Quotes by Cory Doctorow

Everyone wants a definition of creativity that makes what they do into something special and what everyone else does into nothing special. But the fact is, were all creative. We come up with weird and interesting ideas all the time. The biggest difference between creators isnt their imagination - its how hard they work. Ideas are easy. Doing stuff is hard.

Its 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.

Every telecomm company is as big a corporate welfare bum as you could ask for. Try to imagine what it would cost at market rates to go around to every house in every town in every country and pay for the right to block traffic and dig up roads and erect poles and string wires and pierce every home with cabling. The regulatory fiat that allows these companies to get their networks up and running is worth hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars.If phone companies want to operate in the “free market,” then let them: the FCC could give them 60 days to get all their rotten copper out of our dirt, or we’ll buy it from them at the going scrappage rates. Then, let’s hold an auction for the right to be the next big telecomm company, on one condition: in exchange for using the public’s rights-of-way, you have to agree to connect us to the people we want to talk to, and vice-versa, as quickly and efficiently as you can.

Businesses are great structures for managing big projects. It’s like trying to develop the ability to walk without developing a skeleton. Once in a blue moon, you get an octopus, but for the most part, you get skeletons. Skeletons are good shit.

You know, there comes a point where youre not giving advice anymore. There comes a point where youre just moralizing, demonstrating your hypothetical superiority when it comes to doing the right thing. Thats not very fucking helpful, you know. Im holding my shit together right now, and rather than telling me that its not enough, you could try to help me with the stuff Im capable of.

I think that I was too self-centered to ever develop good skills as a peacemaker. In my younger days, I assumed that it was because I was smarter than everyone else, with no patience for explaining things in short words for mouthbreathers who just didnt get it.

Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

Stories are propaganda, virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves directly into your emotions.

Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.

Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is time-rich and cash-poor.

Once you get to naming your laptop, you know that youre really having a deep relationship with it.

The number of games went up or down according to the brutal, elegant logic of the economics of fun:a certain amount of difficultyplusa certain amount of your friendsplusa certain amount of interesting strangersplusa certain amount of rewardplusa certain amount of opportunityequaledfun

I used to want to understand how the world worked. Little things, like heavy stuff goes at the bottom of the laundry bag, or big things, like the best way to get a boy to chase you is to ignore him, or medium things, like if you cut an onion under running water your eyes wont sting, and if you wash your fingers afterwards with lemon-juice they wont stink.I used to want to know all the secrets, and every time I learned one, I felt like Id taken--a step. On a journey. To a place. A destination: to be the kind of person who knew all this stuff, the way everyone around me seemed to know all this stuff. I thought that once I knew enough secrets, Id be like them.

Id never really believed in terrorists before--I mean, I knew that in the abstract there were terrorists somewhere in the world, but they didnt really represent any risk to me. There were millions of ways that the world could kill me--starting with getting run down by a drunk burning his way down Valencia--that were infinitely more likely and immediate than terrorists. Terrorists kill a lot fewer people than bathroom falls and accidental electrocutions. Worrying about them always struck me as about as useful as worrying about getting hit by lightning.

New media don’t succeed because they’re like the old media, only better: they succeed because they’re worse than the old media at the stuff the old media is good at, and better at the stuff the old media are bad at. Books are good at being paperwhite, high-resolution, low-infrastructure, cheap and disposable. Ebooks are good at being everywhere in the world at the same time for free in a form that is so malleable that you can just pastebomb it into your IM session or turn it into a page-a-day mailing list.

The important thing is to convince people to make and share useful things. Fighting with greedy douches who dont share doesnt do that. Making more, living under conditions of abundance, that does it.

Funny, for all surveillance, Osama bin Laden is still free—and were not. Guess whos winning the war on terror?

What if I got hit by lightning while walking with an umbrella? Ban umbrellas! Fight the menace of lightning!

Once upon a time, my government turned my city into a police state, kidnapped me, and tortured me. When I got free, I decided that the problem wasn’t the system, but who was running it. Bad guys had gotten into places of high office. We needed good apples. I worked my butt off to get people to vote for good apples. We had elections. We installed the kind of apples everyone agreed would be the kind of apples we could be proud of. They said good things. A few real dirtbags like Carrie Johnstone lost their jobs. And then, well, the good apples turned out to act pretty much exactly like the bad apples. Oh, they had reasons. There were emergencies. Circumstances. It was all really regrettable. But there were always emergencies, weren’t there?

We’re not making a world without greed, Jacob. We’re making a world where greed is a perversion. Where grabbing everything for yourself instead of sharing is like smearing yourself with shit: gross. Wrong. Our winning doesn’t mean you don’t get to be greedy. It means people will be ashamed for you, will pity you and want to distance themselves from you. You can be as greedy as you want, but no one will admire you for it.