Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 28

My appearance on Futurithmic

I was delighted to sit down with my old friend Michael Hainsworth for his new TV show Futurithmic, where we talked about science fiction, technological self-determination, internet freedom. They’ve just posted the episode and it’s fabulous!

Why do people believe the Earth is flat?

I have an op-ed in today’s Globe and Mail, “Why do people believe the Earth is flat?” wherein I connect the rise of conspiratorial thinking to the rise in actual conspiracies, in which increasingly concentrated industries are able to come up with collective lobbying positions that result in everything from crashing 737s to toxic baby-bottle liners to the opioid epidemic.

In a world where official processes are understood to be corruptible and thus increasingly unreliable, we don’t just have...

Charles de Lint on Radicalized

I’ve been a Charles de Lint fan since I was a kid (see photographic evidence, above, of a 13-year-old me attending one of Charles’s signings at Bakka Books in 1984!), and so I was absolutely delighted to read his kind words in his books column in Fantasy and Science Fiction for my latest book, Radicalized. This book has received a lot of critical acclaim (“among my favorite things I’ve read so far this year”), but to get such a positive notice from Charles is wonderful on a whole different l...

Podcast: DRM Broke Its Promise

In my latest podcast (MP3), I read my new Locus column, DRM Broke Its Promise, which recalls the days when digital rights management was pitched to us as a way to enable exciting new markets where we’d all save big by only buying the rights we needed (like the low-cost right to read a book for an hour-long plane ride), but instead (unsurprisingly) everything got more expensive and less capable.

The established religion of markets once told us that we must abandon the idea of owning things, t...

Come see me in Santa Cruz, San Francisco, Toronto and Maine!

I’m about to leave for a couple of weeks’ worth of lectures, public events and teaching, and you can catch me in many places: Santa Cruz (in conversation with XKCD’s Randall Munroe); San Francisco (for EFF’s Pioneer Awards); Toronto (for Word on the Street, Seeding Utopias and Resisting Dystopias and 6 Degrees); Newry, ME (Maine Library Association) and Portland, ME (in conversation with James Patrick Kelly).

Here’s the full itinerary:

Santa Cruz, September 11, 7PM: Bookshop Santa Cruz Prese...

Talking RADICALIZED and MAKERS on Writers Voice

The Writers Voice podcast just published their interview with me about Radicalized; as a bonus, they include my decade-old interview about Makers in the recording!

MP3

Critical essays (including mine) discuss Toronto’s plan to let Google build a surveillance-based “smart city” along its waterfront

Sidewalk Labs is Google’s sister company that sells “smart city” technology; its showcase partner is Toronto, my hometown, where it has made a creepy shitshow out of its freshman outing, from the mass resignations of its privacy advisors to the underhanded way it snuck in the right to take over most of the lakeshore without further consultations (something the company straight up lied about after they were outed). Unsurprisingly, the city, the province, the country, and the company are all b...

Podcast: Barlow’s Legacy

Even though I’m at Burning Man, I’ve snuck out an extra scheduled podcast episode (MP3): Barlow’s Legacy is my contribution to the Duke Law and Tech Review’s special edition, THE PAST AND FUTURE OF THE INTERNET: Symposium for John Perry Barlow:

“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”1

And now we are come to the great techlash, long overdue and desperately needed. With the techlash comes the political contest to assemble the narrative of What...

They told us DRM would give us more for less, but they lied

My latest Locus Magazine column is DRM Broke Its Promise, which recalls the days when digital rights management was pitched to us as a way to enable exciting new markets where we’d all save big by only buying the rights we needed (like the low-cost right to read a book for an hour-long plane ride), but instead (unsurprisingly) everything got more expensive and less capable.

For 40 years, University of Chicago-style market orthodoxy has promised widespread prosperity as a natural consequence...

My MMT Podcast appearance, part 2: monopoly, money, and the power of narrative

Last week, the Modern Monetary Theory Podcast ran part 1 of my interview with co-host Christian Reilly; they’ve just published the second and final half of our chat (MP3), where we talk about the link between corruption and monopoly, how to pitch monetary theory to people who want to abolish money altogether, and how stories shape the future.

If you’re new to MMT, here’s my brief summary of its underlying premises: “Governments spend money into existence and tax it out of existence, and gov...