Before he'd quit doing interviews, the previous fall, he'd taken to dropping the word totalitarian. Younger interviewers, to whom the word meant total surveillance, total mind control, gray armies in parade with medium-range missiles, had understood him to be saying something unfair about the Internet. In fact, he simply meant a system that was impossible to opt out of. The old Republic had certainly excelled at surveillance and parades, bu the essence of its totalitarianism had been more everyday and subtle. You could cooperate with the system or you could oppose it, but the one thing you could never do, whether you were enjoying a secure and pleasant life or sitting in a prison, was not to be in relation to it. The answer to every question large or small was socialism.

In his experience, few things were more alike than one revolution to another. Then agan, he'd experienced only the kind that loudly called itself a revolution. The mark of a legitimate revolution--the scientific, for example--was that it didn't brag about its revolutionariness but simply occurred. Only the weak and fearful, the illegitimate, had to brag. The refrain of his childhood, under a regime so weak and fearful it built a prison wall around the people it allegedly had liberated, was that the Republic was blessed to be in history's vanguard. If your boss was a shithea and your own husband was spying on you, it wasn't the regime's fault, because the regie served the Revolution and the Revolution was at once historically inevitably and terribly fragile, beset with enemies. This ridiculous contradiction was a fixture of bragging revolutions. No crime or unforeseen side effect was so grievous that it couldn't be excused by a system that had to be but easily could fail.

[...] The privileges available in the Republic had been paltry, a telephone, a flat with some air and light, the all-important permission to travel, but perhaps no paltrier than having x number of followers on Twitter, a much-liked Facebook profile, and the occasional four-minute spot on CNBC. The real appeal of apparatchikism was the safety of belonging. [...]

[...] Although, to a man, the new revolutionaries all claimed to worship risk-taking--a relative term in any case, since the risk in question was of losing some venture capitalist's money, at worst of wasting a few parentally funded years, rather than, say, the risk of being shot or hanged--[...]

He saw that he'd trapped himself. He'd set up house less with a woman than with a wishful concept of himself as a man who could live happily ever after with a woman. And now he was bored with the concept.

turning up at their door to descant on Annagret's ingratitude

"Of all the antenimbusian systems, the legal system is the most intellectually offensive to me."