Science & Tech Quote by Cory Doctorow

There is something gleefully insurgent in Doctorow’s phrasing: “I take apart Isaac Asimov’s Robots world.” It’s not the reverent posture of fandom; it’s the stance of a hacker with a screwdriver, popping the casing off a beloved machine to show you the wires we’ve agreed not to look at. The intent is partly cred-building (I’m fluent in the canon), partly a mission statement (and I’m willing to challenge it).

“Asimov’s Robots world” is a pillar of 20th-century tech optimism: orderly, rule-governed, morally legible through the Three Laws. Doctorow’s subtext is that this comfort is itself a design choice - a narrative interface that flatters engineers and institutions by implying that ethics can be compiled into clean constraints. When he says “take apart,” he signals a different politics of technology: systems don’t behave because we wrote good rules; they behave because power, incentives, and failure modes push them.

Context matters. Doctorow emerges from a late-90s/2000s internet culture where “takedown” is both critique and craft: reverse-engineering as literacy. As a journalist and science-fiction writer associated with digital rights and anti-DRM activism, he’s primed to treat tech utopias as marketing copy with better prose. The mention of “I, Robot” (a title already freighted with adaptation, simplification, and Hollywood’s preference for clean moral binaries) sharpens the edge: he’s not just revisiting Asimov, he’s interrogating the cultural pipeline that turned nuanced thought experiments into consumer-friendly futurism. The line works because it compresses critique into an action verb. He isn’t arguing; he’s opening the device on the table and inviting you to watch.