Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 26

Talking with the Left Field podcast about Sidewalk Labs’s plan to build a surveilling “smart city” in Toronto

We’ve been closely following the plan by Google sister company Sidewalk Labs to build a surveilling “smart city” in Toronto; last week, I sat down with the Out of Left Field podcast (MP3) to discuss what’s going on with Sidewalk Labs, how it fits into the story of Big Tech, and what the alternatives might be.

Talking Adversarial Interoperability with Y Combinator

Earlier this month while I was in San Francisco, I went over to the Y Combinator incubator to record a podcast (MP3); we talked for more than an hour about the history of Adversarial Interoperability and what its role was in creating Silicon Valley and the tech sector and how monopolization now threatens adversarial interop and also how it fuels the conspiratorial thinking that is so present in our modern politics. We talk about how startup founders and other technologists can use science...

The Engagement-Maximization Presidency

In my latest podcast (MP3), I read my May, 2018 Locus column, “The Engagement-Maximization Presidency,” where I propose a theory to explain the political phenomenon of Donald Trump: we live in a world in which communications platforms amplify anything that gets “engagement” and provides feedback on just how much your message has been amplified so you can tune and re-tune for maximum amplification.

Peter Watts’s 2002 novel Maelstrom illustrates a beautiful, terrifying example of this, in...

Talking about Disney’s 1964 Carousel of Progress with Bleeding Cool: our lost animatronic future

Back in 2007, I wrote a science fiction novella called “The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrrow,” about an immortal, transhuman survivor of an apocalypse whose father is obsessed with preserving artifacts from the fallen civilization, especially the Carousel of Progress, an exhibition that GE commissioned from Disney for the 1964 World’s Fair in New York, which is still operating in Walt Disney World.


The novella was collected into my 2011 Outspoken Authors book from PM Press.

Bleeding Cool...

I made Wil Wheaton recite the digits of Pi for four minutes, then a fan set it to music

There’s a scene in my novel Homeland (the sequel to Little Brother) in which the first 1,000 digits of Pi are featured; when it came time to produce the audiobook edition, poor Wil Wheaton — the narrator — ended up reading out Pi for four solid minutes, with some entirely understandable difficulties. Nick Land set the reading to music, creating quite a delightful little tune!

(Image: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA, modified)

Jeannette Ng Was Right: John W. Campbell Was a Fascist

In my latest podcast (MP3), I read my new Locus column, “Jeannette Ng Was Right: John W. Campbell Was a Fascist,“which revisits Jeannette Ng’s Campbell Awards speech from this summer’s World Science Fiction convention.

As far as I know, I’m the only person to have won both awards named for Campbell, which, I think, gives me license to speak on the subject. I think that Ng was absolutely right about Campbell and his legacy, and...

Jeannette Ng was right: John W Campbell was a fascist

My latest Locus Magazine column is Jeannette Ng Was Right: John W. Campbell Was a Fascist, which revisits Jeannette Ng’s Campbell Awards speech from this summer’s World Science Fiction convention.

As far as I know, I’m the only person to have won both awards named for Campbell, which, I think, gives me license to speak on the subject. I think that Ng was absolutely right about Campbell and his legacy, and I think that understanding that the good that people do doesn’t erase the harms they cause (and vice-versa...

Talking with The Storyteller’s Thread about YA literature, activism, and technological rebellion

Séan Connors is a young adult literature researcher at the University of Arkansas, whose podcast, The Storyteller’s Thread, features long-form interviews with young adult writers “on their writing process; on social and political topics that influence their work; on their motivation for writing for young readers: and on other writers and artists whose work challenges and inspires them.”

I had the pleasure of recording with Connors on his latest episode (MP3), where we talked about youth activism and YA literature...

Affordances: a new science fiction story that climbs the terrible technology adoption curve

In my latest podcast (MP3), I read my short story “Affordances,” which was commissioned for Slate/ASU’s Future Tense Fiction. it’s a tale exploring my theory of “the shitty technology adoption curve,” in which terrible technological ideas are first imposed on poor and powerless people, and then refined and normalized until they are spread over all the rest of us.

The story makes the point by exploring all the people in a facial recognition ecosystem, from low-waged climate refugees who are paid t...

“Affordances”: a new science fiction story that climbs the terrible technology adoption curve

“Affordances” is my new science fiction story for Slate/ASU’s Future Tense project; it’s a tale exploring my theory of “the shitty technology adoption curve,” in which terrible technological ideas are first imposed on poor and powerless people, and then refined and normalized until they are spread over all the rest of us.

The story makes the point by exploring all the people in a facial recognition ecosystem, from low-waged climate refugees...