User Profile

It’s one thing to be stuck without the blender attachment that will make your smoothie perfectly smooth. But it’s another thing for your blender to refuse to operate because it can’t connect to its app because severe weather just knocked out your home internet and you’re trying to mix your kid’s medicine into a smoothie to get it down their throat.

— The Internet Con by Cory Doctorow

We’ve tried making Big Tech into better tech for decades. That project has been an abject failure. To make tech better, we have to make it smaller—small enough that the bad ideas, carelessness and blind spots of individual tech leaders are their problems, not everyone else’s. We need lots of tech, run by lots of different kinds of people and organizations, and we need to make it as close to costless as possible to switch from one to the other

— The Internet Con by Cory Doctorow

winning user loyalty by providing an excellent experience is harder work than punishing disloyal users

— The Internet Con by Cory Doctorow

If we someday triumph over labor exploitation, gender discrimination and violence, colonialism and racism, and snatch a habitable planet from the jaws of extractive capitalism, it will be thanks to technologically enabled organizing. From street protests to mutual aid funds, from letter-writing to organizing sit-ins, from blockades to strikes, we need digital networks to prosecute our struggle. That is the other way that tech is exceptional. The fight for a free, fair and open digital future isn’t more important than any of those other fights, but it is foundational. Tech is the terrain on which our future fights will be fought. If we can’t seize the means of computation, we will lose the fight before it is even joined.

— The Internet Con by Cory Doctorow

Karl Marx’s Das Kapital includes, in chapter 10, the lines: “Capital is dead labour that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. Perhaps Marx had read Vuk Karadzić, because he too conflates analogies about vampires and werewolves, describing ‘the werewolf’s hunger for surplus labour’ and observing that “the prolongation of the working day quenches only in a slight degree the vampire thirst for the living blood of labour’.

— Slavic Myths by Noah Charney, Svetlana Slapsak

... you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.

— The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

Men are physically stronger,” the doctor asserted with professional finality.

“Yes, often, and larger, but what does that matter when we have machines? And even when we don’t have machines, when we must dig with the shovel or carry on the back, the men maybe work faster—the big ones— but the women work longer. . . . Often I have wished Iwas as tough as a woman.”

Kimoe stared at him, shocked out of politeness. “But the loss of—of everything feminine—of delicacy—and the loss of masculine self-respect— You can’t pretend, surely, in your work, that women are your equals? In physics, in mathematics, in the intellect? You can’t pretend to lower yourself constantly to their level?”

— The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

Men are physically stronger,” the doctor asserted with professional finality.

“Yes, often, and larger, but what does that matter when we have machines? And even when we don’t have machines, when we must dig with the shovel or carry on the back, the men maybe work faster—the big ones— but the women work longer. . . . Often I have wished Iwas as tough as a woman.”

Kimoe stared at him, shocked out of politeness. “But the loss of—of everything feminine—of delicacy—and the loss of masculine self-respect— You can’t pretend, surely, in your work, that women are your equals? In physics, in mathematics, in the intellect? You can’t pretend to lower yourself constantly to their level?”

— The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

She is an animal. Servile as a dog. And yet if he is careful to make no demands, to leave the air between them open, another version of the windup girl emerges. As precious and rare as a living bo tree. Her soul, emerging from within the strangling strands of her engineered DNA.

He wonders if she were a real person if he would feel more incensed at the abuse she suffers. It's an odd thing, being with a manufactured creature, built and trained to serve. She herself admits that her soul wars with itself. That she does not rightly know which parts of her are hers alone and which have been inbuilt genetically.

— The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi