Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 13

How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism (Part 02)

This week on my podcast, part two of a serialized reading of my 2020 Onezero/Medium book How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, now available in paperback (you can also order signed and personalized copies from Dark Delicacies, my local bookstore).

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How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism (Part 01)

This week on my podcast, part one of a serialized reading of my 2020 Onezero/Medium book How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, now available in paperback (you can also order signed and personalized copies from Dark Delicacies, my local bookstore).

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Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results

This week on my podcast, I read my November 2020 Locus column, Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results, a critical piece on machine learning and artificial intelligence that takes aim at the fallacy that improvements to statistical inference will someday produce a conscious, cognitive software construct. It’s a followup to my July 2020 column, Full Employment, which critiques the fear/aspiration of automation-driven unemployment.

The problems of theory-free statistical inference ...

Free Markets

This week on my podcast, I read my lastest Locus column, Free Markets, a postmortem of sorts on the delivery issues with my record-breaking audiobook Kickstarter for Attack Surface, the third Little Brother book.

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Privacy Without Monopoly: Data Protection and Interoperability (Part 3)

This week on my podcast, the third and final part of “Privacy Without Monopoly: Data Protection and Interoperability,” a major new EFF paper by my colleague Bennett Cyphers and me.

It’s a paper that tries to resolve the tension between demanding that tech platforms gather, retain and mine less of our data, and the demand that platforms allow alternatives (nonprofits, co-ops, tinkerers, startups) to connect with their services.

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Privacy Without Monopoly: Data Protection and Interoperability (Part 2)

This week on my podcast, Part Two of “Privacy Without Monopoly: Data Protection and Interoperability,” a major new EFF paper by my colleague Bennett Cyphers and me.

It’s a paper that tries to resolve the tension between demanding that tech platforms gather, retain and mine less of our data, and the demand that platforms allow alternatives (nonprofits, co-ops, tinkerers, startups) to connect with their services.

MP3

Privacy Without Monopoly: Data Protection and Interoperability (Part 1)

This week on my podcast, Part One of “Privacy Without Monopoly: Data Protection and Interoperability,” a major new EFF paper by my colleague Bennett Cyphers and me.

It’s a paper that tries to resolve the tension between demanding that tech platforms gather, retain and mine less of our data, and the demand that platforms allow alternatives (nonprofits, co-ops, tinkerers, startups) to connect with their services.

MP3

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 31 – CONCLUSION)

Here’s part thirty-one, the conclusion of my new reading of my novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (you can follow all the installments, as well as the reading I did in 2008/9, here).

This is easily the weirdest novel I ever wrote. Gene Wolfe (RIP) gave me an amazing quote for it: “Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is a glorious book, but there are hundreds of those. It is more. It is a glorious book unlike any book you’ve ever read.”

Here’s how my publisher described it w...

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 30)

Here’s part thirty of my new reading of my novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (you can follow all the installments, as well as the reading I did in 2008/9, here).

This is easily the weirdest novel I ever wrote. Gene Wolfe (RIP) gave me an amazing quote for it: “Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is a glorious book, but there are hundreds of those. It is more. It is a glorious book unlike any book you’ve ever read.”

Here’s how my publisher described it when it came out:

A...

Talking Attack Surface in the LA Review of Books

In an interview in the LA Review of Books, Technology and Politics Are Inseparable: An Interview with Cory Doctorow, Eliot Peper digs into the backstory and ethos of the Little Brother books in general and Attack Surface in particular:

Attack Surface explores how technology is not the solution to social problems, but a morally neutral accelerant to political action, and that ultimately only politics can solve social problems. How did you learn this lesson? How did it change your worldview? What...