Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 28

One way to determine whether your publisher is happy with your work

Being a Tor author is pretty swell. (Thanks, Patrick!)

Short documentary on the quest to re-decentralize the internet

I sat down for an interview for Reason’s short feature, The Decentralized Web Is Coming, which documents the surging Decentralized Web movement, whose goal is to restore the internet’s early, decentralized era, before it turned into five giant services filled with screenshots from the other four.

Come see me in Portland, Maine next Monday with James Patrick Kelly

I’m coming to Maine to keynote the Maine Library Association conference in Newry next Monday; later that day, I’m appearing with James Patrick Kelly at the Portland, Maine Main Library, from 6:30PM-8PM (it’s free and open to the public) This is the first time I’ve been to Maine, and I can’t wait!

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...