Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 5

How I Got Scammed

Today for my podcast, I read How I Got Scammed, originally published in my Pluralistic blog. It’s a story of how the attacker has to get lucky once, while the defender has to never make a single mistake.

This is my last podcast before I take off for my next book-tour, for my new novel, The Bezzle. I’m ranging far and wide: LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, Calgary, Phoenix, Portland, Providence, Boston, New York City, Toronto, San Diego, Salt Lake City, Tucson, Chicago, Buffalo, as well a...

Come see me on tour! LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, Calgary, Phoenix, Portland, Providence, Boston, New York City, Toronto, San Diego, Salt Lake City, Tucson, Chicago, Amherst, Torino, Tartu.

Come see me on tour! (permalink)

My next novel is The Bezzle, a high-tech ice-cold revenge thriller starring Marty Hench, a two-fisted forensic accountant, as he takes on the sleaziest scams of the first two decades of the 2000s, from hamburger-themed Ponzis to the unbelievably sleazy and evil prison-tech industry:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

I’m taking Marty on the road! I’ll be visiting eighteen cities between now and June, and I hope you’ll come out and say hello, ...

My Marshall McLuhan Lecture on enshittification from Berlin’s transmediale conference

Last week, I traveled to Berlin to give the annual Marshall McLuhan lecture to open the Transmediale festival. I gave the talk to a full house at the Canadian embassy, and the embassy was kind enough to upload their video of the speech. This podcast is a rip of the audio from that Youtube video. I’ve also posted a transcript of the talk.

Last year, I coined the term ‘enshittification,’ to describe the way that platforms decay. That obscene little word did big numbers, it really hit the zeit...

What kind of bubble is AI?

This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus Magazine column. “What kind of bubble is AI?” In it, I ask what will be left behind after the AI bubble bursts:

You’ve got one week left to back the Kickstarter for my next novel, The Bezzle, the followup to Red Team Blues. I’m preselling hardcovers, ebooks, and an audiobook read by Wil Wheaton. Please consider backing it and helping support my work (including this podcast!).

But the most important residue after the bubble popped was the mil­li...

The Bezzle, read by Wil Wheaton (excerpt)

This week on my podcast, a preview of Wil Wheaton’s reading on the audiobook of The Bezzle, which I’m preselling through a Kickstarter campaign that I hope you’ll consider backing!

MP3

The Internet’s Original Sin

This week on my podcast, I read my final Medium column
The internet’s original sin, about the failure of trying to stretch copyright to cover every problem on the internet.

Copyright is a regulation. It regulates the supply-chain of the entertainment industry. Copyright matters a lot to me, because I’m in the industry.

But unless you’re in the industry, it shouldn’t matter to you.

It’s fine to require a grasp of copyright among people who write, publish and distribute novels — but it’s ban...

Daddy-Daughter Podcast, 2023 edition

12 years ago, my four-year-old daughter’s nursery school let us know they’d be shutting down for Christmas a day before my wife’s office closed down, so I took the kid into my office in London to do some coloring, play with toys, and, eventually, record a podcast. It was hilarious.

In the years since, we’ve done this nine more times (we missed one year, after my podcasting mic got broken during our move to Los Angeles). Now the kid is fifteen (!), learning to drive (!!), and I still managed to...

Don’t Be Evil

This week on my podcast, I read my Locus Magazine column “Don’t Be Evil,” about the microeconomics and moral injury of enshittification.

It’s tempting to think of the Great Enshittening – in which all the inter­net services we enjoyed and came to rely upon became suddenly and irreversibly terrible – as the result of moral decay. That is, it’s tempting to think that the people who gave us the old, good internet did so because they were good people, and the people who enshittified it did so bec...

Announcing The Lost Cause Tour

Today is the day that my new novel, The Lost Cause, goes on sale, and I’m hitting the road with it! I hope you can make it out – tell your friends!

Los Angeles: I’ll be at the Studio City branch of the LA Public Library tonight, Monday, November 13 at 1830hPT; there’ll be a reading, a talk, a surprise guest (!!) and a signing, with books on sale. Tell your friends! Come on down!

https://www.lapl.org/whats-on/events/author-talk-cory-doctorow

Stratford, Ontario: I’m onstage on November 16 at 19hET...

Moral Hazard (from Communications Breakdown)

This week on my podcast, I read my short story “Moral Hazard,” published last month in MIT Press’s Communications Breakdown, a science fiction anthology edited by Jonathan Strahan. “Moral Hazard” is a story about inequality, fintech, and the problems of “solutionism.”

I know exactly where I was the day I decided to give every homeless person in America their own LLC. I was in the southeast corner of the sprawling homeless camp that had once been Seattle’s Discovery Park on a rare, dry Februar...