Sunday, December 7, 2025

Finished reading: Radicalized: Four Tales of Our Present Moment by Cory Doctorow 📚

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.