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A manis just a woman’s strategy for making other women.

— The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia.Freedom to and freedom from.

— The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Tech bosses converted their workplaces into whimsical“campuses” with gourmet cafeterias, luxury fitness centers,free dry cleaning and massages, and egg-freezing services so that tech workers could stay on the job through their fertile years without ever taking parental leave.It worked.So long as all this set dressing was accompanied by high-minded slogans—like Google’s “Don’t be evil” and Facebook’s“Connect every person in the world”—tech workers could tell themselves that they were pampered geniuses rather than patsies who’d been gulled into working like government mules.There’s a name for this strategy, coined by the librarian-theorist Fobazi Ettarh: vocational awe. Ettarh uses this term to describe the weaponization of workers’ sense of duty,especially to the public those workers serve. For Ettarh,vocational awe is why teachers, nurses, hospice care workers,and, of course, librarians accept poor pay and conditions without rebelling. They feel a sense of duty to their students,patients, and patrons, and their bosses don’t, and everyone knows it. So long as workers believe that their boss would rather harm the people they love and care for rather than increase their pay, they are held hostage by their own sense of duty.

— Enshittification by Cory Doctorow

How could you continue then? How could you continue when they came for your friends, your family, your children?Only the most ruthless could go on then—and the ruthless were not the ones you wanted.

— Where the Axe Is Buried by Ray Nayler

We cannot wait. We must act immediately, and take the consequences. We must debate their results, and act again. Action cannot be the product of a final conclusion. Action and argument must be bound up together, driving one another forward, each correcting the other’s course.Action and argument together form an experiment, and nothing but constant experimentation will get us where we need to be. The system that contains us is not threatened by what we think of it. It is threatened by what we do about it. And the time for doing is always now.

— Where the Axe Is Buried by Ray Nayler

From that moment, we understood that the state was everywhere. The state did not need to anticipate us: it was always with us. It shaped the mistakes we would make, and it was there to take us into its prisons when we made them.

— Where the Axe Is Buried by Ray Nayler

the state was not interested in whether people believed its lies. The state was not looking for plausible deniability. A good lie could always be punctured, with enough work. No, Krotov had said—all they needed was implausible deniability. A lie the population would see through immediately but would have to pretend they believed. Even to themselves.

— Where the Axe Is Buried by Ray Nayler

I noticed all this but most of all I noticed the quiet; the quiet of a world free from flying machines, traffic and large cities. The industrial age had only just begun; the planet had reached its Best Before date.

— The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

“There should be no such thing as billionaires,” Kim Stanley Robinson tells me.“The Midas touch is not a happy thing—if you touch people and they turn to gold, then this is a serious barrier to intimacy. So it would be doing them a favor to tax them out of existence. The Republican Congress of 1953 under Dwight Eisenhower was pretty good at this—incomes over $300,000a year were taxed at 92 percent for the overage. This was a society that understood the rich to be parasites and fools. We live in a stupider time, but we could change that.”

— More everything forever by Adam Becker, Adam Becker

Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.”

— More everything forever by Adam Becker, Adam Becker

Most of the greatest problems facing humanity right now—global warming, massive inequality, the lurking potential for nuclear war—are not driven by resource scarcity or a lack of technology. They’re social problems, requiring social solutions. Increased energy usage, increased technological prowess, or even an increase in the amount of “intelligence”brought to bear on these problems (whatever that might mean) isn’t likely to solve them. These are political problems,problems of persuasion and justice and fairness. Negotiating durable ceasefire agreements isn’t something that AI is likely to help with; sending vast numbers of humans to space won’t end violence in the Middle East; doubling humanity’s energy consumption isn’t going to fix political polarization in the United States or stem the rise of fascism worldwide. If we want a future that puts people first, we need to recognize that there are no panaceas, and likely no utopias either. Nothing is coming to save us. There’s no genie inside a computer that will grant us three wishes. Technology can’t heal the world.We have to do that ourselves.

— More everything forever by Adam Becker, Adam Becker

Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache. They wanted to produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary,

— More everything forever by Adam Becker, Adam Becker