It Could Happen Here - CZM Book Club: "Party Discipline" by Cory Doctorow, Part One

Episode Date: June 9, 2024

Margaret reads Robert Evans a novella about the near future of tech, surveillance, and teenage rebellion.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline Podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into Tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while running errands or at the end

of a busy day. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AT&T, connecting changes everything. CallZone Media Book Club Book Club Book Club

Book Club Welcome to CoolZone Media Book Club, the only book club that starts with asynchronous chanting, unless your book club is the only book club that starts with asynchronous chanting. Unless your book club is as cool as ours. Yeah, the New York Review of Books does that, but because they're all a bunch of fucking East Coast elites, they don't let anyone hear their asynchronous chanting.

Yeah. So find the staff of the New York Review of Books on the internet and harass them at their real homes until they send you audio of their chants. Or go on an epic journey to find the staff of the book of reviews or whatever it was, which is an ancient artifact and not a person's job. You have a lot of options.

So, as you probably guessed, because you all are creepily aware of the sounds of our voices, I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and my guest today is Robert Evans. You're gosh darn tootin' rootin' right. So, I hope you all are ready, because we're starting a whole new actual book today. It's going to be another four-parter, which is how we started this whole thing. That's right. We're finally doing the Bible. Yeah, that's right. When the Abrahamic God reached out to you a couple of months ago, saying, you know, I've got this thing that I wrote that might fit for your book club. You and I kind of hesitated a little, but I think he's put in the hours at this point.

He deserves a shot, you know? You know, it's like kind of inconsistent in a lot of places. And some of it's downright mean spirited. Other parts shine. Yeah, I think this guy, I think he's got like a temper, right? I feel like, you know, when he's got like a temper right i feel like you know when he's his best self there's some pretty good moments but man he really needs to take a nap or something you know we shouldn't judge people based on the worst things they've ever done

consistently over the course of millennia that's right only on the best things. But no, today we're talking about our other god, Cory Doctorow, who probably doesn't want to be considered a deity at all. No, but I think he might fuck up some money changers in a temple if he got the opportunity. He would absolutely. Cory Doctorow is one of my favorite science fiction authors and has been for a long time. Yeah, absolutely. I have yet to read a Cory Doctorow book that I didn't like, but there's a lot of them and I haven't read them all. Yeah, I have not read his entire oeuvre. I've read at least a dozen of his books, including Walk Away,

which I understand this is related to. Yeah. Walk Away is one of my favorite books that I've read in the last 10 years, like top three or four, probably somewhere in there, along with your new book, The Sapling Cage. Oh, you mean the one that actually kickstarts tomorrow at 1 p.m. Eastern? And if you look for it by Monday, June 10th, you will be able to back it on Kickstarter. Is that the one that you're talking about? Well, Margaret, to me, time is a flat circle. I have come unstuck from time like Billy Pilgrim from another one of my favorite books

by Kurt Vonnegut, which was not written in the last 10 years. And thus, I am unable to account for when things are, but that does sound accurate to me. Okay, well, it's not a lot I keep track of, but I keep track of the fact that I just got out of a meeting with my publisher to do the last minute getting the kickstarter stuff together and i'm excited about it but what i want to get people excited about is a novella which is clearly if you look at what i've written my favorite form of writing which is basically a real short novel yeah it Party Discipline and it's by Cory Doctorow. Excellent. It was first published by Reactor, which was then called tour.com in 2017 on their website. This is set in the same universe as Walk Away for everyone who's listening. If you haven't

go read Walk Away, it's way longer than this. This one's short. Is there any background we need to give the listeners so that this will make sense? No, this one, it stands on its own. Okay, cool. Yeah. Party Discipline by Cory Doctorow. I don't remember how we decided exactly to throw a communist party. It had been a running joke all through senior year,

whenever the obvious divisions between the semi-zadas and the rest of us came too close to the surface of Burbank High. Have fun at Stanford, come drink with us at the communist parties when you're back on break. The semi-Zadas were mostly white, with some Asians not the brown kind for spice. The non-Zadas were brown and black, and we were on our way out. Out of Burbank High, and out of Burbank 2. Our parents had lucked into lottery tickets, buying out of Burbank High and out of Burbank 2. Our parents had lucked into lottery tickets, buying houses in Burbank back when they were only ridiculously expensive. Now, they were crazy.

We'd be the last generation of brown kids to go to Burbank High because the instant we graduated, our parents were going to sell and use the money to go somewhere cheaper. And the leftovers would let us all take a couple of mid-range MOOCs from a Big Ten university to round out our community college distanced degrees. It was nearly time for finals, May, and it was hot, over 100 degrees every day, and we were all a little crazy. There were the Romeos and Juliettes who were feeling the impending tragedy of their inevitable breakup. The kids who knew they weren't cut out for university or couldn't afford it, who had no clue what they would do next. The ones who had kept their noses to their screens for four years,

busting their humps to get top marks, and were just now realizing that none of it mattered for shit. And then there was me. I liked to hang out with my bestie Sherelle at the back of the portables by the old basketball court, where there was a gap in the CCTV coverage that the school filled with intermittent drone flybys. It was where the vapor kids hung out, but I wasn't one of them.

Even decaf crack wasn't my idea of a good time. I just liked to be a little off the grid, because your business is your business, you know? My cousin got laid off. Sherelle's smart fingernails were infected with ransomware again, refusing to work on payment touchpoints and blinking in seizure time. She was awkwardly trying to patch them, pressing each one's hard reset while tapping her phone to it. But it was a job that really needed a third hand, and since I'd told her that this was going to happen, I refused to help.

She was sitting against the portable wall with her knees drawn up and her phone balanced on them. Mikhail? No, Antoine, the sheet metal guy. It had been decades since Lockheed Martin left Burbank, but there were plenty of remnants of its glory days, including all the metal shops that had supplied it. Antoine had worked at three or four of these,

hopping around as they got shut down. Then he'd got a job in Encino that meant a long commute, but was supposed to be a steady check. And Robert Evans, do you know what you can do with your steady check? Spend it on the thing that gives us a steady check, whoever happens to be advertising for this podcast at the moment. It's almost like a cyberpunk thing itself that this is cut through that. It's almost like we live in a cyberpunk dystopia,

except for I cannot get a move-by-wire system installed in my central nervous system or titanium bone lacings, and I'm livid about that. Not yet. Not yet, not yet. I'm sure someone will do a terrible version that play ads inside your skull yeah i would much prefer the shadow run version where we randomly turn into mythical creatures but we also have laser guns so somebody make that happen it really is the best of both worlds it really is i want to vote for a dragon for president we've had so

many presidents that are more depressing than a dragon. I know. At least it's interesting. Much like these ads, unless you skip them. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast Post Run High is all about.

It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline Podcast, and we're kicking

off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough.

So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now and I cannot decide if I like him or not.

Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents.

Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. And we're back. That job seems too good to be true. Turns out they had a five-year tax holiday from Encino and it ran out this year.

If Antoine had been smart enough to look it up, he'd have known that they weren't going to last past July. She got one fingernail done, moved on to the next one. What's happened to the factory? She got another fingernail done, then dropped her phone. Fuck you, darn. I kicked it back to her. Thanks.

I think she wedged the phone again and tried to reset her third nail. That they're doing an up and out. That was when a company's tax incentives ran out, and then the company ran out too, shutting down an arm's length subsidiary through fast bankruptcy and leaving its creditors, the people who worked there, say, to sort out the sale of its assets. Up and outs made sense because companies were hollow, they leased everything, and contracted everything out. The leasing companies didn't beef because

they had a sweet loophole. They could take a write-off on the equipment that was based on the full replacement value, despite having already taken depreciation and fees for the whole time the plant had run. We'd done a civics for business unit on it as part of the curriculum on generally accepted accounting practices. Of course, the people who worked there often found themselves shit out of luck when it came to their last paycheck, and sometimes that leased equipment would walk out the door in the days running up to the out and up and out. I was hungry, like always. Mom didn't believe in scop, and I didn't want to piss her off, so I wouldn't eat out of the vending machines at school. But that meant if I didn't remember throwing an apple in my bag, my stomach would growl all the way to lunch. Got anything to eat?

She finished the fifth nail in her left hand and fished in her purse and passed me some leptin gum, which was supposed to enhance satiety and help people like Sherelle stick to the diets they had no need to be on in the first place. I didn't like to chew it, but my stomach was rumbling. I unwrapped a stick and chewed it. It tasted like caramelized hemiproteins, which is to say, cooked blood, in a good way, like a burger, thanks to the transgenic yeast it was cultured with. My stomach stopped making noise. Maybe it worked.

Maybe it was the placebo effect. You sure about that up and out? I try not to sound too interested. Sherelle had a severe case of risk aversion. Girl, her side eye could have cut a thousand yards. But I had been immune to it since ninth grade. Come on, Shirelle, just asking. It's a daydream.

Communist parties were one of my favorite daydreams to dream. Me and my revolutionary comrades in our funny Karl Marx beards, liberating a whole factory under the noses of cops in the town, running all those machines and giving away free shit until the feedstock ran out. My dream parties didn't usually take place at a sheet metal factory. I liked the idea of taking over a scop factory where they made burgers or candy or ice cream, because then I would be the person who gave everyone free candy or burgers or ice cream. But I'd take sheet metal if it was the only thing going. I could learn my skills there, and also, Mama wouldn't kill me for the scop thing if she found out. Damned health food crazies. Linnae. She

sounded like her own Mama when she warned, but I wasn't scared of her Mama, I was scared of my Mama, and her Mama sounded nothing like mine. Really, the whole basis of our lasting friendship was my immunity to all her secret weapons, which would otherwise burn you down in your shoes the first time she spatted with you. It's a daydream. Like saying it twice would make it more believable. You're going to ask someone else if I don't tell you, aren't you? I didn't deign to answer. I'll hold your phone while you do your other hand. She tried the side eye again, then she put it away and patted the ground next to her. Hold my phone then. Go on. Once she'd done her right thumb, she said, it's an up and out, yeah, and a lot of the workers there aren't happy about it. Wages have been really delayed lately. Lots of people owed a lot of

back pay, especially people who are out on sick pay. People got injured on the job, can't go down to the payroll office in person. So there's talk. Talk? She shook her head. You're going to make me spell it out? Talk. They're going to run some shifts after the place shuts down, sell things out the back door, whatever they can, make back the money they know they're going to be burned for. In case you don't understand, Missy, that means no communist parties. I sighed and moved her phone to the last finger. No party then. Nope. Forget it, girl. Concentrate on graduating. B students don't get scholarships. This was a running joke between us because A students didn't get scholarships either. I mean,

they did, but at a rate you'd have to be nuts to count on, like basing your life plan on winning the lottery every 10 years. Because there were way, way more kids with broke-ass parents and sharp minds than there were spaces left behind by the dullards who made it into the university on, quote, merit, and by ticking the, quote, no assistance required box on their applications. I was an A student anyway. She called me that night after mama's lights out, no phones blackout time. My little sister Tisha stared at me from her bed when I took the call and mouthed, I'm telling. I rolled my eyes at her. She wouldn't tell. Tisha was still developing her low cunning and there was plenty of

stuff I'd caught her in that she didn't want me blabbing to Mama in retaliation. It's late, I whispered. Your mom was crazy. Sherelle's mama was strict, too, but not about bedtimes. She was an insomniac, and so were her kids, and she taught them her coping skills of doing all their homework, showering, laying out their clothes, and packing their lunches at 2 a.m. so they could rise 20 minutes before first bell, pee and wash their faces, and be on campus with seconds to spare.

You call me up after curfew to tell me that? Send a text next time. Antoine called us all. Thought you'd want to know. I almost said, who's Antoine? And then I remembered. Her cousin, the sheet metal worker. Oh. You want to know what he said? Don't play games, Sherelle. I'm not trying to wake up my mama. Tisha's staring at me like she caught me strangling a cat, too. Hi, Tisha! It was loud enough that Tisha heard it through the earpiece. I winced. Hi, Shirelle, she mouthed and grinned. She says hi. Now, what is it, Shirelle? Antoine called. You said that. He said the reason the plant is shutting down so fast isn't just about the tax credits.

He said there was a wobbly in the shop, someone trying to get everyone to sign a union card. Union organizing was a fireable offense, had been since I was a little girl, but that didn't mean it didn't happen. And if enough of the workers signed a card, the factory wouldn't be allowed to stop paying taxes until the California Labor Board had completed its investigation.

Antoine says the other workers are pissed. At the wobbly? Nah, stupid, at the bosses. Antoine says that before all this, most of the employees didn't really give a damn about the wobbly and her nonsense. But now it's got everyone thinking. Got them thinking about making an example of the plant. They get away with this. Next time they'll be even worse. Hold up. Get away with what? Just listen, okay? I realized she was excited. Really

excited. The wobbly got deported. Born in America and everything. They sent her to Guatemala, said her parents were undocumented when she was born here, so that makes her an anchor baby. Everybody is pissed, like I said. They know it's just bullshit, an excuse to get rid of her because she'd come sniffing around the shop. Antoine says none of them gave a damn when she was talking about helping them. But when she got deported for trying, out comes all this corny talk about it being un-American to shut her down. They're going to let us have a communist party? She made a sound between a squeal and a cheer, and Tisha's eyes got wild. I cut her my sternest look so she didn't jump right out of the bed and tell Mama what she just heard, and I realized with

a sinking feeling that I was going to have to get my little sister involved if I didn't want her to rat me out. Mama would kill me. The gravity of it fell down on top of me. It was one thing to daydream about this, another to plan it. I'd have to do a lot of googling, use one of those darknet googles that I can't even remember how to reach, so that meant I'd have to get one of those brainiac nerds at school to explain it again, which meant they'd know I was looking up something forbidden, which meant that I'd be even more exposed, and... You aren't even listening to me, are you, Linnaeus? Uh, nuh-uh, no. Sorry, Shirelle. Just thinking it through. Damn, are we really gonna... We are. You don't get us caught first. Antoine met us at the Froyo place off San Fernando, the sketchy part near the dead IKEA that had been all cut up for little market stalls that were mostly empty.

I hadn't seen him since we'd been freshmen and he'd been a senior. And in the years since, he'd got strangely grayish, his skin sagging off his face and his hair shot with white, like he was an old man. He looked like he hadn't been sleeping much either. He made a sign at us, a thing with his hands, like the kids had done to pass messages around the classroom, like he was an old man. He looked like he hadn't been sleeping much either. He made a sign at us, a thing with his hands like the kids had done to pass messages around the classroom

back when we'd been kids. It took me a second to remember that this one meant phones down, school cops coming. I couldn't figure out what that was supposed to mean, but Sherelle got it and reached into her purse and shut her phone down. Now I got it, I did the same. We'd both been infected before, of course, drive-by bad wear that let some creepy rando spy on us through our phones.

But then we got more careful. But he wasn't worried about rando spying through our phone. He was worried about cops. You think Burbank PD is going to bother with you, I wanted to ask. You think Burbank PD is going to bother with you, I wanted to ask. But the fact was, maybe they would. Why not? Once they bought that kind of thing, why wouldn't they want to use it every chance they got? I probably would. Damn, he looked us up and down.

Not like a perv, but like a grown-up judging a little kid. You two are so young. I don't know if this was such a good idea. Sherelle gave him an up and down of her own. Antoine, we're only five years younger than you, fool. Smart, too. Besides, it was Linnaeus' idea, not yours. That was news to me. Far as I knew, he'd had the idea, told Shirelle, and she'd said, oh, Linnaeus said the same thing. But the way he shook his head, I knew it was true. He'd got the idea from me. That made me feel pretty badass, tell the truth.

Okay, okay. Your mom will kill me though. Antoine. Okay, there's, he lowered his voice, 45 of us. And one guy, he says he spoke to a wobbly and they're pissed about what happened to that girl, and they say they'll help. We got all skills and hands we need to get it running, but we don't know how we get the word out without getting popped. Who do you want to reach? I've been wondering about this myself. I didn't really know much about sheet metal, except it was, you know, metal that came in sheets. What would you do with a bunch of that stuff around the house? that came in sheets. What would you do with a bunch of that stuff around the house? We don't know either. Antoine looked anxious, more anxious. He dry washed those big knuckled hands. We can make just about anything we got a file for, and there's plenty of files out there.

You want a fireplace surround or a new truck bumper? We got you covered. Don't know many people who need a truck bumper, Shirell said. I know. Antoine gave her a shut-up look that was brotherly, reminding me that they'd been close since they were little. There's all kinds of toys we can make, too. Little cars and shit. He looked at us like, you think that'll do it? I don't think we're going to strike terror into the hearts of the investor class by giving away little cars, Antoine, sorry. Because that was the point, right? Give us all part, give them sorrows? I hadn't really thought about where sheet metal fit into that framework. He shook his head. He knew it too. What were you making? Uber parts, he shrugged. Mostly for the vans, you know. LA Metro had been using the vans

for most of my life, though i could still remember when there had been city buses before the contract went out to uber the vans were boxy and indestructible covered in some kind of slippery treatment that you couldn't write on or mark which gave off a funky musty smell like old socks when the sun baked it but you know what won't give off a funky musty smell robert while the the Washington State Highway Patrol might. That's true. Some complaints have been made. But yeah, nothing else.

No one else who advertises for us. We apply special cool zone media covering that anti-bad smell. And we've been told that the Chumba Casino people have excellent hygiene. I'm always too afraid to name them by name but that is stuck in my head i have no reason to doubt the chumba casino people on this margaret no it's not no i would never doubt them as a general rule casinos are known for being incredibly good at not having you smell things that are unpleasant that's why you can chain smoke indoors in Vegas. Yeah. They're known as palaces of hygiene. Palaces of hygiene and incredibly expensive air filtration systems.

And here's an ad for probably that. Hey, guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast Post Run High is all about. to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all it's light-hearted pretty crazy and very fun listen

to post run high on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts hi i'm ed zitron host of the better podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong,

though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating.

I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment.

I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. And we're back. I watched the people mill around the hawker stalls, smelling the Korean tacos and the pupusas cooking and wondering whether any of it was real food instead of scop. I'd skipped breakfast that morning and I was hungry.

The food was probably scop, judging from the clientele, who were mostly homeless, and Mama wouldn't approve, so I didn't eat, even though my stomach growled. According to my science teachers, single-celled organic protein was safe and healthy. According to Mama, it was a large-scale experiment in feeding mutated bacteria to humans. Mama liked to point out that rich people didn't eat scop.

They didn't drink coffeeum either, but that never stopped Mama. She also had a lapel pin that read, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Mama was one of a kind. The homeless were accompanied by their inevitable companions, the lovingly tended, rusting, ancient shopping carts. It had been years since it was possible to remove a shopping cart from a grocery store without being caught, but the number of people who used the carts as home, locker, and pack mule had only grown in the years since, creating fierce competition for the old, dumb carts.

These ones looked particularly raggy. Antoine and Sherelle had kept talking while I stared at the carts, but eventually they followed my stare. I looked at them, and they looked back at me. Those would be easy, Antoine sounded dismissive. So, Shirelle said, you want to make something hard or something useful? I put my hand on his shoulder. Antoine, you make those. You'll be making something that everyone will see every day for years and years to come. His eyes glinted. Yeah. Yeah.

He looked at the sky for a minute. I bet there's all kinds of ways we can improve them, too. Bet there's designs for better ones, like Crazy 2 from the refugee camps. I know I saw him in a news clip or something. That's amazing. He grinned and he was as handsome as he'd been when I was a freshman and he was the captain of the senior swim team. I told myself that the flip-flops in my stomach were hunger, not crushing. It was only five minutes before final bell when the school went on lockdown. It was only five minutes before final bell when the school went on lockdown.

We all groaned as our homeroom teacher, Mr. Pazitkian, sprinted to the classroom door and swung down the bar, slapping the button that polarized the classroom windows, including the little one and the door itself, plunging the room into darkness. The groan made Pazitkian glare at us with his finger on his lips. Rule one in lockdowns. No words.

Rule two. Silently build a shelter of bullet-absorbing furniture and then hunker down. Nearly everything in the classroom was made of waxed cardboard and wasn't about to stop any artillery, not even crossbows. Yeah, some fools actually went on school shootings armed with crossbows.

But the room had once been a science lab, and there was a big workbench running the length of the wall, made of steel and concrete, with long plugged hookups for burners along its length. Previous lockdown drills had established that this was our designated shelter, so we shuffled behind it. It's not that we weren't worried about getting shot, but we also knew that lockdowns were,

nine times out of ten, hoaxes. Some fool sent a text said, gonna be at school later, and it got autocorrected to, guns be at school later, and that tripped Burbank SWAT's Paranoid Fusion Center security AI. Then we all had to hide behind the lab bench for half an hour while the toy soldier squad did a sweep of the school. We hunkered down and texted each other. The school deactivated its network filters during lockdown so we could text status updates to the cops or our last words to our loved ones and made dumb jokes. Our messages were interrupted every 30 seconds by reminders to stay silent and vigilant, broadcast on the school's administrative emergency channel by the school safety office.

On top of that, there were the actual status updates. Officers en route. Officers on site. North wing sweep complete. South wing sweep complete. Portables sweep complete. More of this. Then, all clear, all clear, all clear. Followed by an announcement out of every phone speaker in the room. Only phones that ran the school safety app would work on school property, so we all ran it. But dang, it was some creepy shit. I left the classroom thinking about my homework

and whether I was supposed to pick up Tisha from band practice, and I was so lost in my thoughts that I didn't notice the guy in the suit until he put a hand on my shoulder as I was heading for my locker. Lenay Walker? Just the way he said it gave him away as a cop. I felt my heart rate triple. Yes?

Please come with me. He steered me to the administrative office. The secretary on the front desk pointedly didn't stare at me as he led me into one of the VP's offices. The first thing I noticed was my backpack on the desk surrounded by its contents, and next to it, Sherelle's bag and its contents too.

That was when I noticed Sherelle sitting on a low sofa. The cop indicated the spot next to her with a tilt of his head, and I sat. The late afternoon sun slanting through the window caught the huge fart of dusty air that escaped from its cushions when I settled in. Sherelle coughed a little and caught my eye. She looked scared.

Really scared. Which seems like a good place for a cliffhanger, and therefore the place that it ends this week yay i think it's interesting how this was written in 2017 yeah i wouldn't have guessed that just from the actual prose but you know it's also like a lot of the stuff about the expansion of homelessness like the fact that the like shopping carts have turned into these ancestral items as the number of people in the streets have expanded.

And, you know, the kind of acceleration of mass shooting culture and the responses to it, particularly the bit about a kid accidentally tripping the local PD's AI scanning thing or whatever by accidentally tweeting something that sounds like gun. I guess all of that is stuff that like, yeah, I mean in 2017, if you're looking ahead, I can see how Corey, you know,

kind of picked that stuff out in a way that feels kind of prophetic, but yeah. Yeah. And then also the person who gets deported for labor organizing, you know, as like an anchor baby or whatever is like, I mean, that's the kind of thing that,

I mean, the right wing has been on about for a long time. Right. I mean, it happened at the twenties, right? Like you had like wobbly as an anarchists who were like various kinds of, you know,

organizers get deported under some of the laws at that time. Yeah. And then also just like specifically that, like anchor baby thing that you know guaranteed u.s citizenship to people born here is a thing that the right wing is always howling and yelling about how they want to get rid of and i hope that one doesn't come out true i hope none of this comes out true except people throwing communist parties where they get weird 3d printers on factory level to print out free things for people yeah i mean i guess i would prefer kids with crossbows to kids with ar-15s but not because either is good it's just one of them yeah it's going to kill fewer people yeah i wonder whether that's like, you know,

oh, this is what they had access to. People will do anything. Or I wonder if it's this implication that the way that school shooters develop as like such a meme. Now, some people are just trying like clever ways to go beat the worst kind of person.

Yeah. I think there's probably a point there about how, like if somehow in some inconceivable way, we got rid of all of the guns tomorrow, mass shootings, like attacks like that are still such a part of the culture that people would find ways to carry them out you know i think they would yeah basically anything i can imagine is less deadly than what we currently have but now because it's a part of the culture people would carry out kinds of attacks with shit like crossbows that like, if this hadn't developed into a meme the way it would, they probably never would have started doing because this isn't uniquely American. You know, Serbia has had a recent spate of

mass shootings, but like Serbia's mass shooting, I think every country's mass shootings really are at this point patterned on the way they work in America. So we don't need to go into too much of a digression on this. Woo, American exceptionalism. We're number one. We're number one. It's really about this. No one else is really in the running. Well, next week, we're going to find out,

not the conclusion, but part two of four of Party Discipline by Cory Doctorow. But you know what else Cory Doctorow wrote? He wrote a really sweet blurb for my book. He did. I wrote a book called The Sapling Cage that we talked about at the beginning. And Monday, June 10th, 2024,

it is available for pre-order through Kickstarter. Comes out in September. Although one of the backer tiers is actually you'll get sent a copy early because there's a couple advanced reader copies left over. But what Cory Doctorow wrote about my book, The Sapling Cage, is a cracking first-rate epic coming-of-fantasy novel where the crisis of gender identity only heightens the stakes and suspense of a propulsive page-turning tale.

A nice blurb. Just to talk about how writing is this weird thing of networking. Like I know Cory Doctorow and we met when he taught at the Clarion West writers workshop in Seattle that I went to in 2015. And at that, I had a long conversation with him about my writing. You know, I had a couple of books out, but I was like still kind of just finding my feet,

you know, as a writer. One of the things that I really liked is he talked about how with science fiction and fantasy, authors pride themselves on making sure that there's this plot. There's this like engine that drives the story forward. And you can talk about any ideas you want. And if you attach it to plot, you're able to like keep the reader engaged in a way that has really stuck with me and made me think about how i write and it's one of the reasons i like how cory writes so much right like this story is about some teens who want to get into some trouble and it also is like here's the

way that factories fuck over poor communities you Yeah. You know? Anyway. Anyway. See y'all next week. We'll be back in seven days. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast Post Run High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. generative AI to the destruction of Google search. Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app,

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