Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 41
May 14, 2018
Podcast: Petard, Part 02
Here’s the second part of my reading (MP3) of Petard (part one), a story from MIT Tech Review’s Twelve Tomorrows, edited by Bruce Sterling; a story inspired by, and dedicated to, Aaron Swartz — about elves, Net Neutrality, dorms and the collective action problem.
May 9, 2018
Talking privacy and GDPR with Thomson Reuters
Thomson Reuters interviewed me for their new series on data privacy and the EU General Data Protection Regulation; here’s the audio!
What if you just said when you breach, the damages that you owe to the people whose data you breached cannot be limited to the immediate cognizable consequences of that one breach but instead has to take recognition of the fact that breaches are cumulative? That the data that you release might be merged with some other set that was previously released either...
May 7, 2018
Donald Trump is a pathogen evolved to thrive in an attention-maximization ecosystem
My latest Locus column is The Engagement-Maximization Presidency, and it proposes a theory to explain the political phenomenon of Donald Trump: we live in a world in which communications platforms amplify anything that gets “engagement” and provides feedback on just how much your message has been amplified so you can tune and re-tune for maximum amplification.
Peter Watts’s 2002 novel Maelstrom illustrates a beautiful, terrifying example of this, in which a mindless, self-modifying compute...
May 3, 2018
Announcing “Petard,” a new science fiction story reading on my podcast
Here’s the first part of my reading (MP3) of Petard, a story from MIT Tech Review’s Twelve Tomorrows, edited by Bruce Sterling; a story inspired by, and dedicated to, Aaron Swartz — about elves, Net Neutrality, dorms and the collective action problem.
April 30, 2018
Boston, Chicago and Waterloo, I’m heading your way!
This Wednesday at 1145am, I’ll be giving the IDE Lunch Seminar at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, 100 Main Street.
From there, I head to Chicago to keynote Thotcon on Friday at 11am.
My final stop on this trip is Waterloo’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, May 9 at 2PM.
I hope to see you! I’ve got plenty more appearances planned this season, including Santa Fe, Phoenix, San Jose, Boston, San Diego and Pasadena!
April 26, 2018
Raleigh-Durham, I’m headed your way! CORRECTED!
CORRECTION! The Flyleaf event is at 6PM, not 7!
I’m delivering the annual Kilgour lecture tomorrow morning at 10AM at UNC, and I’ll be speaking at Flyleaf Books at 6PM — be there or be oblong!
Also, if you’re in Boston, Waterloo or Chicago, you can catch me in the coming weeks!.
Abstract: For decades, regulators and corporations have viewed the internet and the computer as versatile material from which special-purpose tools can be fashioned: pornography distribution systems, jihadi recruit...
Little Brother is 10 years old today: I reveal the secret of writing future-proof science fiction
It’s been ten years since the publication of my bestselling novel Little Brother; though the novel was written more than a decade ago, and though it deals with networked computers and mobile devices, it remains relevant, widely read, and widely cited even today.
In an essay for Tor.com, I write about my formula for creating fiction about technology that stays relevant — the secret is basically to assume that people will be really stupid about technology for the foreseeable future.
And no...
April 14, 2018
Interview with Monocle’s Meet the Writers
Last month, while at Adelaide Writers Week, I sat down with the excellent Georgina Godwin to record an interview (MP3) for Monocole’s “Meet the Writers” podcast. They’ve only just published it and I’m very pleased with how it turned out: we got into some territory that I don’t usually cover. Also: they had the interview in a bar and bought me whatever whisky I asked for, which was quite a bonus.
April 4, 2018
Podcast: The Man Who Sold the Moon, Part 08: the FINAL INSTALLMENT
Here’s the eighth and final part of my reading (MP3) (part seven, part six, part five, part four, part three, part two, part one) of The Man Who Sold the Moon, my award-winning novella first published in 2015’s Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, edited by Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer. It’s my Burning Man/maker/first days of a better nation story and was a kind of practice run for my 2017 novel Walkaway.
March 27, 2018
Talking Walkaway at Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre
The Wheeler Centre just posted the audio (MP3) of my event there with C.S. Pacat, as part of my Australia/NZ book tour. It’s a great interview, and we had a lively Q&A!
