Attack Surface (Little Brother, #3)

by Cory Doctorow

Regexps are one of the secret weapons of hackerdom: compact search strings that parse through huge files for incredibly specific patterns. If you didn’t fuck them up, which most people did.

Anonymouth, a plagiarism detector that used “stylometry” to profile the grammar, syntax, and vocabulary from a training set, then evaluated new texts to see if they seemed to be by the same author.

One of the things I’m good at spotting in myself is the fundamental attribution error: that’s when you assume that your own dumb mistakes are the result of normal, excusable human fallibility, while other people’s mistakes are the result of their fundamental lack of character. As in, “When I forget to do the dishes, that’s because no one’s perfect. When you forget to do the dishes, it’s because you’re a selfish asshole.”

But you technical people have a disease: it’s called ‘solutionism.’ You see every challenge as a problem and every problem as having a solution and every solution as being a piece of technology. You hare off after those solutions without ever stopping to see whether there’s another, worse problem that’ll burst into life the moment the current one is ‘solved.’

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. The smarter your device, the harder it would be for you to outsmart it. Technology didn’t create the brief democratic blip, and it didn’t kill it, but now that it’s dead, technology will sure as shit make sure it never comes back. Those days are done.

The time to act is when you still have privilege and power, not when you’ve had it stripped from you.”

The way out of a crisis was to deal with it as it was, not as you wished it were.

Now, fuck off. Then keep fucking off. Fuck off until you come up to a gate with a sign saying ‘You Can’t Fuck Off Past Here.’ Climb over the gate, dream the impossible dream, and keep fucking off forever.”

Freedom isn’t something technology gives you, technology is something you use to get freedom.”

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, so that when you try to get all your friends to go out and march about something that they should already be thinking about, they’re all like, ‘Eh, is that even real?’ Your enemies don’t need people to disagree with you, they just need people not to care.”