Attack Surface (Little Brother, #3)

by Cory Doctorow

The truth is that it’s a lot harder to defend than it is to attack.

The truth is a lot harder to defend than it is to attack.

Impatience, not fear, is the mind-killer.

There was the bureaucracy, which was only slightly better at places like Xoth and Xe than it was in the government agencies we serviced, because to do business with the DHS, you had to impedence-match them, have parallel bureaucracies.

The reality is, there was a kind of blip when a minority of working stiffs—white dudes, mostly—held a little more political power, that lasted for less than a century. Now, humanity was returning to its baseline: all or nothing, with a tiny super-rich minority able to control everyone and everything else.

They were locked in a classic tech arms race to locate and seize attention, the same fight that every disinformation bot, con artist, political party, marketing campaign, advertiser, religious figure, jihad fighter, meme warrior, self-publisher, and malware phisher was fighting.

I’d met career politicians, people who’d risen to the highest levels of office in their countries, and they all had that same thing, the work-the-room thing. I didn’t work rooms: I watched them and understood them and attacked them sometimes, but I never worked them. It was weird to watch someone be so good at something I wasn’t even slightly competent at.

the point of fake news isn’t just to make it so that no one can tell what’s true, it’s to make it so that no one cares anymore,