Attack Surface Quotes

“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.”
― Cory Doctorow, Attack Surface

“The way out of a crisis was to deal with it as it was, not as you wished it were.”
― Cory Doctorow, Attack Surface

“In the words of Ice-T, “Do I look like a motherfuckin’ role model?”
― Cory Doctorow, Attack Surface

“That would be like telling people not to send nudes. It doesn’t work.”
― Cory Doctorow, Attack Surface

“One thing I learned in all my years as a tech person: tech is more about sales than it is about code.”
― Cory Doctorow, Attack Surface

“But you technical people have a disease: it’s called ‘solutionism.’ You see every challenge as a problem and every problem as having a solution and every solution as being a piece of technology. You hare off after those solutions without ever stopping to see whether there’s another, worse problem that’ll burst into life the moment the current one is ‘solved.”
― Cory Doctorow, Attack Surface

“Any data you collect will probably leak, any data you retain will definitely leak, and we’re putting data-collection capability into fucking lightbulbs now.”
― Cory Doctorow, Attack Surface

“That’s because humans are imperfect, so they make errors, which is why every book you’ve ever read has typos in it.”
― Cory Doctorow, Attack Surface

“The time to act is when you still have privilege and power, not when you’ve had it stripped from you.”
― Cory Doctorow, Attack Surface

“Masha, I know you think that the ‘struggle for justice’ is a corny fantasy, but you live in a world where people have weekends, don’t get maimed on the job, and have constitutional rights, at least some of the time. You live in a world where I’m not someone’s property, where I can vote, where I can marry a woman or a man. That’s because sometimes, the struggle for justice gets somewhere. Do you know how that happens? Do you have a theory of change?”

I shrugged. “The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice?”

She made a fart noise. “You know what makes it bend, Masha? People hauling on that mother, with all their strength, with all their lives. We pull and pull and pull, and then, bit by bit, it bends. 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.”
― Cory Doctorow, Attack Surface

“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.”
― Cory Doctorow, Attack Surface

“When they called boarding for my flight, I got that going-back-to-the-USA feeling. I always went back, no matter how fucked up it was, because America, fuck yeah: milkshakes and giant movie theaters and highways and barbecue and simple politics with only two parties that mostly agreed on mostly everything that mattered, like bombing the shit out of everywhere else.”
― Cory Doctorow, Attack Surface

“The point is just that people usually only figure out that things are turning bad when they turn bad for them, and by then it’s too late. The time to act is when you still have privilege and power, not when you’ve had it stripped from you.”
― Cory Doctorow, Attack Surface

“Privacy was like cigarettes. No single puff on a cigarette would give you cancer, but smoke enough of the things and they’d kill you dead, and by the time you understood that in your guts, it was too late. Smoking is all up-front pleasure and long-term pain, like cheesecake or sex with beautiful, fucked-up boys. It’s the worst kind of badness, because the consequences arrive so long after—and so far away from—the effects. You can’t learn to play baseball by swinging at the ball with your eyes closed, running home, and waiting six months for someone to call you up and let you know whether you connected. You can’t learn to sort the harmless privacy decisions from the lethal ones by making a million disclosures, waiting ten years, and having your life ruined by one of them. Industry was pumping private data into its clouds like the hydrocarbon barons had pumped CO2 into the atmosphere. Like those fossil fuel billionaires, the barons of the surveillance economy had a vested interest in sowing confusion about whether and how all this was going to bite us in the ass. By the time climate change can no longer be denied, it’ll be too late: we’ll have pumped too much CO2 into the sky to stop the seas from swallowing the world; by the time the datapocalypse is obvious even to people whose paychecks depended on denying it, it would be too late. Any data you collect will probably leak, any data you retain will definitely leak, and we’re putting data-collection capability into fucking lightbulbs now. It’s way too late to decarbonize the surveillance economy.”
― Cory Doctorow, Attack Surface

“Technology won’t save their asses. We know that better than anyone. Technology is a tool that gives us the space to make political change. Politics are a tool we use to open the space for making better technology. It’s like parallel parking: you go as far as you can in one direction, then back up and go as far as you can in the other. Use tech to make political achievements, use politics to improve tech. Back and forth.”
― Cory Doctorow, Attack Surface

“Sometimes hard problems don’t have easy solutions.”
― Cory Doctorow, Attack Surface

“It’s hard to pay your own way when you’re used to someone else picking up the tab.”
― Cory Doctorow, Attack Surface

“The great mystery of being a human being is trying to figure out WTF all those other human beings are doing.”
― Cory Doctorow, Attack Surface

“Never underestimate the power of a kid who is time-rich and cash-poor, as a foolish boy once”
― Cory Doctorow, Attack Surface

“Impatience, not fear, is the mind-killer.”
― Cory Doctorow, Attack Surface

“The reality is, there was a kind of blip when a minority of working stiffs—white dudes, mostly—held a little more political power, that lasted for less than a century. Now, humanity was returning to its baseline: all or nothing, with a tiny super-rich minority able to control everyone and everything else. The smarter your device, the harder it would be for you to outsmart it. Technology didn’t create the brief democratic blip, and it didn’t kill it, but now that it’s dead, technology will sure as shit make sure it never comes back. Those days are done.”
― Cory Doctorow, Attack Surface

“When I forget to do the dishes, that’s because no one’s perfect. When you forget to do the dishes, it’s because you’re a selfish asshole.”
― Cory Doctorow, Attack Surface

“Litvinchuk is a smart man; he implements different tactics for different factions.”
― Cory Doctorow, Attack Surface

“As in, “When I forget to do the dishes, that’s because no one’s perfect. When you forget to do the dishes, it’s because you’re a selfish asshole.”
― Cory Doctorow, Attack Surface

“One of the things I’m good at spotting in myself is the fundamental attribution error: that’s when you assume that your own dumb mistakes are the result of normal, excusable human fallibility, while other people’s mistakes are the result of their fundamental lack of character.”
― Cory Doctorow, Attack Surface

“But the people who had to use the software were never actually consulted in the purchase cycle, so why bother to make the software any good for those people?”
― Cory Doctorow, Attack Surface

“But the people who had to use the software were never actually consulted in the purchase cycle, so why bother to”
― Cory Doctorow, Attack Surface

“No one at the Interior Ministry used PGP for email, because no normal human does,”
― Cory Doctorow, Attack Surface

“The plural of anecdote isn’t fact.”
― Cory Doctorow, Attack Surface

“most of what I hated about present-day America was stuff I helped to invent.”
― Cory Doctorow, Attack Surface