Overclocked Quotes

“The United States of America was a pirate nation for the first one hundred years of its existence, ripping off the patents and trademarks of the imperial European powers it had liberated itself from by blood. By keeping their GDP at home, the U.S. revolutionaries were able to bootstrap their nation into an industrial powerhouse. Now, it seems, their descendants are bent on ensuring that no other country can pull the same trick off.”
― Cory Doctorow, Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present

“Nothing. But who shuts down a machine with five years uptime? That’s like euthanizing your grandmother.”
― Cory Doctorow, Overclocked: More Stories of the Future Present

“Sysadmins are the unsung heroes of the century, and if they’re not busting you for sending racy IMs or engaging in unprofessional email conduct, it’s purely out of their own goodwill.”
― Cory Doctorow, Overclocked: More Stories of the Future Present

“It's as if the railroad were looming on the horizon, and the most visionary thing the futurists of the day can think of to say about it is that these iron horses will have a disastrous effect on the hardworking manufacturers of oat-bags for horses.”
― Cory Doctorow, Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present

“some kind of rot-fungus that infects the world. Things that are good when they’re small and personal grow, and as they grow, their attack surface grows with them, and they get more and more colonized by the fungus, making up stupid policies, doing awful stuff to the people who rely on them and the people who work for them, one particle of fungus at a time, each one just a tiny and totally defensible atomic-sized spore of rot that piles up and gloms onto all the other bits of rot until you’re a walking, suppurating lesion.”
― Cory Doctorow, Overclocked: More Stories of the Future Present

“All evil in the world is the result of an imbalance between the people who benefit from shenanigans and the people who get screwed by shenanigans.”
― Cory Doctorow, Overclocked: More Stories of the Future Present

“I love a good bucket brigade, but they’re surprisingly hard to find. A good bucket brigade is where you accept your load, rotate 180 degrees and walk until you reach the next person, load that person, do another volte-face, and walk until someone loads you. A good bucket brigade isn’t just passing things from person to person. It’s a dynamic system in which autonomous units bunch and debunch as is optimal given the load and the speed and energy levels of each participant. A good bucket brigade is a thing of beauty, something whose smooth coordination arises from a bunch of disjointed parts who don’t need to know anything about the system’s whole state in order to help optimize it. In a good bucket brigade, the mere act of walking at the speed you feel comfortable with and carrying no more than you can safely lift and working at your own pace produces a perfectly balanced system in which the people faster than you can work faster, and the people slower than you can work slower. It is the opposite of an assembly line, where one person’s slowness is the whole line’s problem. A good bucket brigade allows everyone to contribute at their own pace, and the more contributors you get, the better it works.”
― Cory Doctorow, Overclocked: More Stories of the Future Present

“If only,” he said. “If only there was some way to feel that way all the time.” “You couldn’t,” I said, without thinking. “Regression to the mean. The extraordinary always ends up feeling ordinary. Do it for long enough and it’d just be noise.” “You may be right. But I hope you’re not. Somewhere out there, there’s a thing so amazing that you can devote your life to it and never forget how special it is.”
― Cory Doctorow, Overclocked: More Stories of the Future Present

“Screw the end of the world. The world doesn’t end. Humans aren’t the kind of things that have endings.”
― Cory Doctorow, Overclocked: More Stories of the Future Present

“Not even PEBKAC this time,” Van said. Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair.”
― Cory Doctorow, Overclocked: More Stories of the Future Present

“Any time I’m at work at 2:00 a.m., it’s either PEBKAC or Microsloth.”
― Cory Doctorow, Overclocked: More Stories of the Future Present

“the American worker’s enemy isn’t the Mexican worker, it’s the auto manufacturer who screws both of them.”
― Cory Doctorow, Overclocked: More Stories of the Future Present

“Bless the wooly alt. hierarchy and all those who sail in her.”
― Cory Doctorow, Overclocked: More Stories of the Future Present

“But beautiful was not the opposite of terrible. The two could easily coexist.”
― Cory Doctorow, Overclocked: More Stories of the Future Present