Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 31
June 26, 2019
Podcast number 300: “Adversarial Interoperability: Reviving an Elegant Weapon From a More Civilized Age to Slay Today’s Monopolies”
I just published the 300th installment of my podcast, which has been going since 2006 (!); I present a reading of my EFF Deeplinks essay Adversarial Interoperability: Reviving an Elegant Weapon From a More Civilized Age to Slay Today’s Monopolies, where I introduce the idea of “Adversarial Interoperability,” which allows users and toolsmiths to push back against monopolists.
Facebook’s advantage is in “network effects”: the idea that Facebook increases in value with every user who joins it...
June 25, 2019
Join me today at 12PM Pacific for a New York Times/Periscope livestream about my “op-ed from the future”
Yesterday, the New York Times published my “op-ed from the future,” an essay entitled “I Shouldn’t Have to Publish This in The New York Times,” which tried to imagine what would happen to public discourse if the Big Tech platforms were forced to use algorithms to police their users’ speech in order to fight extremism, trolling, copyright infringement, harassment, and so on.
In just a couple hours — 12PM Pacific, 3PM Eastern — I’ll be doing a Periscope livestream for the Times to discuss the...
June 24, 2019
“I Shouldn’t Have to Publish This in The New York Times”: my op-ed from the future
I was honored to be invited to contribute to the New York Times‘s excellent “Op-Eds From the Future” series (previously), with an op-ed called “I Shouldn’t Have to Publish This in The New York Times,” set in the near-future, in which we have decided to solve the problems of Big Tech by making them liable for what their users say and do, thus ushering in an era in which all our speech is vetted by algorithms that delete anything that looks like misinformation, harassment, copyright infringeme...
My Atlseccon keynote
In which I tie together infosec, monopoly, corruption, human rights and conspiracy theories
June 10, 2019
Competition can fix Big Tech, but only if we don’t make “bigness” a legal requirement
I’m all for making Big Tech small again and fixing the internet so that it’s not just five giant websites filled with screenshots from the other four, not to mention doing something about market dominance, corporate bullying, rampant privacy invasions and so on.
But a persistent thread in the past year’s efforts to “fix the internet” has been to pass out badly constructed regulations that only the very biggest companies can afford to comply with, making it that much harder to enact policies...
May 19, 2019
Los Angeles! Come see me at Exposition Park library this Thursday, talking about Big Tech, monopolies, mind control and the right of technological self-determination
From 6PM-730PM this Thursday, May 23, I’m presenting at the Exposition Park Library (Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune Regional Library, 3900 S Western Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90062) on the problems of Big Tech and how the problems of monopolization (in tech and every other industry) is supercharged by the commercial surveillance industry — and what we can do about it. It’s part of the LA Public Library’s “Book to Action” program and it’s free to attend — I hope to see you there!
May 15, 2019
“What does it mean to keep the internet free?” An in-depth discussion with Why? on North Dakota Public Radio
A couple of weeks ago, I recorded a long, in-depth discussion on the subject of “What does it mean to keep the internet free” with Jack Russell Weinstein from Why?, the Institute for Philosophy in Public Life’s program on North Dakota Public Radio (MP3). Weinstein and I ranged pretty far and wide about what internet freedom really means, what threatens it, and how we can defend it.
Naked Capitalism reviews Radicalized
Naked Captalism is one of my favorite sites, both for its radical political commentary and the vigorous discussions that follow from it; now, John Siman has posted a review of my latest book, Radicalized, which collects four intensely political science fiction stories about our present day and near future.
Siman’s review frames Radicalized as a critique of neoliberalism, which is just right: from the story Unauthorized Bread, about the use of DRM-locked appliances to make the lives of refug...
May 14, 2019
LA! Come see me this Saturday at the Nebula Awards Conference, and next Thursday at Exposition Park Library!
This Saturday, May 18, I’ll be appearing at the Nebula Awards Conference, at the Marriott Warner Center in Woodland Hills: I’ll be participating in the 1:30PM mass signing in the Grand Ballroom and then I’ll be on the “Megatrends for the Near Future” panel at 4PM in A/B Salon.
And then on Thursday, May 23d, I’ll be speaking at the Exposition Park Regional Library as part of the Los Angeles Public Library’s Book to Action program, speaking on algorithmic manipulation, monopolies and technolo...
