dollars in an office at the top of a tower full of random assholes earning less than me decided she should die. He doesn’t know her and he won’t ever know her but he knows that there are so many kids like Lisa that are going to die because of his choices.

Work was never the same for Joe after Lacey got sick. He never rescheduled that meeting with the VP. He just couldn’t muster the fucks needed to give it his all for on-demand wholesale distribution.

“I’m going to make a prediction right now, that even though I’m the first, I sure as hell will not be the last. There’s more to come. To those fathers and husbands, mothers and wives, grandparents and lovers, the ones who’ll come after me, I want to salute you. We are going to scare them, we’re going to make them so scared that they will never get a night’s sleep again. They will right this wrong, this stain on our country, not because they love your kids as much as you love your kids, but because we will scare them into it.”

Now what? Two wrongs don’t make a right? This was Dark Fuckriff, not Pinocchio.

“They say violence never solves anything, but to quote The Onion: ‘That’s only true so long as you ignore all of human history.’ Violence is the only way to get some people’s attention. You know which ones I mean.

One was an ad-tech programmer.

Like it or not, these were his people, this was his place. His spiritual home. And if there were fringe elements in his community who did bad things, unconscionable things, well, what of it? No one faulted soldiers for staying in the army just because someone wearing the same uniform shot up a village or waterboarded a prisoner. The camaraderie and understanding he got from the Fuckriffers, the bond of shared experience—it was irreplaceable.

If Martin spooked and ran for Fort Doom too early, he’d have to slink back to the city and his job after however many days he’d spent bunkered up.

It was all about information asymmetries. Markets corrected them. If knowing a secret could make a stupid, unworthy person rich, then sooner or later, smart, superior people would find that secret out and clear out the misallocated wealth of all those dimbulbs. Markets were awesome at this.

Give the socialists credit, they had this figured out. They knew that the world was heading to a state when the number of betas and gammas the alphas needed to keep the systems running would far exceed the demand, and that those unnecessary people would be squeezed out, little by little, and then, all at once. They wouldn’t go without a fight, of course. Of course! Who would?

That’s what markets did: they moved fallow, underutilized assets out of the hands of the incompetent and moved them into the hands of their betters, who put those assets to work.

This was an “adjustment period,” two words that sounded bloodless and bureaucratic, but which described the chaos that would reign while the unnecessariat were eased out of existence and humanity realigned itself around the strongest and brightest that evolution could select.

Economists called it an “adjustment period” but people like Martin called it The Event.

It was hard to tell whether things were deteriorating or whether it was just the usual baseline of craziness, made more vivid by the fact that they’d all hunkered down in a fortress to await the collapse of civilization.

They started calling the ranch “Forward Base Alpha” which was really cool to say.

This was idiotic, a misunderstanding. They didn’t want a fight. There was nothing to fight over. Fort Doom had lots of guns already, more than they could ever fire. This was a break from the tedium, a game.

So many terrible things had happened since they took to Fort Doom, but this was what made The Event seem real: if the property rights of people like them were slipping away, then everything was up for grabs.

Martin had deliberately left the decorations clumped together to give other people something to fix, which was the most surefire way to create a sense of ownership over the project.