Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 31
June 24, 2019
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...
May 13, 2019
May 9, 2019
Houston! I’m at Comicpalooza all weekend!
I’m one of the guests of honor at this weekend’s Comicpalooza festival in Houston, Texas: in addition to my keynote and signing, you can catch me at panels on copyright, robots and AI, cyberpunk, copyright (again!).
May 6, 2019
“Steering With the Windshield Wipers”: why nothing we’re doing to fix Big Tech is working
My latest Locus column is “Steering with the Windshield Wipers,” and it ties together the growth of Big Tech with the dismantling of antitrust law (which came about thanks to Robert Bork’s bizarre alternate history of antitrust, a theory so ridiculous that it never would have gained traction except that it promised to make rich people a lot richer).
The problems of Big Tech are almost all the results of how big they are, not the fact that they’re doing tech. But all of our regulatory respon...
How the diverse internet became a monoculture
I appeared on this week’s Canadaland podcast (MP3) with Jesse Brown to talk about the promise of the internet 20 years ago, when it seemed that we were headed for an open, diverse internet with decentralized power and control, and how we ended up with an internet composed of five giant websites filled with screenshots from the other four. Jesse has been covering this for more than a decade (I was a columnist on his CBC podcast Search Engine, back in the 2000s) and has launched a successful i...
