(2008-08-30) Doctorow Weak Strange Engineered

Cory Doctorow has a Short Story "The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away". Reminds me a bit of Anathem's Culture. Standing on Sixth Avenue, looking north from midtown, staring at the buildings the cars and the buses and the people and the tallwalkers, that's when he had his realization: He was not meant to be in this world. It just didn't suit him. He could see its workings, see how its politics and policies were flawed, see how the system needed debugging, see what made its people work, but he couldn't touch it. Every time he reached in to adjust its settings, he got mangled by its gears. He couldn't convince his bosses that he knew what they were doing wrong. He couldn't convince his colleagues that he knew best. Nothing he did succeeded--every attempt he made to right the wrongs of the world made him miserable and made everyone else angry. Lawrence knew about humans, so he knew about this: this was the exact profile of the people in the Order... "But it wasn't just food--in the Order, we keep track of everything; our typing patterns, our sleeping patterns, our moods, our reading habits (Measurement). I discovered that I read faster when I've been sleeping more, so now, when I need to really get through a lot of reading, I make sure I sleep more.

"We're all guilty of something, Lawrence. That's how the game is rigged. Look closely at anyone's life and you'll find, what, a little black-marketeering, a copyright infringement, some cash economy business with unreported income, something obscene in your Internet use, something in your bloodstream that shouldn't be there. (Too Many Laws)

"You're just flooding yourself with useless information, trying to find the useful parts. Why not make some predictions about which part of your life you need to pay attention to, rather than spying on every process? You're a spy in your own body."

"The Securitat's here forever. We've treated everyone like a criminal for too long now--everyone's really a criminal now. If we dismantled tomorrow, there'd be chaos, bombings, murder sprees. We're not going anywhere." (Laws Make Criminals)