Darknet Quotes

“We only see two things in people, Jake’s dad used to say. What we want to see, and what they show us. Neither was the truth, and”
― Matthew Mather, Darknet

“Digital death followed long after physical death.”
― Matthew Mather, Darknet

“For thirty or forty years, through middle age, they would look almost exactly the same, and then all of a sudden the decades would pile on in months.”
― Matthew Mather, Darknet

“We only see two things in people, Jake’s dad used to say. What we want to see, and what they show us. Neither was the truth,”
― Matthew Mather, Darknet

“A cross-country bus tour before the final leg of the election had sounded good on paper last April when they were planning it in New Hampshire. But down here in North Carolina, on a sweltering August morning after sleeping in this coffin on wheels for six days? Not so much.”
― Matthew Mather, Darknet

“You have any whiskey?” A silly question, like asking the Pope if he was Catholic.”
― Matthew Mather, Darknet

“he pressed his feet up and down on the aileron pedals,”
― Matthew Mather, Darknet

“It was like trying to explain using a cellphone to a fish,”
― Matthew Mather, Darknet

“A darknet is a private network where connections are made only between trusted peers, often associated with "underground" web communications and technologies, commonly associated with illegal activity or dissent. Darknets are anonymous, enabling users to communicate with little fear of government or corporate interference.”
― Matthew Mather, Darknet

“She started up an app for the augmented reality glasses she and Shen Shi had been working on as a research project. It did real-time facial recognition of the people you looked at, comparing them to scrapes of social networking sites. Ninety percent of people in Shenzhen had social media accounts. It was a powerful way to view the people around you.”
― Matthew Mather, Darknet

“The kid was OCD, but every psychological disorder had a pay-off. Obsessive-compulsive? Hey, you won’t leave your doors unlocked. Paranoid? Don’t worry about not reading the small print. Psychopath? Hey, at least you won’t be worried about anything too much. Any disorder could be useful in the right moment. Before”
― Matthew Mather, Darknet

“Trying to act normal, with the FBI running from office to office, was like trying to carry on a conversation when having a colonoscopy.”
― Matthew Mather, Darknet

“A living was what you earned, but a life—Jake glanced over his shoulder at his family—a life was what you gave.”
― Matthew Mather, Darknet

“People had a way of aging suddenly when you weren’t looking. For thirty or forty years, through middle age, they would look almost exactly the same, and then all of a sudden the decades would pile on in months.”
― Matthew Mather, Darknet

“To make something in our human image. Like when you imagine God, you think of a grandfather in the sky, but that’s not God. God is indescribable, like these new machine intelligences are to us. You can’t think of it in human terms. It doesn’t have an ego, it doesn’t want to dominate the herd and gain power.”
― Matthew Mather, Darknet

“People saw psychopaths as aberrations, examples of something gone wrong in human programming, but Jake often thought that perhaps we had it wrong. After all, you wouldn’t see a psychopath panic. Maybe psychopaths were the next stage in evolution for the human species. Ruthless and fearless, they were perfectly adapted to the modern world, maybe more evolved. And maybe that was why they”
― Matthew Mather, Darknet

“They’re a Russian mob hacker collective based in Omsk, a small town between Mongolia and Kazakhstan.”
― Matthew Mather, Darknet

“The kid was OCD, but every psychological disorder had a pay-off. Obsessive-compulsive? Hey, you won’t leave your doors unlocked. Paranoid? Don’t worry about not reading the small print. Psychopath? Hey, at least you won’t be worried about anything too much.”
― Matthew Mather, Darknet

“The popular media vilified ‘psychos,’ made them out to be ogres, but Jake knew they possessed the exact qualities celebrated by the modern world: charm, ruthlessness, and a win-at-all-costs mentality. Psychopathy wasn’t black or white, but more a multi-colored rainbow from Ted Bundy to the Dalai Lama, with everyone fitting somewhere in between. Jake often wondered why psychos seemed to surround him. Did he search them out? Or did he just notice them more than most? It was hard to tell.”
― Matthew Mather, Darknet

“Then again, this was the Research Triangle Park. A lot of eggheads. Russ was realistic enough to know he couldn’t expect a lot of intellectuals to show up for one of his speeches.”
― Matthew Mather, Darknet

“When a corporation kills people, it pays fines. Ironic, isn’t it? Pure capitalism, taken to a new level.”
― Matthew Mather, Darknet

“Personally, I think consciousness is an accidental by-product, a feedback loop to conserve resources.”
― Matthew Mather, Darknet

“One hour until the next assassin deadline. Dead-line. An appropriate word. Sean Womack checked his wristwatch and tried to steady his shaking hand. It was noon. Clang. Clang… The clocks of London chimed their consensus. Sixty minutes until the next assassin bet, but he only needed half that. The Assassin Market—a crowd-funded murder collective—was on the hunt for him.”
― Matthew Mather, Darknet

“One issue that I always had with book and film portrayals of the ‘rise of intelligent machines’ was that they always seemed to create these ‘superhuman’ entities that were like human beings in a box, just much smarter and faster than we were (and inevitably seemed to want to destroy the human race). I didn’t see it happening like that, not the ‘first’ time, anyway. The desire to see a novel that explored the rise of the first intelligent machine network, but not characterizing it as a human-like entity, was my inspiration for writing Darknet.”
― Matthew Mather, Darknet