Annalee Newitz > Quotes

“But now we know there has been no one great disaster—only the slow-motion disaster of capitalism converting every living thing and idea into property.”
― Annalee Newitz, Autonomous

“For all the robots who question their programming.”
― Annalee Newitz, Autonomous

“Everybody is an outsider, if you go deep enough. The trick is reassuring people that you’re their kind of outsider.”
― Annalee Newitz, Autonomous

“She wasn’t sure which motivation made better fuel for innovation: naïve but ethical beliefs, or the need to survive.”
― Annalee Newitz, Autonomous

“I am sorry you have to live in the time of terraforming, and not in the spring that follows.”
― Annalee Newitz

“Still, humans were humans. They wanted you to know their opinions about your body, even if you hadn’t asked.”
― Annalee Newitz, Automatic Noodle

“It was, she supposed, a way of defying death. Necessities helped people survive, but joyful excess gave them life.”
― Annalee Newitz, Automatic Noodle

“He was a user of his own consciousness, but he did not have owner privileges. As a result, Paladin felt many things without knowing why.”
― Annalee Newitz, Autonomous

“Suffrage didn’t mean equal opportunity.”
― Annalee Newitz, Autonomous

“Are we not witnessing a strange tableau of survival whenever a bird alights on the head of a crocodile, bringing together the evolutionary offspring of Triassic and Jurassic?”
― Annalee Newitz, Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction

“People assigned genders based on behaviors and work roles, often ignoring anatomy. Gender was a form of social recognition.”
― Annalee Newitz, Autonomous

“As long as we tell our urban ancestors' stories, no city is ever lost. They live on, in our imaginations and on our public lands, as a promise that no matter how terrible things get, humans always try again.”
― Annalee Newitz, Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age

“Nothing like drugs to take the edge off drug problems.”
― Annalee Newitz, Autonomous

“As UC Berkeley economics professor Brad DeLong put it to me:

You get famine if the price of food spikes far beyond that of some people's means. This can be because food is short, objectively. This can be because the rich have bid the resources normally used to produce food away to other uses. You also get famine when the price of food is moderate if the incomes of large groups collapse.... In all of this, the lesson is that a properly functioning market does not seek to advance human happiness but rather to advance human wealth. What speaks in the market is money: purchasing power. If you have no money, you have no voice in the market. The market acts as if it does not know you exist and does not care whether you live or die.

DeLong describes a marketplace that leaves people to die - not out of malice , but out of indifference.”
― Annalee Newitz, Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction

“That’s when I decided the point of travel was not to observe history, but to change it.”
― Annalee Newitz, The Future of Another Timeline

“Back then, she was certain she could change the world just by making commits to a text file repository,”
― Annalee Newitz, Autonomous

“My mother says that smart women are always crazy.”
― Annalee Newitz, Autonomous

“Remember me but forget my fate.”
― Annalee Newitz, Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age

“The key to autonomy, she realized, was more than root access on the programs that shaped her desires. It was a sense of privacy.”
― Annalee Newitz, Autonomous

“She could taste a nuanced ethical understanding of the patent system all over his body.”
― Annalee Newitz, Autonomous

“What would it be like to reflect on his days, rather than trying vainly to forget them?”
― Annalee Newitz, Automatic Noodle

“How many times had Paladin looked into this human face, its features animated by neurological impulse alone? He did not know. Even if he were to sort through his video memories and count them up one by one, he still didn't think he would have the right answer. But after today's mission, human faces would always look different to him. They would remind him of what it felt like to suffer, and to be relieved of suffering.”
― Annalee Newitz, Autonomous

“Over a century ago, scientists first began to argue that the patent system and scientific data should be opened up. Back then, it was popular for conservatives to claim that putting geneng into the hands of the public would result in mega-viruses or total species collapse. Open data would be the gateway to a runaway synthetic biology apocalypse. But now we know there has been no one great disaster—only the slow-motion disaster of capitalism converting every living thing and idea into property.”
― Annalee Newitz, Autonomous

“The khñum debt slavery scenario sounds brutal until you consider that most capitalist cultures in the West use a similar system. In the United States, it’s not unusual for people to graduate from college with so much debt that they have to work their whole lives to pay it off.”
― Annalee Newitz, Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age

“There was no giant sign proclaiming the end of life as they'd known it; instead, there was a mounting pile of annoyances and disappointments.”
― Annalee Newitz, Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age

“Thanks. I really don’t want to get sent back to America. Fuck that place. It’s a hellhole run by garbage cans.”
― Annalee Newitz, Automatic Noodle

“Bots, who cost money, required a period of indenture to make their manufacture worthwhile. No such incentive was required for humans to make other humans.”
― Annalee Newitz, Autonomous

“Perhaps human intelligence gathering was a version of network penetration, and he could better integrate into social situations by inviting humans to see an illusory version of himself.”
― Annalee Newitz, Autonomous

“Make Merch Not War”
― Annalee Newitz, Automatic Noodle

“If you have property, you can’t be property.”
― Annalee Newitz, The Future of Another Timeline