Title: The Bezzle: A Martin Hench Novel

Author: Cory Doctorow

Completed: July 2025 (Full list of books)

Overview: This summer I attended Teardown 2025 where Cory Doctorow presented. When preparing for the event, I found his Martin Hench books and read the first one, Red Team Blues. Unfortunately, I lost my highlights from that one (first time reading on my phone) but enjoyed it enough to keep the series going. The nerdiness of a forensic accountant who knows plenty about tech and computer/information security appeals to me. These are fun stories and have encouraged me to carry a fiction book with me on my phone to read anytime I would otherwise waste time waiting for something else. It’s also the first time in many years I’ve read more than one fiction book a year. I’m not starting the third book in the series yet but probably will soon.

Highlights:

• so we have mostly decided that the truth is that a legion of secret criminals lurk among our neighbors and that our overstuffed prisons are so full only because so many of us deserve to grow old as caged animals.
  To extend even the tiniest bit of mercy (or even empathy) to our incarcerated brothers and sisters is to admit the possibility that they don’t belong there. If they don’t belong there, then we are a nation that imprisons people who should be free. If that is true, than you or I or anyone else might end up in prison.
  The belief in prisoners’ just desserts is an emotional defense mechanism, as is the racism it depends on, because anyone who pays even a scintilla of attention to prisoners will know that the carceral state is not an equal-opportunity predator. It has an insatiable appetite for brown and Black flesh.
• When I started out in this business, my mental model was that 80 percent of business was real and 20 percent was scams. When the S&L crisis hit, I recalibrated to 70/30. After Enron, the dot-bomb, and the subprime crisis, I was at 40/60. Reading the paperwork from Thames Estuary, I felt like the entire economy had become a scam, and any real businesses remaining were incidental residue.
• “They have those in their office. Ikea sells them as ready-mades: two sawhorses and a door for two hundred dollars. They take the investors to the office and show them how frugal they’re living, then they take them here and buy them hundred-and-fifty-dollar shots of Pappy van Winkle.”
  “This is why I’ve never been a start-up guy,” I said. “I don’t have the cognitive capacity to reconcile those two signifiers.”
• People today, they think the government can’t do anything right, so they want the private sector to take it over. Then, when someone like these Thames Estuary people come along and start stealing everything that isn’t nailed down, those same people are like, ‘You see? I told you the government was incompetent!’ And then they slash my budget because I’m not doing enough to fight crime
• The court system makes hundreds of millions of dollars in profit off PACER, and they justify it by saying that the excess goes to pay for stuff like big TV screens in courtrooms. I don’t know whether courtrooms need TV screens. Maybe they do. But those TV screens shouldn’t be subsidized by a break-even program that stands between everyone in America and the laws they are supposed to obey.
• I’d been waiting for Facebook to die since I first tried it. It wasn’t any one thing that turned me off, it was everything—it was like someone had taken all the things I hated about technology and stuck them together into a grotesque Frankenstein’s monster.
• (Afterwards) Readers who’ve followed my work know that I have waged a decades-long war on “digital rights management”(DRM)—encryption that stops you from moving your books from one reader to another, giving tech giants like Amazon enormous power over readers, writers, and publishers.
  To its credit, Amazon doesn’t require DRM for ebooks, and my publishers—Tor/Macmillan in the USA and Canada and Head of Zeus/Bloomsbury in the UK, Australia, NZ, India, and South Africa—have gone to great lengths to ensure that my ebooks are sold DRM-free.
  However, Amazon’s audiobooks division, Audible (a monopolist with a greater than 90 percent market share), requires DRM for every title. Naturally, none of my books are for sale on Audible, which makes them effectively invisible to the majority of audiobook publishers.
  I produce my own, high-quality audiobooks (the audio edition for this book and Red Team Blues were read by the marvelous Wil Wheaton