Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 36

Video and audio from my closing keynote at Friday’s Grand Re-Opening of the Public Domain

On Friday, hundreds of us gathered at the Internet Archive, at the invitation of Creative Commons, to celebrate the Grand Re-Opening of the Public Domain, just weeks after the first works entered the American public domain in twenty years.

I had the honor of delivering the closing keynote, after a roster of astounding speakers. It was a big challenge and I was pretty nervous, but on reviewing the saved livestream, I’m pretty proud of how it turned out.

Proud enough that I’ve ripped the au...

Interview on A World That Might Just Work with Terrence McNally

This week, I sat down for an interview (MP3) with Terrence McNally for his World That Just Might Work show to talk about information politics, science fiction, oligarchy, resistance, and hope!

Revealed! The cover of RADICALIZED, my next book of science fiction

On March 19, Tor Books will release my next book, Radicalized, whose four novellas are the angry, hopeful stories I wrote as part of my attempt to make sense of life in our current moment.

As with my novel Walkaway and the reissues of my adult backlist, Radicalized will have a cover by the amazing Will Stahle, who is, for my money, the best cover designer working in the business at the moment.

Today, Tor has published Stahle’s cover for Radicalized, and holy fucking shit, is it ever great.

...

Big Tech loves disruption, when they’re doing the disruption

My latest Locus Magazine column is “Disruption for Thee, But Not for Me,” and it analyzes how Big Tech has been able to “disrupt” incumbent industries, but has repurposed obscure technology regulations to prevent anyone from meting out the same treatment to their new digital monopolies.

I cite the example of Uber and Lyft, which have gutted the (often corrupt and rentier-riddled) taxi industry, but which can’t be similarly cannibalized my driver co-ops without risking legal retaliation throu...

Video from the launch of the EFF/McSweeney’s “End of Trust” project launch with Cindy Cohn, Annalee Newitz, and me!

The End of Trust is the first-ever nonfiction issue of McSweeney’s, co-edited by McSweeney’s editors and the staff of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; on December 11, we held a sold-out launch event in San Francisco with EFF executive director Cindy Cohn, science fiction writer and EFF alumna Annalee Newitz, and me.

Lisa Rein recorded the event for Mondo 2000, producing a partial transcript, an audio recording (MP3) and a video.

Cindy Cohn: “The first reason is that there’s a fundamen...

Christmas podcast with Poesy, 2018 edition

An annual tradition (MP3)! Poesy is now 10 — nearly 11! — and this year, she’s decided to offer us a detailed makeup tutorial, with some bonus horseback riding advice. There’s even a musical number!

MP3

False Flag: my science fiction story about the future of copyright filters in an Article 13 Europe

The Green European Journal has published a package on the proposed new European Copyright Directive: first, an outstanding interview with the rebel Pirate Party MEP Julia Reda (previously); and then a new science fiction story I’ve written to show what a future where our speech is governed by unaccountable black-box copyright censorbots might look like: “False Flag.”

Agata had always assumed that getting the footage would be the hard part. As it turned out, a covert North Sea drone inserti...

Podcast: “Sole and Despotic Dominion” and “What is the Internet For?”

Here’s my reading (MP3) of my Locus column, “What is the Internet For?” (which asks, “Is the internet a revolutionary technology?”) and my short story for the fiftieth anniversary of Reason Magazine, Sole and Despotic Dominion, which builds on my 2015 Guardian column, If Dishwashers Were iPhones.

MP3

Talking dystopia, utopia, science fiction and theories of change on the Netzpolitik podcast

When I was in Berlin last month, I stopped into the offices of Netzpolitik (previously), the outstanding German digital rights activist group, where I recorded an interview for their podcast (MP3), talking about science fiction, utopianism, dystopianism, how we can change the world, and why my kid has so many names.

Videos from the University of Chicago “Censorship and Information Control” seminar

This year, I helped University of Chicago science fiction writer and renaissance scholar Ada Palmer and science historian Adrian Johns host a series of interdisciplinary seminars on “Censorship, Information Control, & Revolutions in Information Technology from the Printing Press to the Internet.”

Thanks to our generous Kickstarter backers, we were able to raise money to pay for high-quality videography and closed captioning to make the videos beautiful and accessible. The first session...