Quotes by Cory Doctorow

“The number of games went up or down according to the brutal, elegant logic of the economics of fun:a certain amount of difficultyplusa certain amount of your friendsplusa certain amount of interest...”

“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 million...”

“New media don’t succeed because they’re like the old media, only better: they succeed because they’re worse than the old media at the stuff the old media is good at, and better at the stuff the old...”

“Funny, for all surveillance, Osama bin Laden is still free—and we're not. Guess who's winning the "war on terror?”

“What if I got hit by lightning while walking with an umbrella? Ban umbrellas! Fight the menace of lightning!”

“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 ha...”

“We’re not making a world without greed, Jacob. We’re making a world where greed is a perversion. Where grabbing everything for yourself instead of sharing is like smearing yourself with shit: gross...”

“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 spe...”

“It is a mistake to let aesthetics drive your rational decision making.”

“There's something to the idea of the autonomous character. Big chunks of our wetware are devoted to simulating other people, trying to figure out if we are likely to fight or fondle them. It's unsu...”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 r...”

“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 ...”

“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 corporat...”

“As someone once said, Just because you're not interested in politics does not mean that politics won't be interested in you. And staying away from politics either because you think tech will make l...”

“It's impossible to overstate how bonkers the idea of sabotaging cryptography is to people who understand information security. ... Use deliberately compromised cryptography, that has a back door th...”

“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 re...”

“Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop.”

“Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw ...”