Radicalized

by Cory Doctorow

This was a new kind of toaster, a toaster that took orders, rather than giving them. A toaster that would give her enough rope to hang herself, let her toast a lithium battery or a can of hairspray, or anything else she wanted to toast: unauthorized bread. Even homemade bread.

When the State Department finally finished vetting her and let her out, a caseworker met her with a bag of clothes, a prepaid debit card, and the news that her parents had died while she was in the camp.

A ship was a computer that you put desperate people inside, and when the computer went bad, the ship was a tomb you put desperate people inside.

“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,

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.

“Running headfirst into the system doesn’t change the system, it just gives you a headache.

Just because you’ve decided to die of cancer, that doesn’t stop everyone you know from consuming your last months on this Earth by sending you links to miracle cures. They deleted these and politely told everyone—even their parents—to cut that shit out,

right now, that dad is talking to someone at Cigna, or Humana, or BlueCross BlueShield, and the person on the phone is telling that dad that his little girl has. To. Die.

“They say violence never solves anything, but to quote The Onion: ‘that’s only true so long as you ignore all of human history.’

Boredom was unquestionably the worst part of the end of the world.

The residents of Fort Doom were about done with the end of the world and ready to go back to massages, steaks, cocktail bars, squash games, hard work, big profits, arguing on social media, ill-advised sex with interesting strangers, all the comforts of modernity.