Quotes from Cory Doctorow

Freedom isn't something technology gives you, technology is something you use to get freedom.

But the people who had to use the software were never actually consulted in the purchase cycle, so why bother to

But the people who had to use the software were never actually consulted in the purchase cycle, so why bother to make the software any good for those people?

You're also not white. You ever hear those heritage-not-hate types, that myth that the Irish were the first slaves in America? They're an interesting bunch. They're so close, you know, so close to understanding that whiteness is a thing that other people choose for you. People are white if whiteness is endowed upon them by the wider whiteness. It starts before birth and carries on after you're dead. And what whiteness gives, it can take away.

He ended up in this place because these supposed pals of his had screwed up. He knew that he was going to end up making up with them, going to end up getting deeper into this. He knew that this was how good people did shitty things: one tiny rotten compromise at a time. Well, he wasn't going to go there.

Not even PEBKAC this time," Van said. Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair.

you're convinced scarce things are fairly allocated—but it's the same circular meritocratic argument that Etcetera annihilated for my dad: markets are the fairest way to figure out who should get what, and the markets have produced the current terrible allocation, therefore the current terrible allocation is the best solution to a hard problem.

I'd rather be a criminal underground than a secret police.

I don't think that the average person is sixty percent good and forty percent prick. I think that the average person sometimes kids himself that he's the center of the universe, and it's okay if he does something that he'd be pissed about if someone else did it to him, and tries not to think about it too hard.

If we set up a system that makes people compete for acknowledgement, we invite game-playing and states-fiddling, even unhealthy stuff like working stupid hours to beat everyone. A crew full of unhappy people doing substandard work. If you build systems that make people focus on mastery, cooperation, and better work, we'll have a beautiful inn full of happy people working together well.

she'd looked around the badlands, set down her pack, emptied her pockets of anything worth stealing, put extra underwear in a bag, and walked out onto the Niagara escarpment, past the invisible line that separated civilization from no-man's-land, out of the world as it was and into the world as it could be.

He's a sucking chest wound of a human being. But if you're going to have a jailer, better a clueless one than one who's really on the ball.

All evil in the world is the result of an imbalance between the people who benefit from shenanigans and the people who get screwed by shenanigans.

If you installed something wrong, the system tried to find a way to work around your stupid mistake.

he realized that the whispered conversations about money and jobs that all the grown-ups had all the time were the outward reflection of deep, unending terror. A fear that gnawed at every grown person. A primordial terror of the tiger outside the cave.

A 'job creator' is someone who figures out how to threaten you with starvation unless you do something you don't want to do.

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He had lots of guns, but you can't shoot germs.

Huw backs away. She might actually be a communicant, he realizes in absolute horror. She might actually have a Facebook account! She's mad enough... These days, tales of what Facebook did with its users during the singularity are commonly used to scare naughty children in Wales.

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.

We can live like it's the first days of a better world, not the like it's the first pages of an Ayn Rand novel. Have this place, but you can't have us. We withdraw our company.

Ten thousand years ago, the state-of-the-art was a goat.

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.

I don't know anything about press conferences." "Oh, just google it. I'm sure someone's written an article on holding a successful one. I mean, if the President can manage it, I'm sure you can. He looks like he can barely tie his shoes without help.