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“Don’t compete!—competition is always injurious to the species, and you have plenty of resources to avoid it!” That is the tendency of nature, not always realized in full, but always present. That is the watchword which comes to us from the bush, the forest, the river, the ocean. “Therefore combine—practise mutual aid! That is the surest means for giving to each and to all the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence and progress, bodily, intellectual, and moral.” That is what Nature teaches us; and that is what all those animals which have attained the highest position in their respective classes have done. That is also what man—the most primitive man—has been doing; and that is why man has reached the position upon which we stand now, as we shall see in the subsequent chapters devoted to mutual aid in human societies. — location: 1082 ^ref-38852

— Mutual Aid by Peter Kropotkin

What sort of intelligence actively participates in the drilling, draining and despoliation of the few remaining wildernesses on earth, in the name of an idea of progress we already know to be doomed? This is not an intelligence I recognize. — location: [631]

— Ways of Being : Animals, Plants, Machines by James Bridle

“You have never really understood how technology works.” Marcus started to sputter, but she rolled over him. “I mean, yeah, you know lots more about coding and crypto and algorithms than me, but when it comes to how technology really works—what it does in the world—you have never really grasped the way the system functions. You think that if technology makes something possible, it will happen automatically. You think if something can’t be accomplished through technology, it’s impossible. You’ve always missed the point: information doesn’t want to be free—” Marcus chimed in with the air of someone who’d had this discussion before. “But people do.” She smiled. “People do. People use technology to make themselves free, by using it to share and organize and connect. Freedom isn’t something technology gives you, technology is something you use to get freedom.”

— Attack Surface by Cory Doctorow