Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

“They’re right to be afraid. This world, if you aren’t a success, you’re a failure. If you’re not on top, you’re on the bottom. If you’re in between, you’re hanging on by your fingernails, hoping you can get a better grip before your strength gives out. Everyone holding on is too scared to let go. Everyone on the bottom is too worn down to try. The people on the top? They’re the ones who depend on things staying the way they are.”

“Haven’t you figured it out? Giving money away doesn’t solve anything. Asking the zottarich to redeem themselves by giving money away acknowledges that they deserve it all, should be in charge of deciding where it goes. It’s pretending that you can get rich without being a bandit. Letting them decide what gets funded declares the planet to be a giant corporation that the major shareholders get to direct. It says that government is just middle-management, hired or fired on the whim of the directors.”

“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. Of all the ways that people kid themselves into doing nothing, that one is the most self-serving.”

“His beliefs don’t start with the idea that it’s okay to kid yourself you’re a special snowflake who deserves more cookies than all the other kids. It starts with the idea that it’s human nature to kid yourself and take the last cookie, so if he doesn’t, someone else will, so he had better be the most lavishly self-deluded of all, the most prolific taker of cookies, lest someone more horrible, immoral and greedy than he gets there first and eats all the cookies, takes the plate, and charges rent to drink the milk.”

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.

“The reason they’re so good at making us desperate and selling us shit isn’t that they’re too smart to get conned. It’s because they’re extra-susceptible. They understand how to make us turn on one another in envy and terror because they’re drowning in envy and terror of each other. My dad knows the guy in the next yacht is a bastard who’d slit his throat and steal his empire because my dad is a bastard who’d slit that guy’s throat and steal his empire.

At a time when so many of the people around her treated their bodies as inconvenient meatsuits they were obliged to use as mechas for toting around their precious brains, it was nice to have a piece of her identity that was inextricably bound to her flesh.

“For hundreds of years, people have been trying to get everyone to live gently on the land, but their whole pitch was, ‘hold still and try not to breathe.’ It was all hair-shirt, no glory in nature’s beauty. The environmental prescription has been to act as much as possible like you were already dead. Don’t reproduce. Don’t consume. Don’t trample the earth or you’ll compress the dirt and kill the plants. Every exhalation poisons the atmosphere with CO2. Is it any wonder we haven’t gotten there?

Mouth feel. Another class marker, knowing those two words and having the confidence to use them without feeling bourgie. The dynastic Redwaters could say “mouth feel” without batting an eye, and memorably, cousin Sarah used it to describe a boy she’d met at boarding school in Donetsk.

Snicker

“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. Wrong. Our winning doesn’t mean you don’t get to be greedy. It means people will be ashamed for you, will pity you and want to distance themselves from you. You can be as greedy as you want, but no one will admire you for it.”