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foreword
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would be about the only place I can imagine finding such a crea-
ture. Cory, as you will learn from his various rants “contained”
herein, was perfectly suited to the task of subduing the dinosaurs
of content.
He’s a little like the guerilla plumber Tuttle in the movie
Brazil
.
Armed with a utility belt of improbable gizmos, a wildly over-
clocked mind, a keyboard he uses like a verbal machine gun, and,
best of all, a dark sense of humor, he’d go forth against massive
industrial forces and return grinning, if a little beat up.
Indeed, many of the essays collected under this dubious title
are not only memoirs of his various campaigns but are themselves
the very weapons he used in them. Fortunately, he has spared
you some of the more sophisticated utilities he employed. He is
not battering you with the nerdy technolingo he commands when
stacked up against various minutiacrats, but I assure you that he
can speak geek with people who, unlike Cory, think they’re being
pretty social when they’re staring at the other person’s shoes.
This was a necessary ability. One of the problems that EFF has
to contend with is that even though most of our yet-unborn con-
stituency would agree heartily with our central mission — giving
everybody everywhere the right to both address and hear every-
body everywhere else — the decisions that will determine the
eventual viability of that right are being made now and generally
in gatherings invisible to the general public, using terminology,
whether technical or legal, that would be the verbal equivalent of
chloroform to anyone not conversant with such arcana.
I’ve often repeated my belief that the first responsibility of
a human being is to be a better ancestor. Thus, it seems fitting
that the appearance of this book, which details much of Cory’s
time with the EFF, coincides with the appearance of his first-born
child, about whom he is a shameless sentimental gusher.
I would like to think that by the time this newest prodigy,
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