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Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow Books

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Little Brother

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Walkaway

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For The Win

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In Real Life

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Makers

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Homeland

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Context

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Pirate Cinema

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Attack Surface

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Red Team Blues

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“There were no deaths. It was miraculous, but Limpopo had a theory: "I think the bombers lost their nerve. The stables went up during their maintenance cycle, when there'd be no one there. The power plant went up ten minutes later, plenty of time for everyone to be on the lawn, staring at the stables, far from the blast. The inn's explosives, going off hours later? Either we're dealing with a terrorist who sucks at timers, or they wanted to be sure of minimal casualties. It's what you'd do if you wanted to convince your bosses you'd been a good little mad bomber, but didn't want too much blood on your hands.”

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Book:Walkaway
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“Masha, I know you think that the ‘struggle for justice’ is a corny fantasy, but you live in a world where people have weekends, don’t get maimed on the job, and have constitutional rights, at least some of the time. You live in a world where I’m not someone’s property, where I can vote, where I can marry a woman or a man. That’s because sometimes, the struggle for justice gets somewhere. Do you know how that happens? Do you have a theory of change?” I shrugged. “The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice?” She made a fart noise. “You know what makes it bend, Masha? People hauling on that mother, with all their strength, with all their lives. We pull and pull and pull, and then, bit by bit, it bends. People hear Dr. King’s quote and they think, oh, well, if the arc of history is going to bend toward justice then all we have to do is sit back and wait for it. But the truth is, it bends because we make it bend, and the instant we let up, even a little, it snaps back.”

Inspiring
Book:Attack Surface
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“I'd never really believed in terrorists before--I mean, I knew that in the abstract there were terrorists somewhere in the world, but they didn't really represent any risk to me. There were millions of ways that the world could kill me--starting with getting run down by a drunk burning his way down Valencia--that were infinitely more likely and immediate than terrorists. Terrorists kill a lot fewer people than bathroom falls and accidental electrocutions. Worrying about them always struck me as about as useful as worrying about getting hit by lightning.”

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Book:Little Brother
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“She had parents. People who loved her. Every human was a hyper-dense node of intense emotional and material investment. Speaking meant someone had spent thousands of hours cooing to you. Those lean muscles, the ringing tone of command - their inputs were from all over the world, carefully administered. The mere was more than a person; like a spaceship launch, her existence implied thousands of skilled people, generations of experts, wars, treaties, scholarship, and supply-chain management. Every one of them was all that.”

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Book:Walkaway
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“This is beautiful, good and virtuous. It is most prolific and healthy without us. So the best human course is to absent ourselves from it, to do what the original Thetfordians did, but on a grand scale. Evacuate the planet." "Uh." "Think of it for a minute. I'm not talking mass suicide. I'm talking about balancing our material needs with our aesthetic or, if you want to call it that, our spiritual needs. We'd be seriously bummed if all the wilderness disappeared. We care about Earth and the things that live here because we co-evolved with them, so our brains are the products of millions of years' worth of selection for being awed and satisfied by this kind of place. At the same time, we're consultive top predators with the propensity to engage in self-evolution. We've hacked Lysenkoism into Darwin.”

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Book:Walkaway
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“Once upon a time, my government turned my city into a police state, kidnapped me, and tortured me. When I got free, I decided that the problem wasn’t the system, but who was running it. Bad guys had gotten into places of high office. We needed good apples. I worked my butt off to get people to vote for good apples. We had elections. We installed the kind of apples everyone agreed would be the kind of apples we could be proud of. They said good things. A few real dirtbags like Carrie Johnstone lost their jobs. And then, well, the good apples turned out to act pretty much exactly like the bad apples. Oh, they had reasons. There were emergencies. Circumstances. It was all really regrettable. But there were always emergencies, weren’t there?”

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Book:Homeland
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“We are the people of the book. We love our books. We fill our houses with books. We treasure books we inherit from our parents, and we cherish the idea of passing those books on to our children. Indeed, how many of us started reading with a beloved book that belonged to one of our parents? We force worthy books on our friends, and we insist that they read them. We even feel a weird kinship for the people we see on buses or airplanes reading our books, the books that we claim. If anyone tries to take away our books—some oppressive government, some censor gone off the rails—we would defend them with everything that we have. We know our tribespeople when we visit their homes because every wall is lined with books. There are teetering piles of books beside the bed and on the floor; there are masses of swollen paperbacks in the bathroom. Our books are us. They are our outboard memory banks and they contain the moral, intellectual, and imaginative influences that make us the people we are today.”

Books
Author:Cory Doctorow
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“If your ship goes down in the middle of the open water, you don't give up and sink. You tread water, clutch onto a spar, do 'something'." He stopped, wrung his hands. "Realistically speaking, if you're in the middle of the sea, you're a goner. But you tread water until you can't kick another stroke. Not because you're optimistic. I you polled ten random shipwreck victims treading open water in open sea, every one would tell you they're not optimistic. What they are is 'hopeful'. Or at least not hope-'empty'. They don't give up because that means death and living people can sometimes change their situations, while dead ones can't change a fucking thing. I've never been lost at sea, but I think if your buddy was weaker than you, and you were holding him up, you'd kick just as hard, because you'd be hoping for both of you. Because giving up for someone else is even harder than giving up for you." "Now I'm walkaway, I've been shot at and chased from my home, but I can't feature going back to default, because default is the bottom of the sea and walkaway is a floating stick we can clutch. Default has no use for us except as a competition for other non-zottas, someone who'll do someone else's job if they get too uppity and demand to be treated as human beings instead of marginal costs. We are surplus to default's requirements. If they could, they'd sink us. So what we're doing, Gretyl, is exercising hope. It's all you can do when the situation calls for pessimism. Most people who hope have their hopes dashed. That's realism, but everyone whose hopes 'weren't' dashed 'started off by having hope'. Hope's the price of admission. It's still a lotto with shitty odds, but at least it's our lotto. Treading water in default thinking you might become a zotta is playing a lotto you can't win, and whose winners - the zottas - get to keep winning at your expense because you keep playing. Hope's what we're doing. Performing hope, treading water in open ocean with no rescue in sight.”

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Book:Walkaway
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“The US traded its manufacturing sector’s health for its entertainment industry, hoping that Police Academy sequels could take the place of the rustbelt. The US bet wrong. But like a losing gambler who keeps on doubling down, the US doesn’t know when to quit. It keeps meeting with its entertainment giants, asking how US foreign and domestic policy can preserve its business-model. Criminalize 70 million American file-sharers? Check. Turn the world’s copyright laws upside down? Check. Cream the IT industry by criminalizing attempted infringement? Check. It’ll never work. It can never work. There will always be an entertainment industry, but not one based on excluding access to published digital works. Once it’s in the world, it’ll be copied. This is why I give away digital copies of my books and make money on the printed editions: I’m not going to stop people from copying the electronic editions, so I might as well treat them as an enticement to buy the printed objects. But there is an information economy. You don’t even need a computer to participate. My barber, an avowed technophobe who rebuilds antique motorcycles and doesn’t own a PC, benefited from the information economy when I found him by googling for barbershops in my neighborhood. Teachers benefit from the information economy when they share lesson plans with their colleagues around the world by email. Doctors benefit from the information economy when they move their patient files to efficient digital formats. Insurance companies benefit from the information economy through better access to fresh data used in the preparation of actuarial tables. Marinas benefit from the information economy when office-slaves look up the weekend’s weather online and decide to skip out on Friday for a weekend’s sailing. Families of migrant workers benefit from the information economy when their sons and daughters wire cash home from a convenience store Western Union terminal. This stuff generates wealth for those who practice it. It enriches the country and improves our lives. And it can peacefully co-exist with movies, music and microcode, but not if Hollywood gets to call the shots. Where IT managers are expected to police their networks and systems for unauthorized copying – no matter what that does to productivity – they cannot co-exist. Where our operating systems are rendered inoperable by “copy protection,” they cannot co-exist. Where our educational institutions are turned into conscript enforcers for the record industry, they cannot co-exist. The information economy is all around us. The countries that embrace it will emerge as global economic superpowers. The countries that stubbornly hold to the simplistic idea that the information economy is about selling information will end up at the bottom of the pile. What country do you want to live in?”

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Book:Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future
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“Amazon makes 38 billion every year charging merchants for search placement. On average, the first result in an Amazon search is 29 percent more expensive than the best result for your search. Click any of the top four links on the top of your screen, and you'll pay an average of 25 percent more than you would for your best match. On average, that best match is located seventeen places down in an Amazon search result.”

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Book:Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
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“Today’s tech giants have not invented an interop-proof computer. They’ve invented laws that make interoperability illegal unless they give permission for it. A new, complex thicket of copyright, patent, trade secret, noncompete and other IP rights has conjured up a new offense we can think of as “felony contempt of business model”—the right of large firms to dictate how their customers, competitors and even their critics must use their products.”

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Book:The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation
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“The hard problems of reforming social media are the laws that block interoperability and the management of tech giants’ unwillingness to provide interoperability in the absence of these laws. Because Big Tech can lock people into its silos, it can impose high switching costs on users who have the temerity to leave those silos: they can make you surrender your apps, or your data, or your relationships, or your media, or your customer list.”

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Book:The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation
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“And that's the real reason the powerful fear open systems and networks. If anyone can set up a free voicecall to anyone else in the world, using the net, then we can all communicate with the same ease that's standard for the high and mighty. [...] And if any worker, anywhere, can communicate with any other worker, anywhere, for free, instantaneously, without the boss's permission, then, brother, look out, because the Coase cost of demanding better pay, better working conditions and a slice of the pie just got a *lot* cheaper. And the people who have the power aren't going to sit still and let a bunch of grunts take it away from them.”

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Book:For The Win
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“Natalie, as hard as you might find this to believe, I respect you in addition to loving you as your father. I would like the part of you that makes you "you" to survive this adventure. I don't want an automaton with a superficial resemblance to my daughter. I want you to realize all this pissing around with radical politics and campouts with dropouts is not a long-term strategy. I understand you feel guilty about having so much when everyone else has so little, but what good do you think it does to turn your back on reality? You can't wish inequality away.”

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Book:Walkaway
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“When I was an activist in the 1980s, ninety-eight percent of my time was spent stuffing envelopes and writing addresses on them. The remaining two percent was the time we spent figuring out what to put in the envelopes. Today, we get those envelopes and stamps and address books for free. This is so fantastically, hugely different and weird that we haven’t even begun to feel the first tendrils of it.”

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Book:In Real Life
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“There are people already sharing eBooks out there, .. and they do it simply because they love books. You don't buy a second copy of a book, cut the spine off, lay each page on a scanner, run that .tif through an OCR (Optical Character Reader), hand edit the resulting output for errors and then post it online if you don't love the book. it can up to 80 hours to turn a printed novel into an eBook. I figure if someone out there is willing to put in 80 hours of work promoting my book, then I'd prefer they do it in a way that gives a better return to me.”

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Author:Cory Doctorow
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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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Book:Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future
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“The real damage from terrorist attacks doesn't come from the explosion. The real damage is done after the explosion, by the victims, who repeatedly and determinedly attack themselves, giving over reason in favor of terror... Terrorism is about magnifying one mediagenic act of violence into one hundred billion acts of terrorized authoritarian idiocy.”

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Author:Cory Doctorow
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