Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 44

I’m speaking at UCSD on Feb 9!

I’m appearing at UCSD on February 9, with a talk called “Scarcity, Abundance and the Finite Planet: Nothing Exceeds Like Excess,” in which I’ll discuss the potentials for scarcity and abundance — and bright-green vs austere-green futurism — drawing on my novels Walkaway, Makers and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

The talk is free and open to the public; the organizers would appreciate an RSVP to galleryinfo@calit2.net.

The lecture will take place in the Calit2 Auditorium in the Qualcom...

My keynote from ConveyUX 2017: “I Can’t Let You Do That, Dave.”

“The Internet’s broken and that’s bad news, because everything we do today involves the Internet and everything we’ll do tomorrow will require it. But governments and corporations see the net, variously, as a perfect surveillance tool, a perfect pornography distribution tool, or a perfect video on demand tool—not as the nervous system of the 21st century. Time’s running out. Architecture is politics. The changes we’re making to the net today will prefigure the future our children and their...

The Man Who Sold the Moon, Part 02

Here’s part two of my reading (MP3) 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.

MP3

With repetition, most of us will become inured to all the dirty tricks of Facebook attention-manipulation

In my latest Locus column, “Persuasion, Adaptation, and the Arms Race for Your Attention,” I suggest that we might be too worried about the seemingly unstoppable power of opinion-manipulators and their new social media superweapons.

Not because these techniques don’t work (though when someone who wants to sell you persuasion tools tells you that they’re amazing and unstoppable, some skepticism is warranted), but because a large slice of any population will eventually adapt to any stimulu...

Interview with the National Science Teachers Association’s Lab Out Loud podcast

Back in 2010, I appeared as a guest on the National Science Teachers Association’s Lab Out Loud podcast, and this year, they had me back as part of their celebration of their first decade; they’ve just published the interview, (MP3) which was primarily about my novel Walkaway.

A Hopeful Look At The Apocalypse: An interview with PRI’s Innovation Hub

I chatted with Innovation Hub, distributed by PRI, about the role of science fiction and dystopia in helping to shape the future (MP3).

Three Takeaways

1. Doctorow thinks that science-fiction can give people “ideas for what to do if the future turns out in different ways.” Like how William Gibson’s Neuromancer didn’t just predict the internet, it predicted the intermingling of corporations and the state.

2. When you have story after story about how people turn on each other after disas...

Podcast: The Man Who Sold the Moon, Part 01

Here’s part one of my reading (MP3) 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.

MP3

Reviving my Christmas daddy-daughter podcast, with Poesy!

For nearly every year since my daughter Poesy was old enough to sing, we’ve recorded a Christmas podcast; but we missed it in 2016, due to the same factors that made the podcast itself dormant for a couple years — my crazy busy schedule.

But this year, we’re back, with my off-key accompaniment to her excellent “Deck the Halls,” as well as some of her favorite slime recipes, and a promise that I’ll be taking up podcasting again in the new year, starting with a serialized reading of my Stu...

Talking Walkaway on the Barnes and Noble podcast

I recorded this interview last summer at San Diego Comic-Con; glad to hear it finally live!

Authors are, without exception, readers, and behind every book there is…another book, and another. In this episode of the podcast, we’re joined by two writers for conversations about the vital books and ideas that influence inform their own work. First, Cory Doctorow talks with B&N’s Josh Perilo about his recent novel of an imagined near future, Walkaway, and the difference between a dystopia and a...

An 8th grader’s brilliant trailer for Walkaway