Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 19

Full Employment

This week’s podcast is a reading of Full Employment, my latest Locus column. It’s a counter to the argument about automation-driven unemployment – namely, that we will have hundreds of years of full employment facing the climate emergency and remediating the damage it wreaks. From relocating all our coastal cities to replacing aviation routes with high-speed rails to the caring and public health work for hundreds of millions of survivors of plagues, floods and fires, we are in no danger of runn...

Full Employment

My latest Locus column is “Full Employment,” in which I forswear “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” as totally incompatible with the climate emergency, which will consume 100%+ of all human labor for centuries to come.

https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

This fact is true irrespective of any breakthroughs in AI OR geoengineering. Technological unemployment is vastly oversold and overstated (for example, that whole thing about truck drivers is bullshit).

https://journals.s...

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 09)

Here’s part nine 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:

Alan ...

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 08)

Here’s part eight 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:

Alan...

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 07)

Here’s part seven 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:

Alan...

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 06)

Here’s part six 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:

Alan i...

Talking tech and protests with the Out of Left Field podcast

The kind folks at the Out of Left Field podcast just hosted me for a discussion of protests, surveillance tech and liberation (MP3).

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 05)

Here’s part five 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).

There’s more of Kurt in this week’s episode; as I mentioned in last week’s intro, Kurt is loosely based on my old friend Darren Atkinson, who pulled down a six-figure income by recovering, repairing and reselling high-tech waste from Toronto’s industrial suburbs. Darren was the subject of the first feature I ever sold to W...

Rave for “Poesy the Monster Slayer”

No matter how many books I write (20+ now!), the first review for a new one is always scary. That goes double when the book is a first as well – like Poesy the Monster Slayer, my first-ever picture book, which comes out from First Second on Jul 14.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627

So it was with delight and relief that I read Publishers Weekly’s (rave) review of Poesy:

“Some children fear monsters at bedtime, but Poesy welcomes them. Her pink ‘monster lair’ features gothic art and s...

How Big Tech Monopolies Distort Our Public Discourse

This week, I’m podcasting How Big Tech Monopolies Distort Our Public Discourse, a new article I wrote for the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Deeplinks blog. It’s the most comprehensive of the articles I’ve written about the problems of surveillance capitalism, a subject I’ve also addressed in a forthcoming, book-length essay. In a nutshell, my dispute with the “surveillance capitalism” hypothesis is that I think it overstates how effective Big Tech is at changing our minds with advanced machi...