Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 39

Come see me at the Edinburgh Festival and/or Worldcon!

I’m heading to Scotland for the Edinburgh Festival where I’m appearing with the wonderful Ada Palmer on August 12th at 845PM (we’re talking about the apocalypse, science fiction and hopefulness); from there, I’m heading to the 76th World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose, California, where I’ll be doing a bunch of panels, signings and a reading.

Here’s my Worldcon schedule:

Friday August 17:

11AM, Signing, The Book Bin table, dealer’s room R4

12PM, Borderlines, SJCC 210B, with Joanna M...

My closing keynote from the second Decentralized Web Summit

Two years ago, I delivered the closing keynote at the Internet Archive’s inaugural Decentralized Web event; last week, we had the second of these, and once again, I gave the closing keynote, entitled Big Tech’s problem is Big, not Tech. Here’s the abstract:

For decades, we fought complacency over Big Tech. That’s over. The techlash is here, and with it, a new and scarier problem: that we’ll tame big tech by regulating it with expensive compliance rules that no startup could match, enthron...

Talking copyright, internet freedom, artistic business models, and antitrust with Steal This Show

I’m on the latest episode of Torrentfreak’s Steal This Show podcast (MP3), where I talk with host Jamie King about “Whether file-sharing & P2P communities have lost the battle to streaming services like Netflix and Spotify, and why the ‘copyfight’ is still important; how the European Copyright Directive eats at the fabric of the Web, making it even harder to compete with content giants; and why breaking up companies like Google and Facebook might be the only way to restore an internet — and a...

I’ll be live on BookTV’s In Depth on August 5!

I’m headed to DC to sit down in studio with BookTV’s “In Depth” on August 5; it’ll air live on Aug 5 at 12PM Eastern/9AM Pacific and be repeated on August 6 at 12AM Eastern/(9PM Pacific on Aug 5) and on Aug 11 at 9AM Eastern/6AM Pacific. It’s a phone-in!

See you at Comic-Con!

I’m one of the “special guests” at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con! If you’re attending, I hope you’ll come by and see some of my programming items, especially my spotlight interview with Cecil Castellucci (Friday, July 20, 1330h-1430h, Room 24ABC), where I’ll be making an exciting announcement.

Here’s my full schedule, including some extracurriculars not listed in the regular program:

* Thursday, 1PM: Panel – Finding Comfort in the Apocalypse, Room 32AB, with Emily Suvada, Elizabeth Hand,...

Podcast: Zuck’s Empire of Oily Rags

Here’s my reading (MP3) of Zuck’s Empire of Oily Rags, a Locus Magazine column about the corruption implicit in surveillance capitalism, which creates giant risks to users by collecting sensitive information about them in order to eke out tiny gains in the efficacy of targeted advertising. The commercial surveillance industry may not be very good at selling us fridges, but they’re very good at locating racists and thugs and getting them to support violent political movements.

MP3

Portuguese translation of Zuck’s Empire of Oily Rags

Brent Longborough did me the enormous favor of translating my latest Locus column, Zuck’s Empire of Oily Rags, into Portuguese, and sent it to me to publish.

Cory Doctorow: Zuck e seu Império de Trapos Oleosos

2 de julho de 2018 Cory Doctorow

Durante vinte anos, os defensores da privacidade vem soando o alarme sobre a vigilância comercial on-line, a maneira de as empresas coletarem dossiês detalhados sobre nós para ajudar os profissionais de marketing a nos almejar com seus anúncios. Esse al...

The economics of Walkaway

Edgeryders’ Alberto Cottica has published a detailed analysis of the economics of Walkaway, at the micro-, mezzo-, and macroscale. It’s a good, crisp analysis that really captures what I was going for.

Writers are notoriously bad at knowing what they’re doing and why, and good criticism is just as interesting for writers to read as it is for readers.

The economics in Walkaway are my attempt to nail down a bunch of half-formed ideas that have been knocking around in my own thoughts for de...

Mark Zuckerberg and his empire of oily rags

Surveillance capitalism sucks: it improves the scattershot, low-performance success-rate of untargeted advertising (well below 1 percent) and doubles or triples it (to well below 1 percent!).

But surveillance captialism is still dangerous: all those dossiers on the personal lives of whole populations can be used for blackmail, identity theft and political manipulation. As I explain in my new Locus column, Cory Doctorow: Zuck’s Empire of Oily Rags, Facebook’s secret is that they’ve found a w...

Podcast: Let’s get better at demanding better from tech

Here’s my reading (MP3) of Let’s get better at demanding better from tech, a Locus Magazine column about the need to enlist moral, ethical technologists in the fight for a better technological future. It was written before the death of EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow, whose life’s work was devoted to this proposition, and before the Google uprising over Project Maven, in which technologists killed millions in military contracts by refusing to build AI systems for the Pentagon’s drones.

MP3...