Quotes from Cory Doctorow

The right to freedom of association is fine, but why shouldn't the cops be allowed to mine your social network to figure out if you're hanging out with gangbangers and terrorists?

Without exception. It's easy to feel hopeless in the face of the difficult issues that we face every day—how could one person effectively resist anything so much larger than herself? Once we stop acting alone, we have a chance for positive change. To protest is to stop and say that you object, to resist is to stop others from going along without thinking and to build alternatives is to give everyone new choices.

Blowing them up or shooting them wasn't right, but a world in which the wicked went about their days frightened of retribution was a more just one than a world where the wicked held their heads high.

A sense of purpose is a wonderful tonic for anxiety.

They'd only been here for a couple of years, only employed twenty people all told, their two-year tax holiday was ending. Place

living people can sometimes change their situations, while dead ones can't change a fucking thing.

Kurt smiled a shy smile. You're just trying to cheer me up, he said. Course I am, Andy said. You deserve to be full of cheer.

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

Communism is an interesting thing to do, nothing I ever want to be.

I'm suspicious of any plan to fix unfairness that starts with 'step one, dismantle the entire system and replace it with a better one,' especially if you can't do anything else until step one is done. Of all the ways that people kid themselves into doing nothing, that one is the most self-serving.

It gave you ironic distance—a very now kind of high. Conspiracy

End of the day, anything that made you discount objective reality and assign a premium to some kind of internal mental state was going to be both pro-survival and pro–status-quo.

Familiar things grew more improbably gossamer. Everything was intertwingled tensegrity meshes that cross-braced themselves when stressed, combining strength and suppleness.

My nose itched. I tried to ignore it, but it got worse and worse, until it was all I could think of, the flaming lance of itch that strobed at the tip of my nostril. Furiously, I wrinkled my face, rattled at my restraints. The doc absentmindedly noticed my gyrations and delicately scratched my nose with a gloved finger. The relief was fantastic. I just hoped my nuts didn't start itching anytime soon.

So long as you keep on pretending that money is anything but a consensus hallucination induced by the ruling elite to convince you to let them hoard the best stuff, you're never going to make a difference.

Death is cured! USA! USA! USA! "This is Canada." "Yeah, but you sound stupid chanting 'Ca-na-da!

The anthropocene is about collective action, not individuals. That's why climate change is such a clusterfuck. In default, they say that it's down to the individual choice and responsibility, but reality is that you can't personally shop your way out of climate change.

discounting' is when you discount something too much, just because it's some time in the future.

Bless the wooly alt. hierarchy and all those who sail in her.

Makes me want to tweak reality's gamma slider.

You never have to sit back and look at the people, the systems, the politics—just the technology that can be used to distort them to suit your needs.

We are all worth something, she said. Zottas are not worth more than the rest of us. Self-Deception makes us into monsters. Selfishness is an excuse to busy your empathy. People are basically good. Live as though it was the first days of a better [nation].

by the time the datapocalypse is obvious even to people whose paychecks depended on denying it, it would be too

It's way too late to decarbonize the surveillance economy.