Quotes from Cory Doctorow

Every time I hear someone saying that money is bullshit, I check to see how much money they have.

It's as if the railroad were looming on the horizon, and the most visionary thing the futurists of the day can think of to say about it is that these iron horses will have a disastrous effect on the hardworking manufacturers of oat-bags for horses.

The important thing is to convince people to make and share useful things. Fighting with greedy douches who don't share doesn't do that. Making more, living under conditions of abundance, that does it.

think that the tragedy of human existence is our world is run by people who are really good at kidding themselves, like your father. Your dad manages to kid himself that he's rich and powerful because he's the cream and has risen to the top. But he's not stupid. He knows he's kidding himself. So underneath that top layer of bullshit is another, more aware belief system: the belief that everyone else would kid themselves the same way he does, if they had the chance.

Nothing. But who shuts down a machine with five years uptime? That's like euthanizing your grandmother.

Look, there are as many walkaway philosophies as there are walkaways, but mine is, 'the stories you tell come true.' If you believe everyone is untrustworthy, you'll build that into your systems so that even the best people have to act like the worst people to get anything done. If you assume people are okay, you live a much happier life.

Uništio sam mu to uvjerenje. Bilo je lažno, naravno, ali održavalo ga je na životu. Vidjevši ga onako jadnog i slomljenog, zapitao sam se je li bolje biti svjestan i o?ajan ili živjeti u raju za budale.

Content, huh? Ha! Where's the container?

Digital locks are roach motels: copyrighted works check in, but they don't check out. Creators and investors lose control of their business—they become commodity suppliers for a distribution channel that calls all the shots. Anti-circumvention isn't copyright protection: it's middleman protection.

So far, I've managed to spend more time free than behind bars. Paranoia is my friend.

The time to act is when you still have privilege and power, not when you've had it stripped from you.

The Nazi cipher was called Enigma, and they used a little mechanical computer called an Enigma Machine to scramble and unscramble the messages they got.

the point of fake news isn't just to make it so that no one can tell what's true, it's to make it so that no one cares anymore, so that when you try to get all your friends to go out and march about something that they should already be thinking about, they're all like, 'Eh, is that even real?' Your enemies don't need people to disagree with you, they just need people not to care.

That's because humans are imperfect, so they make errors, which is why every book you've ever read has typos in it.

Impatience, not fear, is the mind-killer.

Botnets are supremely powerful, since they can comprise thousands, even hundreds of thousands of computers, scattered all over the Internet, connected to juicy high-speed connections and running on fast home PCs. Those PCs normally function on behalf of their owners, but when the botmaster calls them, they rise like zombies to do his bidding.

I miss the days when forensic accountancy and security engineering were distinct fields.

On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

The great mystery of being a human being is trying to figure out WTF all those other human beings are doing.

So it fell to Lil to make sure that there were no bugs in the meager attractions of Liberty Square: the Hall of the Presidents, the Liberty Belle riverboat, and the glorious Haunted Mansion, arguably the coolest attraction to come from the fevered minds of the old-time Disney Imagineers.

There's more than one way to be smart. People like my dad assume that because they're smart about being evil bastards, they're smart about everything—

All secrets are deep. All secrets become dark. That is in the nature of secrets

Any data you collect will probably leak, any data you retain will definitely leak, and we're putting data-collection capability into fucking lightbulbs now.

From there, it was time for dinner: roaring fires, meat popping on spits, tofu sizzling on skillets ((it's northern California, a vegetarian option is not optional), and a style of eating and drinking that can only be described as quaffing.