Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 32
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...
May 4, 2019
A wonderful review for Radicalized in the Winnipeg Free Press
Joel Boyce:
The tagline of Cory Doctorow’s latest release is “dystopia is now.” In four novellas, the Canadian ex-pat ably covers a broad swath of pressing social concerns ranging from police racism to affordable American health care through an only slightly science-fictional lens.
No prior volume has so perfectly encapsulated who Doctorow is or what he thinks we should be worrying about as this one does. In the past, a new reader might have had to read lots of long essays about Makerspaces a...
May 3, 2019
Ottawa! I’m speaking tomorrow at the Writers Festival (and then Re:publica in Berlin and Comicpalooza in Houston!)
Tomorrow night at 7:30PM, I’m giving a presentation about my new book, Radicalized, as part of the Ottawa Writers Festival, at Christ Church Cathedral (414 Sparks St.) — I haven’t spoken in Ottawa for years (maybe a decade?!) so I’m really looking forward to it.
From there, I’m heading to Berlin for May 7, where I’m keynoting at the Re:publica conference with a talk about surveillance and monopolies, followed by a launch and signing for the German edition of my novella Unauthorized Bread (I’...
May 2, 2019
I’m teaching on this year’s Writing Excuses Cruise!
I’m one of the guest instructors on this year’s Writing Excuses Cruise, a nine-day intensive writing program on land and at sea, departing from Galveston and putting into port at Cozumel, Georgetown, and Falmouth, with a roster of instructors including Brandon Sanderson, Piper Drake, Kathy Chung, K Tempest Bradford, DongWon Song, Mary Robinette Kowal, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler. The program starts with a two-day workshop at a Houston hotel and then sets sail, running Sept 22-30 altogether....
Internet Activist Cory Doctorow on How to Change the World
Cory Doctorow, blogger, journalist, science fiction author, and co-editor of the blog Boing Boing, talks about why he’s a great believer in the Internet, warts and all; how, as a white male, he became aware of the struggles of people furthest from opportunity; and how he keeps a positive outlook on life. Cory’s latest book is Radicalized: Four Tales of Our Present Mom...
May 1, 2019
Talking Radicalized, monopoly and DRM with the Techdirt podcast
I’m on this week’s Techdirt podcast (MP3) talking about my latest book Radicalized — this being Techdirt, the talk quickly moved to DRM, and then to tech policy, monopolism, breaking up the Big Tech platforms, and neofeudalism.
April 30, 2019
Ottawa! I’ll be at the Writers Festival this Saturday night (then Berlin for Re:publica and Houston for Comicpalooza!)
This Saturday, May 4, at 7:30PM, I’ll be presenting at the Ottawa Writers Festival, talking about my novel Radicalized and how it ties into surveillance, monopoly, refugees, climate change, racism and oligarchy — all the good stuff!
From there, I’m heading to Berlin’s Re:publica Festival, to give a keynote entitled “It’s monopolies, not surveillance,” on May 7 at 6:45PM on the main stage. I’m also doing an AMA about the EU Copyright Directive earlier that day, at 12:30PM in the Internationa...
Talking Radicalized with the LA Public Library: Trump derangement syndrome, engagement algorithms, and novellas as checked luggage
The LA Public Library’s Daryl M interviewed me about my new book, Radicalized, specifically, about how my Trump anxiety (created, in part, by the platforms’ relentless use of “engagement” tools to nonconsensually eyeball-fuck me with Trump headlines) led to the book’s germination, as well as the specific inspirations for each of the four novellas, and the delights of working in novella form.
What was your inspiration for Radicalized as a collection?
I call this my “Trump derangement syndrom...
