Radicalized

by Cory Doctorow

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 paperwork and refused to explain themselves.

but she was as eager to show him as he was to be shown. When he said show me it made her realize that she’d been bursting with secret knowledge that she’d wanted more than anything to share.

“That’s where I got confused, too. 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!”