Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 47

My presentation from ConveyUX

Last March, I traveled to Seattle to present at the ConveyUX conference, with a keynote called “Dark Patterns and Bad Business Models”, the video for which has now been posted: “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...

Interview with Wired UK’s Upvote podcast

Back in May, I stopped by Wired UK while on my British tour for my novel Walkaway to talk about the novel, surveillance, elections, and, of course, DRM. (MP3)

I’ll see you this weekend at Denver Comic-Con!

I just checked in for my o-dark-hundred flight to Denver tomorrow morning for this weekend’s Denver Comic-Con, where I’m appearing for several hours on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, including panels with some of my favorite writers, like John Scalzi, Richard Kadrey, Catherynne Valente and Scott Sigler:

Friday:

* 1:30-2:30pm The Future is Here :: Room 402
How have recent near-future works fared in preparing us for the realities of the current day? What can near-future works being publish...

Audio from my NYPL appearance with Edward Snowden

Last month, I appeared onstage with Edward Snowden at the NYPL, hosted by Paul Holdengraber, discussing my novel Walkaway. The library has just posted the audio! It was quite an evening

Bruce Sterling reviews WALKAWAY

Bruce Sterling, Locus Magazine: Walkaway is a real-deal, generically traditional science-fiction novel; it’s set in an undated future and it features weird set design, odd costumes, fights, romances, narrow escapes, cool weapons, even zeppelins. This is the best Cory Doctorow book ever. I don’t know if it’s destined to become an SF classic, mostly because it’s so advanced and different that it makes the whole genre look archaic.

For instance: in a normal science fiction novel, an author pa...

Canada: Trump shows us what happens when “good” politicians demand surveillance powers

The CBC asked me to write an editorial for their package about Canadian identity and politics, timed with the 150th anniversary of the founding of the settler state on indigenous lands. They’ve assigned several writers to expand on themes in the Canadian national anthem, and my line was “We stand on guard for thee.”

I wrote about bill C-51, a reckless, sweeping mass surveillance bill that now-PM Trudeau got his MPs to support when he was in opposition, promising to reform the bill once he...

Talking about contestable futures on the Imaginary Worlds podcast

I’m in the latest episode of Imaginary Worlds, “Imagining the Internet” (MP3), talking about the future as a contestable place that we can’t predict, but that we can influence.

We were promised flying cars and we got Twitter instead. That’s the common complaint against sci-fi authors. But some writers did imagine the telecommunications that changed our world for better or worse. Cory Doctorow, Ada Palmer, Jo Walton and Arizona State University professor Ed Finn look at the cyberpunks and t...

How to get a signed, personalized copy of Walkaway sent to your door!

The main body of the tour for my novel Walkaway is done (though there are still upcoming stops at Denver Comic-Con, San Diego Comic-Con, the Burbank Public Library and Defcon in Las Vegas), but you can still get signed, personalized copies of Walkaway!

My local, fantastic indie bookstore, Dark Delicacies, has a good supply of Walkaways, and since I pass by it most days, they’ve generously offered to take special orders for me to stop in and personalize so they can ship them anywhere in the...

New Yorkers! I’ll see you tomorrow at Bookcon on the Walkaway tour (then SF, Chicago, Denver…) (!)

I just got to NYC for Bookcon, where I’m Bay Area Book Festival on Sunday, where I’m o...

Bad news: tech is making us more unequal. Good news: tech can make us more equal.

My latest Guardian column is Technology is making the world more unequal. Only technology can fix this; in it, I argue that surveillance and control technology allow ruling elites to hold onto power despite the destabilizing effects of their bad decisions — but that technology also allows people to form dissident groups and protect them from intrusive states.

The question, then, isn’t whether technology makes the world more equal and prosperous, but how to use technology to attain those...