Daily Inspiration Quote by Cory Doctorow

Doctorow is doing what he does best: taking a supposedly technical debate and yanking it back into the messy realm of stories, incentives, and consequences. The opener - "misses out on some of the interesting narrative realities" - is a tell. He is not just arguing facts; he is accusing an opponent of bad storytelling, of using a neat, comforting plot that flattens what actually happens when systems collide with complexity. It's a classic Doctorow move: treat rhetoric as infrastructure. If the narrative is wrong, policy built on it will be brittle.

The phrase "it actually doesn't work very well" lands with deliberate anti-grandiosity. No apocalypse-mongering, no utopian sweep - just the dry verdict of a systems thinker watching a simplistic fix fail in the real world. Then he pivots to biology, not as a metaphor of destiny but as an empirical rebuke: diversity isn't a fashionable preference, it's a resilience strategy. The subtext is aimed at any ideology - political, corporate, or technological - that imagines optimization as subtraction: fewer kinds of people, fewer ideas, fewer weird edge cases, fewer exceptions to manage.

In context, Doctorow's journalism has long been about how monopolies, surveillance, and gatekeeping shrink the space of possibility. Here, "eliminating diversity" reads as a stand-in for everything that standardizes humans into compliant users, workers, or consumers. He's warning that homogeneity doesn't just harm the excluded; it weakens the whole organism. Robustness comes from friction, redundancy, and difference - the very things power structures try to sand down for convenience.