Quotes from Cory Doctorow

My point of view is fallacious!

That's what made the panics about huge zero-day security ruptures such a fright: the sudden knowledge that everything might have been auto-pwned by a random crim or asshole who used a skin-detection algorithm to catch you masturbating, keywords to flag your embarrassing conversations, harvesting your biometrics for playback attacks on your finances and social nets.

Once you've been a shotgun person for a while, it's hard to imagine anything else, and you start using stupid terms like 'human nature' to describe it. If being a selfish, untrusting asshole is human nature, then how do we form friendships? Where do families come from?

That's the walkaway dilemma. If you take without giving, you're a mooch. If you keep track of everyone else's taking and giving, you're a creep scorekeeper. It's our version of Christian guilt—it's impious to feel good about your piety. You have to want to be good, but not feel good about how good you are. The worst thing is to be worrying about what someone else is doing, because that has nothing to do with whether you're doing right.

Martin tried to shut her down by talking about the intrinsically vulnerable circumstances of farming, and she countered by snappishly reminding them all of the vulnerability of fucking starving to death.

The plural of anecdote isn't fact.

She was in the zone, a human copressor for a complex system that used machines as a nervous system to wire together the intelligence of a global crowd of people she loved with all her heart.

It's the nature of the beast to believe in bubbles and think you can just entrepreneur your way out.

It's unbelievable today, but there was a time when the government classed crypto as a munition and made it illegal for anyone to export or use it on national security grounds. Get that? We used to have illegal math in this country.

But beautiful was not the opposite of terrible. The two could easily coexist.

One of the things I'm good at spotting in myself is the fundamental attribution error: that's when you assume that your own dumb mistakes are the result of normal, excusable human fallibility, while other people's mistakes are the result of their fundamental lack of character.

As in, "When I forget to do the dishes, that's because no one's perfect. When you forget to do the dishes, it's because you're a selfish asshole.

You want a burrito? I asked. Is that a question or a statement of the obvious? Neither. It's an order.

Litvinchuk is a smart man; he implements different tactics for different factions.

If only," he said. "If only there was some way to feel that way all the time." "You couldn't," I said, without thinking. "Regression to the mean. The extraordinary always ends up feeling ordinary. Do it for long enough and it'd just be noise." "You may be right. But I hope you're not. Somewhere out there, there's a thing so amazing that you can devote your life to it and never forget how special it is.

There was a space in the conversation here where Salima would say something positive. Everyone in the room wanted her to say something positive. The conversation had a shape, or maybe a direction, and she could pat it on the back, give it a little push in that direction, and the next stop would be something glad from Paul or Wye or the white guy, and then back to her, push and push and push, until it had picked up enough velocity that no one could stop it.

If you wanted your bug fixed, you should really check it in depth.

Work needed doing, and he could help. What more could anyone ask for?

Most people who hope have their hopes dashed. That's realism, but everyone whose hopes weren't dashed started off by having hope. Hope's the price of admission.

most of what I hated about present-day America was stuff I helped to invent.

You're going to hate to hear this, but you're too young to get it. Anything invented before you were eighteen was there all along. Anything invented before you're thirty is exciting and will change the world forever. Anything invented after that is an abomination and should be banned. You don't remember what life was like twenty years ago, before walkaways. You don't understand how different things are, so you think things don't change that much.

Because evolution isn't directed. It's not streamlined. We're an attic stuffed with everything our ancestors found useful, even if it stopped being useful thousands of years ago. Unless it makes you have fewer babies, it hangs around in the genome. Being out of control of your rational priorities certainly increases the number of babies you'll make.

after Anonymous brought in its Real Name Policy. They

There was a whole subculture of mentalists who spent their nights breaking into boarded-up tube stations, forgotten sewers, abandoned buildings, and other places you just aren't meant to be.