Daniel Suarez Quotes

It all seems so clear now. Corporate intrusion into public institutions. Corporate domination of culture and media. It happened in plain view, with us cheering on their success as if it reflected well on us. As if it was us.

The seat of consciousness - what's known as 'sensorium' - exists partly as an expression of particle entanglement in higher physical dimensions. The human brain is merely a conduit.

How do you preserve your freedom when the powerful can use software bots to detect dissent and deploy drone aircraft to take out troublemakers? Human beings are increasingly unnecessary to wield power in the modern world.

Print-on-demand publishing is the new farm system for new voices in fiction. Authors who have compelling things to say, who can market their stories in compelling ways, will succeed.

You never understood games. Maybe that's why the world was such a mystery to you.

How can you expect to handle the future if you can't even handle the present?

Fact and fiction carry the same intrinsic weight in the marketplace of ideas. Unfortunately reality has no advertising budget.

Every day was filled with surprises. What a change from the network affiliate. Her new boss was an undead automaton from hell, true, but no job was perfect.

Love and hate are opposite sides of the same coin, you know - both passions. You can flip from one to the other - but not to indifference

A thing can't exist in people's minds until it has a name. But with a name, it can exist in people's minds without existing at all. You should always come up with a name before you set out to create anything.

Everyone on the Internet is talking about television and everyone on television is talking about the Internet. The whole damn thing is a self-licking ice cream cone and you're blaming me?

Gragg felt the tingling of the Third Eye on his stomach and back. The Third Eye was another of the miracles that Sobol had bestowed upon him. It was a form-fitting conductive shirt worn next to the skin - but it wasn't a garment. It was a haptic device that helped him use his body's largest organ - his skin - as another, all-seeing eye. An eye that never blinked, and an eye that could see around him in 360 degrees or halfway around the world, if he wished. It

I think that for all of the dangers of technology spreading, I think it is more dangerous in some ways that it doesn't. My simple reason for that is we've got 7 billion people on the planet, and we have these very serious problems, and I think we don't know who's going to have the answers to the problems that are coming around the bend.

In all, his outfit required nearly two thousand man-years of research and development, eight barrels of oil, and sixteen patent and trademark infringement lawsuits. All so he could possess casual style. A style that, in logistical requirements, was comparable to fielding a nineteenth-century military brigade.
But he looked good. Casual.

Mammals of every species indulge in play. Games are Nature's way of preparing us to face difficult realities.

I've always been your friend, Alexa. Now go. I will try to kill you as unsuccessfully as I can.

With music you can speak to anyone.

All right. I owe you a character. Should we buy another one?" Ross chuckled. "Now you're getting the hang of it." He sighed. "No, let's see if we can get out of town alive.

Humanity had always trafficked in oppression. Before the corporate marketing department got ahold of it, it was called conquest. Now it was regional development. Vikings and Mongols were big on revenue targets, too - but Leland had dispensed with all the tedious invading, and had taken a page out of the Roman playbook by hiring the locals to enslave each other as franchisees.

Instead of adapting, their leaders clung to power and strove instead to be the last ones to starve to death. The Mayan civilization in South America did the same, and I expect our own civilization will do likewise.

I have an English literature degree. I wanted to be the next great American novelist from a very early age, but I put it aside for a while, because I got very realistic at one point.

If your data is out there earning money for somebody, you should have a say in it.

How do you like your drones now, asshole?" Nearby,

But if they're so successful, why haven't parasites taken over the world? The answer is simple: they have. We just haven't noticed. That's because successful parasites don't kill us; they become part of us, making us perform all the work to keep them alive and help them reproduce.

He was just an idea - a collection of responsibilities with a mailing address.

Perfect replication is the enemy of any robust system ... Lacking a central nervous system - much less a brain - the parasite is a simple system designed to compromise a very specific target host. The more uniform the host, the more effective the infestation.

When you write a high-tech thriller, and then people in the defense establishment start calling you - people I can't name - you feel you've hit a nerve.

The others he wore simple work clothes - flannels and jeans with work boots. He was tall and handsome, with blue eyes and dirty-blond hair and a Donegal-style beard running along his broad jaw. He was athletically built with a charismatic, compelling look - like some rustic fashion model. And he had a vaguely familiar appearance. Grady felt certain he'd seen him somewhere before. Grady eyed the man warily. Are you the foreman

I'm against unanswerable concentrations of power, whether that be government or private industry or religious figures - anybody who is not accountable to the larger social climate or society for the power they wield, that concerns me. I'm very pro-democracy.

Sexual reproduction exists solely as a means to defeat parasites. By mixing male and female genes, sex produces offspring not exactly like either the male or female - making each generation different from the last, and presenting a moving target to intruders intent on compromising this system. ... Even with this variation, parasites continue to pose a threat ... and parasitism evolves and moves through any system - not just living things. The less variation there is in a system, the more readily parasites will evolve to infest it ...

We need to take a leaf out of nature's book. Any species that clones itself will eventually be attacked by a parasite, leading to an inevitable population crash.

When the survival strategy of a civilization is invalidated, in all of human history none have ever turned back from the brink.

When privacy is criminalized,
only criminals will have privacy.

What I caution against is any unaccountable concentration of power. And I don't care whether that's the government, a corporation, the church, a really bad-ass girl scouts troop, whatever it is.

Anyone who has ever tried to share pizza with roommates knows that Communism cannot ever work. If Lenin and Marx had just shared an apartment, perhaps a hundred million lives might have been spared and put to productive use making sneakers and office furniture.

Democracy requires active participation, and sooner or later someone 'offers' to take all the difficult decision-making away from you and your hectic life. But the darknet throws those decisions back onto you. It hard-codes democracy into the DNA of civilization. You upvote and downvote many times a day on things that directly affect your life and the lives of people around you - not just once every few years on things you haven't got a chance in hell of affecting.

Her new boss was an undead automaton from hell, true. But, no job is perfect.

So what? So what if everyone cares? What does that do for us? The situation we're in isn't going to be solved by angry posts and best fucking wishes. Public outrage has never stopped these bastards.

When people become more reliant on multinational corporations than on their own communities, they surrendered whatever say they had in their government. Corporations are growing stronger while democratic government becomes increasingly helpless.

He kept his eyes upon her as the natural laws is the universe brought them closer together with each revolution.

Mankind was on the moon in the 1960s, Jon. That was half a century ago. Nuclear power. The transistor. The laser. All existed even back then. Do you really think the pinnacle of innovation since that time is Facebook?

We have to find a happy medium in our use of technology. We want things to be efficient, but we have to compartmentalise, too, so that if there is one flaw discovered, the whole thing doesn't topple.

Look, cell phone geolocation data shows very few clustering anomalies for this hour and climate. And that's holding up pretty much across all major metro areas. It's gone down six percentage points since news of the Karachi workshop hit the Web, and it's trending downward. If people are protesting, they aren't doing it in the streets." He circled his finger over a few clusters of dots. "Some potential protest knots in Portland and Austin, but defiance-related tag cloud groupings in social media put us within the three-sigma rule - meaning roughly sixty-eight percent of the values lie within one standard deviation of the mean.

We basically used oil and aquifer water to temporarily boost the carrying capacity of the land, all for economic growth demanded by Wall Street investors. It's a crazy system that only makes sense when you foist all the costs onto taxpayers in the form of crop subsidies that benefit agribusiness, and defense spending to secure fossil fuels. We're basically paying for corporations to seize control of the food supply and dictate to us the terms under which we live.

Food is the very heart of freedom. How can people be free if they can't feed themselves without getting sued for patent violations?

It's knowing one's ... limitations ... and then ignoring them.

They'd had so much more luck investing in eccentric B and C students. The rationale was simple: Those heavily invested in the status quo had difficulty thinking outside of it - and were often tainted by it. Especially when success and peer approval beckoned. One did not accidentally graduate from top-tier schools. One strove to get in and to maintain grades once there, and to do that, one usually needed to be a master at conformity. To excel in all the accepted conventions.

A very small group of powerful people is deciding what's going to happen with your data, and they're using bots to help implement what they want to do. That has nothing to do with democracy. It's all about efficiency. And that's the really scary thing about it.

I don't have a Facebook page. I don't use Twitter. I don't give anyone a lot to grab onto. Sometimes, I even take out the battery of my mobile phone so that I can't be localized.

Silicon Valley isn't usually where aspiring authors go to kick-start a literary reputation. [ ... ] How'd he do it? By courting bloggers and influential techies like Joi Ito, Stewart Brand, and Craig Newmark demonstrating that if you can get the geek grapevine on your side, you don't need Random House.

Great. So if a dragon and a fairy show up at the castle, what the hell am I supposed to do with that information? Put out a warrant for their arrest?" "No,

Nodded. I see that you're a first-level Fighter. Which makes it all the more

There is a great deal more to evolutionary biology than survival of the fittest - although that's all anyone seems to remember. One of Darwin's contemporaries was Alfred Russel Wallace, who had even more profound lessons about evolution - that humans are social creatures. That we coevolve with other species as part of a fabric of interwoven and interdependent life-forms. The world isn't entirely about competition and dominance. And species that cooperate with others succeed better than those who do not. That's what civilization is, cooperation." "And

But human memories change each time they are recalled, Jon. This is known as memory reconsolidation. It's part of a natural updating mechanism that imbues even old memories with current information as you recall them. Thus, human memory does not so much record the past as hold knowledge likely to be useful in the future. That's why forgetting is a human's default state. By contrast, remembering requires a complex cascade of chemistry. Were I to increase the concentration of protein kinase C at your synapses, your memory retention would double.

Those heavily invested in the status quo had difficulty thinking outside of it - and were often tainted by it.

I think if I were to express my wish, it would be that we are more regionally self-reliant. And I don't mean people being survivalists, I mean regionally self-reliant. So that you have these individual cells. The idea of having different solutions in different areas, so that we have a very robust, durable civilization.

I actually love technology. I worked for 18 years as systems analyst in technology.

In the vast game of Darwinian musical chairs, whenever the music stopped there were large numbers of people without a seat - and some smartass had sold them guns.

He didn't care. She was a sexual hand grenade with the pin pulled out, but he could never manage to resist her. Whatever this said about him didn't matter.

We need to build change in to our systems and let these systems evolve as circumstances change. Change is inevitable, but we need to do a better job of dealing with it, because when we start building huge gleaming monoliths, I think we start getting into trouble.

enough energy to it?" Cotton tapped

I wrote a piece of software in 1998 that created fictional weather.

My fiction is only just over the horizon. I present a world that's different but it's familiar enough that it freaks people out a little.

I'd always loved technology. It's something I always messed around with in computer labs at school. So I glommed onto it very early as way to differentiate myself in business.

If you want to be a modern citizen of the world, you have to be minimally capable in technology. It's a new literacy test. Technology rules your outcome in life. And software is making a lot of decisions in our lives.

Neal Stephenson is great. He can write about a white wall for six pages, and it sounds fascinating. I read the whole 'Baroque Cycle' and 'Cryptonomicon.'

I suspect that democracy is not viable in a technologically advanced society. Free people wield too much ability to destroy.

They sell the fact that you're susceptible to technical animism.

Something was beyond wrong. Sebeck looked at the faces of the agents and police arrayed around him. There was abject hatred in their eyes. Burning anger. He knew that look. It was the look reserved for the vilest criminals. They were closing in from two directions - leaving a clear field of fire. Twenty or thirty heavily armed men. Sebeck glanced at Ross, who already had his hands on his head. "What the hell is going on, Jon?" "I don't know. But the Daemon's got something to do with it." "This is your last warning! Put your hands on your head, or we will open fire!" Sebeck felt his blood rising. He put his hands on the back of his head but looked to Ross. "Why are they looking at me?" "I don't know." The Feds hit Sebeck like linebackers. They

As it stands, our patrols and bases are just targets, and the more firepower we use, the more enemies we make.