Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 45

The Fight for a Free, Fair and Open Internet | Bioneers 2017

According to journalist, blogger, “creative commons” advocate, Electronic Frontier Foundation Fellow, and award-winning science fiction author Cory Doctorow, the fight for a free, fair and open Internet isn’t the most important fight on the planet, but you can’t win any of the other major battles without it. Although the Net is the nervous system of the 21st century, so far we have misunderstood and mismanaged it and made it susceptible to capture by the powerful and corrupt. Cory will share...

How I lifehacked my way into a corner

My latest Locus column is “How to Do Everything (Lifehacking Considered Harmful),” the story of how I was present at the birth of “lifehacking” and how, by diligently applying the precept that I should always actively choose how I prioritize my time, I have painted my way into a (generally pleasant) corner that I can’t escape from.

Call it the paradox of mindful choosing: after 14 years of throwing away the things that do the least for me and preserving those things that do the most for me...

Londoners! I’ll be speaking at Waterstones Gower Street with Ada Palmer on Nov 8

By a very happy coincidence, Ada Palmer and I are both passing through London on November 8 and we’re doing a joint event at the Waterstones in Gower Street, starting at 6:30! The tickets (which include wine) are £6/£4 for students; you can book them here.

Talking Walkaway on the CNet book-club podcast

CNet has started a new book-club podcast, and they honored me by picking my novel Walkaway as their second-ever title.

We had a long and far-ranging discussion last week about the book and the themes it raises: disasters, economics, technological immortality, community, trolling, bohemianism, and much more (MP3).

Since a big part of “Walkaway” concerns ideas of artificial intelligence and the line between humans and machines (which becomes more blurred as the book progresses), Scott...

My adult novels are being reissued with covers to match Walkaway!

When I first saw Will Stahle‘s cover art for my novel Walkaway, I was pleased beyond all reason (and not least because I am an unabashed Stahle fanboy, as he is behind some of the greatest covers of our era, from Yiddish Policeman’s Union to Autonomous to A Darker Shade of Magic to All the Birds in the Sky).

Then, incredibly, it got even better. My publisher told me they were going to reissue my adult backlist in matching livery to coincide with the Walkaway paperback, with Stahle covers f...

Boring, complex and important: the deadly mix that blew up the open web

On Monday, the World Wide Web Consortium published EME, a standard for locking up video on the web with DRM, allowing large corporate members to proceed without taking any steps to protect accessibility work, security research, archiving or innovation.

I spent years working to get people to pay attention to the ramifications of the effort, but was stymied by the deadly combination of an issue that was super-technical and complicated, as well as kind of boring (standards-making is a slow-mo...

Our technology is haunted by demons controlled by transhuman life-forms

In my latest Locus column, “Demon-Haunted World,” I propose that the Internet of Cheating Things — gadgets that try to trick us into arranging our affairs to the benefit of corporate shareholders, to our own detriment — is bringing us back to the Dark Ages, when alchemists believed that the universe rearranged itself to prevent them from knowing the divine secrets of its workings.

From Dieselgate to Wannacry to HP’s sleazy printer ink chicanery, we are increasingly colonized by demon-haunte...

Walkaway won the Dragon Award for Best Apocalyptic Novel

Yesterday, I left the Black Rock Desert after Burning Man and my phone came to life and informed me that my novel Walkaway had been awarded DragonCon’s Dragon Award for Best Apocalyptic Novel!

I couldn’t be more pleased. My sincere thanks to all the voters who supported the novel! By the way, Tor.com published Party Discipline — a novella set in the Walkaway world — while I was away in the desert. I think it came out great.

BEST SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL:
Babylon’s Ashes by James S.A. Core...

Party Discipline: a novella set in the world of Walkaway

I wrote the novella Party Discipline while I was on my grueling US/Canada/UK tour for my novel Walkaway, last spring. Today, Tor.com publishes the tale, in which two seniors at Burbank High confront their uncertain future by planning a “Communist party” in which they take over a defunct factory and start it up again, a tangible, dangerous, playful reminder that material abundance is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.

The piece is accompanied by a gorgeous original illustration by Go...

See you at Burning Man!

Tomorrow, I’m turning off my email and hitting the road for Burning Man, where I’ll be giving three talks, and I hope to see you there: at 4PM on Weds, Aug 20, I’m speaking at Palenque Norte at Camp Soft Landing; at noon on Thursday, Aug 31, I’ll be speaking at my home camp, Liminal Labs (6:15 and Rod’s Road); at 4:30PM on Friday, September 1, I’m speaking at the Center Camp Cafe stage. See you there — or back here after Labor Day!