Cory Doctorow Quotes

..[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 good versus evil, Dan. You don't want to be a post-person. You want to stay human. The rides are human. We each mediate them through our own experience. We're physically inside of them, and they talk to us through our senses. What Debra's people are building — it's hive-mind [stuff:]. Directly implanting thoughts! Jesus! It's not an experience, it's brainwashing!

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.

What's the point of a houseful of books you've already read?

I lived in the future that they were talking about in the ride, but we didn't have “progress” anymore. We’d outgrown progress. What we had was change. Things changed whenever anyone wanted to change them: design and launch a fleet of wumpuses, or figure out a way to put an emotional antenna in your head, or create a fleet of killer robots, or invent immortality, or gengineer your goats to give silk. Just do it. It'll catch on, or it won't. Maybe it'll catch itself on. Then the world is…different. Then someone else changes it.
The status quo doesn't protect itself, it needs defending if it's going to stay put. The problem is that technology gives more of an advantage to an attacker than to a defender. A defender needs to mount a perfect defense. An attacker needs to find one hole in the defense. So once technology gets going, anything can be knocked down—evil doesn't stand—but nothing much can be erected in its place.

The future's a weirder place than we thought it would be when we were little kids.

Right, and you point out something important which is that people who don’t want to pay, people who are pirates, don’t get bothered by the DRM, they go out and buy the cracked books or download the cracked books for free. It’s only people who are foolish enough to pay for them that get locked into these platforms.

Again, I was torn between the impulse to hang up on him and to hear more. Nosiness won (nosiness always wins; bets on nosiness are a sure thing).

I used to want to understand how the world worked. Little things, like heavy stuff goes at the bottom of the laundry bag, or big things, like the best way to get a boy to chase you is to ignore him, or medium things, like if you cut an onion under running water your eyes won't sting, and if you wash your fingers afterwards with lemon-juice they won't stink.
I used to want to know all the secrets, and every time I learned one, I felt like I'd taken — a step. On a journey. To a place. A destination: to be the kind of person who knew all this stuff, the way everyone around me seemed to know all this stuff. I thought that once I knew enough secrets, I'd be like them.

It turns out that teaching is one of those things like raising a kid or working out—sometimes amazing, often difficult and painful, but, in hindsight, amazing.

Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

I have given this offer more consideration than it is due already. Now, fuck off. Then keep fucking off. Fuck off until you come up to a gate with a sign saying ‘You Can’t Fuck Off Past Here.’ Climb over the gate, dream the impossible dream, and keep fucking off forever.

But now I think that there’s no reason that Mrs. Dotta’s job is more important than my mother’s job. Mamaji wouldn’t have a job without Mrs. Dotta’s factory, but Mrs. Dotta wouldn’t have a factory without Mamaji’s work, right?

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.