These were four short stories. While originally published in 2019, they all feel extremely relevant in 2025.
My favorite was Unauthorized Bread, in which an unlikely hacker frees all the appliances in her apartment (and then in her neighbors' apartments) from DRM that prevents them being used as the users would like, and instead only according to the manufacturers' wishes. This story resonated with me because I’m currently in a moment of trying to liberate much of the technology in my own life from the whims of our corporate overlords.
The collection’s namesake story, Radicalized, a story about how deficiencies in the United States' healthcare system radicalized a group of angry online men, hit close to home at a time where I’m left without healthcare because I was laid off from my job. It’s hard to believe that Doctorow wrote this story five years before Luigi Mangione.
The Masque of the Red Death was interesting because it felt like the inverse of Doctorow’s novel Walkaway.
This was, not surprisingly, a controversial matter. During the war, during the congressional debates over the treaty with Spain, and during the heated election of 1900, the question of empire was argued at high volume.
In essence, it was an argument about a trilemma. Republicanism, white supremacy, and overseas expansion—the country could have at most two. In the past, republicanism and white supremacy had been jointly maintained by carefully shaping the country’s borders. But absorbing populous nonwhite colonies would wreck all that.
I recently finished reading How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwhar. It gave me much food for thought about how American Empire shapes the experience of being on this planet today.
As an American citizen living through a period of American political crisis, I found the above quote especially thought-provoking. The United States couldn’t be more imperial than it already was (which was very) precisely because it would bring so many non white people into the country.
An argument for a trilemma - republicanism, white supremacy, and overseas expansion - what an awful combination. Can’t we just keep the republic and throw out the other two?
Soldiers who had fought to destroy the United States and establish an independent slaveholding republic were given more respect and honor than the men who defended it and helped to save the Union.
One of the ways I’ve chose to process everything going on is to read and sit with history. The more I sit with it, the more I understand that the present crisis is the logical conclusion of the United States never fully dealing with its past demons.
If you read Russian, I highly recommend you read.
Два года ожидания социальной справедливости Токаева - Аналитический интернет-журнал Власть
Here’s a quote from Dosym Satpaev
“«Протестность в Казахстане никуда не делась. Она просто не аккумулирована в рамках политических оппозиционных партий и движений. Вся история локальных протестов – в Жанаозене, Шаныраке или во время земельных митингов – показывала, что власть не владеет ситуацией и замкнулась в мыльном пузыре, пока страна жила в другом измерении.
Finished reading: Spill by Cory Doctorow 📚
This short story is part of Cory Doctorow’s excellent Little Brother series. There’s a million things I like about these books, but one of my favorite things is how Doctorow sneaks in basic digital security practices, especially for activists, as an exciting part of the plot. Spill is no exception.
Sometimes, I just want to hand the entire Little Brother series to my colleagues as assigned reading.
First sub-freezing (25 F / -4 C) ride of the year. Fortunately, it was just the two miles to the metro station, as I don’t know if I’m emotionally prepared prepared for this yet.
Absolutely, but this article also doesn’t mention that electric bikes and mopeds require far fewer critical minerals for their batteries, which have their own grave externalities.
This video does a great job summarizing the problems and challenges facing the MARC train in Maryland. I second the author’s call for regular weekend service on the Brunswick and Camden lines.
Between travel, deadlines, being sick, and the elections, November just felt like I was trying to survive. Here’s to creating my own conditions to thrive in December.
While not quite as thought provoking as the Mars Trilogy or Ministry of the Future, which may have shifted some of my own politics, Kim Stanley Robinson still impressed me with his world building and his ability to combine science with politics.
In this book, I particularly enjoyed his descriptions of the terraria, or hollowed out asteroids spun to simulate gravity on their hollowed-out insides, and each populated with its own complete biome, complete with flora and fauna. Many were a love note to different biomes on earth.
I’d previously listened to the excellent Revolutions Podcast series on the Mexican Revolution, which peaked my interest in learning more.
I was fascinated to learn more about the conditions during the Porfiriato that lead to the Mexican Revolution. Both the role the Haciendas played as a conservative, planter-class aristocracy, as well as the destructive role American and British oil investments played in capturing the state. I can’t point to any contemporary parallels at all.
Anyways, the sticker I have of Emiliano Zapata riding a bike on my own bike finally feels earned. I read his biography.
Virtually every film in modern memory ends with some variation of the same disclaimer: “This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.” The cut-and-paste legal rider must be the most boring thing in every movie that features it. Who knew its origins were so lurid?
For that bit of boilerplate, we can indirectly thank none other than Grigori Rasputin, the famously hard-to-assassinate Russian mystic and intimate of the last, doomed Romanovs. It all started when an exiled Russian prince sued MGM in 1933 over the studio’s Rasputin biopic, claiming that the American production did not accurately depict Rasputin’s murder. And the prince ought to have known, having murdered him.
I had no idea this traced back to a specific historical event.
