Cory Doctorow Quotes

Stories are propaganda, virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves directly into your emotions.

The important thing about security systems isn’t how they work, it’s how they fail.

The opposite of esprit d'escalier is the way that life's embarrassments come back to haunt us even after they're long past. I could remember every stupid thing I'd ever said or done, recall them with picture-perfect clarity. Any time I was feeling low, I'd naturally start to remember other times I felt that way, a hit parade of humiliations coming one after another to my mind.

The companies are multinational — why should labor still stick to borders?

Businesses are great structures for managing big projects. It’s like trying to develop the ability to walk without developing a skeleton. Once in a blue moon, you get an octopus, but for the most part, you get skeletons. Skeletons are good shit.

The way out of a crisis was to deal with it as it was, not as you wished it were.

Take it from someone who's read the Wikipedia entry: this is how the Ottoman Empire was won: madden horsemen fueled by lethal jet-black coffee-mud.

But if you're not prepared to learn from the teachers that life gives you, you'll always be ignorant.

This stuff only works in practice. In theory, it’s a mess.

I fireballed him as he was seeking out treasure after we wiped out a band of orcs, playing rock-paper-scissors with each orc to determine who would prevail in combat. This is a lot more exciting than it sounds.

It's quite civilized, and a little weird. You go running after someone through the woods, catch up with him, bare your teeth, and sit down to play a little roshambo.

He had them as spellbound as a room full of Ewoks listening to C-3PO.

..[Enshittification] is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

It's the stupid questions that have some of the most surprising and interesting answers. Most people never think to ask the stupid questions.

The problem with world hunger is that rich, powerful governments are more than happy to send guns and money to dictators and despots who'll use food to control their populations and line their pockets. There is no 'world hunger' problem. There's a corruption problem. There's a greed problem. There's a gullibility problem...."
"So there's a corruption problem," I said. "Point taken. How about if we make a solution for the corruption problem, then? Maybe we could build some kind of visualizer that shows you if your Congresscritter is taking campaign contributions from companies and then voting for laws that benefit them?"
"What, you mean like every single one of them?

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