Cory Doctorow Quotes
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No one should do a job he can do in his sleep.
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Larry poured himself a coffee. 'I hate when they come in here with computers. They sit forever at their tables, and they don't talk to nobody, it's like having a place full of statues or zombies.'
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Lying on my hotel bed, mesmerized by the lazy turns of the ceiling fan, I pondered the possibility that I was nuts. It wasn’t unheard of, even in the days of the Bitchun Society, and even though there were cures, they weren’t pleasant.
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This is why I loved technology: if you used it right, it could give you power and privacy.
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I lived long enough to see the cure for death; to see the rise of the Bitchun Society, to learn ten languages; to compose three symphonies; to realize my boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World; to see the death of the workplace and of work.
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I swore I'd be done, and that would be the end of it. And now I am. There isn't a single place left on-world that isn't part of the Bitchun Society. There isn't a single thing left that I want any part of.
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Open platforms and experimental amateurs … eventually beat out the spendy, slick pros. … Relying on incumbents to produce your revolutions is not a good strategy. They're apt to take all the stuff that makes their products great and try to use technology to charge you extra for it, or prohibit it altogether.
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I'm of the opinion that science fiction writers suck at predicting the future. We mostly go around describing the present in futuristic clothes - (such as) Mary Shelley, Bill Gibson, and many others.
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Any time someone puts a lock on something you own against your wishes, and doesn't give you the key, they're not doing it for your benefit.
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One form of math denial is the belief in the ability to make computers that prevent copyright infringement. Computers only ever work by making copies: restricting copying on the internet is like restricting wetness in water.
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The Bitchun Society has had much experience with restores from backup-in the era of the cure for death, people live pretty recklessly. Some people get refreshed a couple dozen times a year.
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Engineers are all basically high-functioning autistics who have no idea how normal people do stuff.
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First-time novelists have a tough row to hoe. Our publishers don’t have a lot of promotional budget to throw at unknown factors like us. Mostly, we rise and fall based on word-of-mouth.
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It's not necessarily about what career you pick. It's about how you do what you do.
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All secrets are deep. All secrets become dark. That's in the nature of secrets.
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I'm not a lawyer- I'm a kind of mouthpiece/activist type, though occasionally they shave me and stuff me into my Bar Mitzvah suit and send me to a standards body or the UN to stir up trouble. I spend about three weeks a month on the road doing completely weird stuff like going to Microsoft to talk about DRM.
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It is a mistake to let aesthetics drive your rational decision making.
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Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is time rich and cash poor.
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The Bitchun Society had all but done away with any sort of dull, repetitious labor, and what remained-tending bar, mopping toilets-commanded Whuffie aplenty and a life of leisure in your off-hours.
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A tablet without software is just an inconveniently fragile and poorly reflective mirror, so the thing I want to be sure of when I buy a device is that I don't have to implicitly trust one corporation's judgment about what software I should and shouldn't be using.
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I think that if I’m still here in ten thousand years, I’m going to be crazy as hell. Ten thousand years, pal! Ten thousand years ago, the state-of-the-art was a goat. You really think you’re going to be anything recognizably human in a hundred centuries?
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Abnormal is so common, it's practically normal.