Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 37

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...

San Franciscans! Come celebrate the launch of the EFF/McSweeney’s special privacy issue with me on Dec 11!

I’m heading to San Francisco next week for a launch party on December 11th celebrating the release of The End of Trust, a collaboration between EFF and McSweeney’s on internet surveillance and the future of the net; the event is at 7:30PM at Manny’s at 3092 16th Street (RSVP here), and I’ll be on a panel with EFF exec director Cindy Cohn, moderated by the amazing Annalee Newitz! end of trust,san francisco,events,happy mutants,privacy, mannys-730pm

Sole and Despotic Dominion: my story about the future of private property for Reason

Reason’s December issue celebrates the magazine’s 50th anniversary with a series of commissioned pieces on the past and future of the magazine’s subjects: freedom, markets, property rights, privacy and similar matters: I contributed a short story to the issue called Sole and Despotic Dominion, which takes the form of a support chat between a dishwasher owner and its manufacturer’s rep, who has the unhappy job of describing why the dishwasher won’t accept his dishes.

The story is part of a s...

Talking about the DMCA and 20 years of tech law malpractice on PRI’s Marketplace

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act — tech’s stupidest law — turns 20 this year; I chatted with Molly Wood on Marketplace Tech about the law’s history and how dismally little we’ve learned from it, repeating and even magnifying its mistakes today. (MP3)

The internet is made up revolutionary technologies, but isn’t revolutionary

My latest Locus Magazine column is What the Internet Is For: it describes the revolutionary principle (end-to-end communications) and technologies (general purpose computers, strong cryptography) that undergird the net, but also cautions that these are, themselves, not sufficient to revolutionize the world.

All these tools are available to establishments just as much as they are available to insurgents: and given time, these technologies will eventually add to the advantage the establishme...

My keynote for Ethereum Devcon: without the rule of law, crypto fails

I was one of the keynote speakers at last week’s Ethereum Devcon in Prague, where I gave a talk called “Decentralize, Democratize, or Die,” about the way that bad tech policy (crypto backdoors, the DMCA’s ban on security disclosures, etc) come from weak states where the super-rich get to call the shots, and how things like money-laundering creates these weak states. The core message: if you don’t figure out how to make more pluralistic, less plutocratic states, you will never get the kind...

Reminder: I’m speaking in Berlin tonight at the DTK-Wasserturm

I’m in Berlin today, promoting the German edition of my novel Walkaway: the kindly folks at Otherland Books are hosting me tonight at a free event at DTK Wasserturm, where I’ll be presenting with Marcus Richter. Hope to see you there! Tell your friends!

I’m speaking in Berlin on November 5!

I’m going to be in Berlin next week to promote the German edition of my novel Walkaway: I’ll be appearing at DTK-Wasserturm from 20h-22h, sponsored by Otherland Books. Entry is free — I hope to see you there!