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Marcus Yallow would leak all of this information with a righteous, self-destructive entitlement that you had to be a white dude to really even approximate, that confidence that you wouldn’t end up in jail, that you wouldn’t get rendered to Syria.
there are too many big shots with stars on their shoulders whose personal empires are based on the status quo.
Two days later, I was on my way to the Green Zone in an up-armored Hummer, sandwiched between four goons, watching the desert unfurl through the smoked windows.
I mean, I know how to make a phone harder to wiretap, but aiming angry rich people at powerful police forces? That was sorcery.
“My point, Marcus, is that if you want to protect people from spying, you might just have to protect them from computers, not with computers.”
And the teacher says, ‘Don’t go down an alley at 2 a.m., and if you do, choose one that’s well lit, with people around you.’”
The opposite of abstinence isn’t promiscuity, it’s fucking who you choose, under circumstances you give some thought to.”
technology vegans.”
They’d been watching you and then you did something that suggested that you’d figured out what they were doing. Before you did that, they thought you might be dangerous. Once you did it, they decided you had to be dangerous.”
I was the kind of nightmare student who calculated the minimum work necessary for a C-minus and did exactly, precisely that, with such polish and perfection that the teachers knew exactly what I was doing.
She’d had to be ten times better than me to get 10 percent of the slack I’d gotten.
In reality, she was an executive secretary who had wiped the nose and held the hands of an unending parade of mediocre white men who had been promoted through the ranks of Bank of America and never cared to bring along the personal assistant who’d been shopping for their wives and answering their emails.
Crypto and gadgets might be securable against enemy spies and criminals—maybe, depending on how targeted you were—but when it came to the government whose police force had jurisdiction over you, could arrest you and take your stuff away, it was game over.
They clearly thought that the kind of spying they were so hard for was going to be exclusively directed at other people.
it’s getting worse because of people like you, contractors. We’re moving all the really bad stuff into your in-baskets, writing you fat checks, then your bosses lobby my bosses to do more of it. Then, when my boss is ready to quit, your boss gives him a job at five times his government pay,
But if you fire everyone who’s ever squeezed off a couple more rounds than necessary, you’ll end up with no one at all, or a bunch of pacifists guarding your back.
People hear Dr. King’s quote and they think, oh, well, if the arc of history is going to bend toward justice then all we have to do is sit back and wait for it. But the truth is, it bends because we make it bend, and the instant we let up, even a little, it snaps back.”
The Masha way was to take the payoff, move along, live to fight another day. The Marcus way, the Kriztina way, the Tanisha way, was to burn every bridge, piss in the ashes, and then run directly into the machine-gun nest.
Ulysses pacts aren’t an admission of weakness, they’re a show of strength: a way to use your strong self against your weak self.
The problem isn’t just racism, it’s hyperbolic discounting.”
“But the human brain really sucks at pricing those long-away risks. It makes some sense to lower the value of things that are far away—
They’re discounting the discomfort of living in a police state a couple years down the line by nearly one hundred percent.”
The time to act is when you still have privilege and power, not when you’ve had it stripped from you.”
The wrong question is ‘who’s to blame,’ the right question is ‘what do we do with these facts,’ so let’s ask it.”
You either bend the arc, or it bends you: you stand up, or you surrender. There’s no middle ground, friends.”
“This isn’t an offer you’ll get again, Masha. Think carefully.” “I have given this offer more consideration than it is due already. 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.”
I spoiled it by involuntarily grinning—in Boris, only idiots smile easily.
Was it just a coincidence that the only women who rose through the ranks in this industry acted like poster children for toxic masculinity?
because you’re the snoops that America deserves, not like the scum you run into in the lobby of your branding agency.”
They weren’t lairs of supervillains: they were open-plan offices full of awkward nerds maintaining buggy code that their marketing departments had overpromised on. They were Dilberts, not Dr. Evils.
the tortured transmissions made a sound I can only describe as eldritch.
Get out of town. Get out of the country. Change your name. Get another passport from some Caribbean tax haven and start sending your résumé around to failed states.
Somewhere, in a compartment, a small and stupid dream of doing something brave and foolish died.
My problem wasn’t your stupid father. It wasn’t my beautiful, stubborn daughter. You were my solution, not my problem. Other people are never the problem. Sometimes, though, they’re the solution.”
ordered farm-to-table everything and a superfood smoothie made from pureed sunshine and virtue and took out my phone.
These bros were crushing it 24/7 and that meant eating nothing but ketogenic slurry and running your ass around in shorts for hours every weekend in deadly serious competition in a park that had once been full of laughing Latinx kids horsing around.
“You’re very persuasive.” I’ll probably die if I take your advice. And there’s a good chance it won’t be a nice death.
No one born today would have all that. San Francisco was a game of musical chairs where the music was speeding up and the chairs were being yanked away.
now just having a chair marked you as a one-percenter.
The world was going through a phase-shift, what had been a smooth grade from poor to rich, with plenty in the middle, was becoming a cliff.
Of course, I’d be getting rich because I’d be helping people much richer than me hang on to their money and figure out who to arrest before the guillotines could be erected outside their walled estates.
In a world of winners and losers, choosing the losing side wasn’t going to help anyone, least of all myself.
All of this was self-serving, sure—it wasn’t just ethical cover for an expedient way of keeping my skin intact, but also oiled with the most expensive lotions the world’s luxury duty-free stores had to offer. But self-serving wasn’t the same as wrong.
If the system—whatever that meant—could give these people a life like this, then maybe all those people hanging out with Tanisha needed to figure out how to be more like them.
Every city was beautiful when you found the right place to stand. I was going to get me one of those.
She never tried to disguise her age, wore it in a kind of mannish way, the way the old Borises in Slovstakia did. I am very old, and that means I survived this long. Ask yourself: What must I have done for that to be true?
Good clients know that someday they will have to face the world and explain what and why they bought from us.
you want to be in the business of supplying anti-dissident tools to local governments and you’re going to freak out every time some dissidents show up to object, maybe you’re in the wrong line of work.”
The thing is, I’d always known that compartments weren’t a good thing. They were just the least terrible thing I had. Technology debt is when you cheat a barely functional solution to an important problem early in the development cycle, telling yourself that you’ll revisit your fugly hack later and put something real in its place.
The longer you carry the debt, the more interest you have to pay, as you write more code that depends on the eldritch topologies of your hacky module, all of which will break as soon as you fix the original problem.
