Quotes from Cory Doctorow

Sysadmins don't take holidays

But you technical people have a disease: it's called 'solutionism.' You see every challenge as a problem and every problem as having a solution and every solution as being a piece of technology. You hare off after those solutions without ever stopping to see whether there's another, worse problem that'll burst into life the moment the current one is 'solved.

Here, take this. It'll give you a boost. – You spent 90 gold on this?? – 90 gold is nothing when you're the baddest bitch in the virtual universe.

Technology won't save their asses. We know that better than anyone. Technology is a tool that gives us the space to make political change. Politics are a tool we use to open the space for making better technology. It's like parallel parking: you go as far as you can in one direction, then back up and go as far as you can in the other. Use tech to make political achievements, use politics to improve tech. Back and forth.

I'm not magic. You lead yourselves.

the most expensive champagne in the world is cheap when compared with inkjet ink, which costs all of a penny a gallon to make wholesale.

That would be like telling people not to send nudes. It doesn't work.

I felt one hundred feet tall, made of solid gold, and on fire.

Because as hard as it is to win by fighting, it's impossible to win by doing nothing.

One thing I learned in all my years as a tech person: tech is more about sales than it is about code.

The worst part was that the Brit's reportage was just spleen-filled editorializing on the lack of ethics in the valley's board-rooms (a favorite subject of hers, which no doubt accounted for his fellow-feeling), and it was also the crux of Kettlewell's schtick. The spectacle of an exec who talked ethics enraged Rat-Toothed more than the vilest baby-killers. He was the kind of revolutionary who liked his firing squads arranged in a circle.

When they called boarding for my flight, I got that going-back-to-the-USA feeling. I always went back, no matter how fucked up it was, because America, fuck yeah: milkshakes and giant movie theaters and highways and barbecue and simple politics with only two parties that mostly agreed on mostly everything that mattered, like bombing the shit out of everywhere else.

Talk to your neighbors. Make them promise to vote. Make them promise to take the country back from the torturers and thugs. The people who laughed at my friends as they lay fresh in their graves at the bottom of the harbor. Make them promise to talk to their neighbors. Most of us choose none of the above. It's not working. You have to choose — choose freedom.

It was the fact that there was all this terrible stuff and no one seemed to be able to do anything about it.

These guys are the world's biggest welfare queens, after all—suck up government money in military contracts, use it to issue bonds, get the government to pass laws that make your bonds into safer bets, then go after even bigger and better laws. I'm guessing they never spend a penny if they can get Uncle Sucker to foot the bill.

Marcus is a great example of that way of thinking. He's always looking for ways a security system fails.

you want to be in charge of your machines, you have to learn to write code.

Never underestimate the power of a kid who is time-rich and cash-poor, as a foolish boy once

The merc was more than a person: like a spaceship launch, her existence implied thousands of skilled people, generations of experts, wars, treaties, scholarship, and supply-chain management. Every one of them was all that.

They say that it's down to individual choice and responsibility, but reality is that you can't personally shop your way out of climate change. If your town reuses glass bottles, that does one thing. If it recycles them, it does something else. If it landfills them, that's something else, too. Nothing you do, personally, will affect that, unless it's you, personally, getting together with a lot of other people and making a difference.

Sysadmins are the unsung heroes of the century, and if they're not busting you for sending racy IMs or engaging in unprofessional email conduct, it's purely out of their own goodwill.

Trading privacy for security is stupid enough; not getting any actual security in the bargain is even more stupid.

Per poco Salima non scoppiò a ridere. Se lo faceva lei era un crimine, se lo metteva in vendita un'azienda era un prodotto. Qualsiasi cosa poteva diventare un prodotto.

What the fuck do we need money for? 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. Steve, the problem isn't that people spend their money the wrong way, or that the wrong people have money. The problem is money. Money only works if there isn't enough to go around—