Attack Surface (Little Brother, #3)

by Cory Doctorow

some of the jankiest telcoms gear you’ve ever seen, the thrice-brewed teabags of the telecommunications world,

The guy who ran the place liked to talk about how the chlorophyll “oxygenated” your blood—of course chlorophyll only makes oxygen in the presence of sunlight, and if you’ve got sunlight in your colon, you’ve got big problems. Even if you could get grass to fill your back passage with oxygen, it’s not like your asshole has any way to absorb it. I get my oxygen the old-fashioned way: I breathe.

But tell me that you don’t do anything self-contradictory. Tell me that you don’t find yourself dissociating, doing something you know you’ll regret later, something you know is wrong, and doing it anyway, like you’re watching yourself do it.

I hate raisins. Sweetened rabbit turds.

Even that poor crushing floor-guard and I had only glanced off each other, him falling for a performance of me, me deeply disinterested in anyone who’d fall for such a performance.

I saw Ray a couple times more around the office that week and it was as awkward as if we’d hooked up. More awkward. A mere exchange of fluids would have been less consequential. We hadn’t been practicing safe hex.

I discovered that I was grinning like a crazy person, unaccountably pleased at our daring escape, squirting like watermelon seeds out of the grasp of the Oakland PD. It was a dangerously excellent feeling, playing nimble mouse to the lumbering cats of authority.

Most of us are passengers of history, but every once in a while, if you’re very lucky, lightning strikes and you get to drive.

People use technology to make themselves free, by using it to share and organize and connect. Freedom isn’t something technology gives you, technology is something you use to get freedom.”

Marcus rubbed his hands together like a chef about to carve a goose. “I remember when the disinformation campaigns first hit the net, and I thought, ‘Oh shit, we made a monster,’ like all these conspiracy theories and filter bubbles were unstoppable, and there was enough terrible stuff going on in the world that anything was believable. But it turns out that for most people, any stimulus eventually fades—no matter how difficult it is to ignore at the outset. I mean, some people will always be susceptible, the same way some people will always want to play FarmVille or go to Vegas and feed quarters into the slots. But for most people, disinfo just gets … boring.”

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.”