“You think I could stop the NSA?”
The American Eagle stared at him. Bruce was one of the richest men who’d ever lived, a contractor on both the white and black sides of the Pentagon’s budget, with clearances to match the Joint Chiefs. He owned his own covert armory, and an overt armory, and corporations he had majority stakes in provided intelligence contracting to the entire roster of federal espionage and policing agencies, not to mention most major metros’ police forces. He almost certainly got a paycheck every time the cops in Staten Island were advised by a machine-learning algorithm to go to the brown side of the Mason-Dixon line and start making Black people turn out their pockets and drop their pants.
Cory Doctorow has put together a collection of four novellas that cover themes of copyright law, income inequality, racism, climate change, and universal health care, among many others.
It’s always a treat to read his (somewhat optimistic) takes on post-apocalyptic and dystopian futures.
Not long after I finished the book, I found out that “poor doors” did exist for a while. Brutal.