254 Quotes by Cory Doctorow

All secrets become deep. All secrets become dark. That’s in the nature of secrets.

The proprietary advantage once enjoyed by companies who assembled teams under their own roofs and used them only on their own products has been surrendered in the rush to attain some semblance of “lean, efficient” flexibility.

For decades, computers have been helping us to remember, but now it’s time for them to help us to ignore.

Content isn’t king. If I sent you to a desert island and gave you the choice of taking your friends or your movies, you’d choose your friends – if you chose the movies, we’d call you a sociopath. Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.

One thing I learned in all my years as a tech person: tech is more about sales than it is about code.

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

Real invention is a process of repeated, crushing failure that leads, very rarely, to a success. If you want to succeed faster, there’s nothing for it but to fail faster and better.

These guys are the world’s biggest welfare queens, after all – suck up government money in military contracts, use it to issue bonds, get the government to pass laws that make your bonds into safer bets, then go after even bigger and better laws. I’m guessing they never spend a penny if they can get Uncle Sucker to foot the bill.

That’s why you never hear politicians talking about ‘citizens,’ it’s all ‘taxpayers,’ as though the salient fact of your relationship to the state is how much you pay. Like the state was a business and citizenship was a loyalty program that rewarded you for your custom with roads and health care.