For the Win Quotes

“He hated it when adults told him he only felt the way he did because he was young. As if being young was like being insane or drunk, like the convictions he held were hallucinations caused by a mental illness that could only be cured by waiting five years.”
― Cory Doctorow, For the Win

“It's the stupid questions that have some of the most surprising and interesting answers. Most people never think to ask the stupid questions.”
― Cory Doctorow, For the Win

“The future's a weirder place than we thought it would be when we were little kids.”
― Cory Doctorow, For the Win

“The first casualty of any battle is the plan of attack.”
― Cory Doctorow, For the Win

“We're going to fight this battle with everything we have, and we will probably lose. But then we will fight it again, and we will lose a little less, for this battle will win us many supporters. And then we'll lose *again*. And *again*. And we will fight on. Because as hard as it is to win by fighting, it's impossible to win by doing nothing.”
― Cory Doctorow, For the Win

“The fact is, almost everything you do is collaborative. Somewhere out there, someone else had a hand it it.”
― Cory Doctorow, For the Win

“The companies are multinational--why should labor still stick to borders?”
― Cory Doctorow, For the Win

“Somewhere, in a distant land he barely knew the name of, people had stopped buying washing machines, and so his city had died.”
― Cory Doctorow, For the Win

“The fact was, there wasn't room on earth for a couple million gold-farmers to turn into high-paid video-game executives. The fact was, if you had to slice the pie into enough pieces to give one to everyone, you'd end up slicing them so thin you could see through them. "When 30,000 people share an apple, no one benefits -- especially not the apple." It was a quote one of his economics profs had kept written in the corner of his white-board, and any time a student started droning on about compassion for the poor, the old prof would just tap the board and say, "Are you willing to share your lunch with 30,000 people?”
― Cory Doctorow, For the Win

“The number of games went up or down according to the brutal, elegant logic of the economics of fun:
a certain amount of difficulty
plus
a certain amount of your friends
plus
a certain amount of interesting strangers
plus
a certain amount of reward
plus
a certain amount of opportunity
equaled
fun”
― Cory Doctorow, For the Win

“There were dumplings on the train, sold by grim men and women with deep lines cut into their faces by years and worry and hunger and misery. This was the provinces, the outer territories, the mysterious China that had sent millions of girls and boys to Canton to earn their fortunes in the Pearl River Delta. Matthew knew all their strange accents, he spoke their strange Mandarin language, but he was Cantonese, and these were not his people.

Those were not his dumplings.”
― Cory Doctorow, For the Win

“And that's the real reason the powerful fear open systems and networks. If anyone can set up a free voicecall to anyone else in the world, using the net, then we can all communicate with the same ease that's standard for the high and mighty. [...]

And if any worker, anywhere, can communicate with any other worker, anywhere, for free, instantaneously, without the boss's permission, then, brother, look out, because the Coase cost of demanding better pay, better working conditions and a slice of the pie just got a *lot* cheaper. And the people who have the power aren't going to sit still and let a bunch of grunts take it away from them.”
― Cory Doctorow, For the Win

“But what if all the workers we went to said the same thing? What if, everywhere he [the boss] went, there were workers saying, 'We are worth so much,' and 'We will not be treated this way,' and 'You cannot take away our jobs unless there is a just reason for doing so'? What if all workers, everywhere, demanded this treatment?”
― Cory Doctorow, For the Win

“But now I think that there’s no reason that Mrs. Dotta’s job is more important than my mother’s job. Mamaji wouldn’t have a job without Mrs. Dotta’s factory, but Mrs. Dotta wouldn’t have a factory without Mamaji’s work, right?”
― Cory Doctorow, For the Win

“She had been beaten down by too many boys and men, too much hurt and poverty and fear. This was what Mala was destined to become, someone who ran from her attackers because she couldn’t afford to anger them. She wouldn’t do it.”
― Cory Doctorow, For the Win

“I’m not magic. You lead yourselves.”
― Cory Doctorow, For the Win

“Because as hard as it is to win by fighting, it’s impossible to win by doing nothing.”
― Cory Doctorow, For the Win

“Gandhi admitted to beating his wife. He was a great man, but not a saint.” He swallowed. “No one mentions that Gandhi had all that violence inside him. I think it makes him better, because it means that his way wasn’t just some natural instinct he was born with. It was something he battled for, in his own mind, every day.”
― Cory Doctorow, For the Win

“all this important stuff has *no one in charge of it.* Some people claim to be, but they're in charge of one tiny piece of it, and maybe they think *their* piece is a brake or a steering wheel, but they're wrong. The world's economy is a runaway train, the driver dead at the switch, the passengers clinging on for dear life as their possessions go flying off the freight-cars and out the windows, and each curve in the tracks threatens to take it off the rails altogether.
There's a small number of people in the back of the train who fiercely argue about when it will go off the rails, and whether the train can be slowed down by everyone just calming down and acting as though everything was all right. These people are the economists, and some of the first-class passengers pay them very well for their predictions about whether the train is doing all right and which side of the car they should lean into to prevent their hats from falling off on the next corner.
Everyone else ignores them.”
― Cory Doctorow, For the Win

“In those hours where he'd planned for the [possible future] demise of his family's fortune, he'd settled quickly on the easiest job he could step into: Mechanical Turk.
The Turks were an army of workers in gamespace. All you had to do was prove that you were a decent player - the game had the stats to know it - and sign up, and then log in whenever you wanted a shift. The game would ping you any time a player did something the game didn't know how to interpret - talked too intensely to a non-player character, stuck a sword where it didn't belong, climbed a tree that no one had bothered to add any details to - and you'd have to play spot referee. You'd play the non-player character, choose a behavior for the stabbed object, or make a decision from a menu of possible things you might find in a tree.
It didn't pay much, but it didn't take much time, either. Wei-Dong had calculated that if he played two computers - something he was sure he could keep up - and did a new job every twenty seconds each, he could make as much as the senior managers at his father's company. He'd have to do it for ten hours a day, but he'd spent plenty of weekends playing for twelve or even fourteen hours a day, so hell, it was practically money in the bank.”
― Cory Doctorow, For the Win