Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 6

How To Think About Scraping

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column. “How To Think About Scraping: In privacy and labor fights, copyright is a clumsy tool at best,” about the real risks (and benefits) of web-scraping, and how to formulate policy responses that preserve those benefits while targeting the harms head-on”

Scraping when the scrapee suffers as a result of your scraping is good, actually.

Mario Zechner is an Austrian technologist who used the APIs of large grocery chains to prove that they were...

Plausible Sentence Generators

This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus column. “Plausible Sentence Generators,” about my surprising, accidental encounter with a chatbot, and what it says about the future of the bullshit wars.

When I came back to the tab a couple minutes later, I found that the site had fed my letter to a large language model (probably ChatGPT) and that it had been transformed into an eye-watering, bowel-loosening, vicious lawyer letter.

Hell, it scared me.

Let’s get one thing straight. This was a...

Enshitternet: The old, good internet deserves a new, good internet

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column. “Enshitternet: The old, good internet deserves a new, good internet,” clarifying that our aspiration shouldn’t be to restore the internet’s former glory, but to make a new and glorious internet.

The enshitternet wasn’t inevitable. It was the result of specific policy choices: the decision to encourage monopoly formation, which created the corporate power and concentration that led to even more policies, granting the monopolist unlimited ...

The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (audiobook outtake)

This week’s podcast is a special one: the introduction and chapter one of the audio edition of The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation, which Verso will publish on September 5, 2023. I made my own DRM-free audiobook for this, reading it under the direction of the incredible Gabrielle de Cuir at Skyboat Media. You can pre-order DRM-free audiobooks, ebooks and hardcovers (both signed and unsigned) at my Kickstarter.

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Let the Platforms Burn: The Opposite of Good Fires is Wildfires

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column. “Let the Platforms Burn: The Opposite of Good Fires is Wildfires,” making the case that we should focus more on making it easier for people to leave platforms, rather than making the platforms less terrible places to be.

Tech bosses know the only thing protecting them from sudden platform collapse syndrome are the laws that have been passed to stave off the inevitable fire.

They know that platforms implode “slowly, then all at once.”

T...

Ideas Lying Around

This week on my podcast, I read a recent Medium column. “Ideas Lying Around,” about archivillain Milton Friedman’s surprisingly good theory of change, and how to apply it to progressive politics.

Enter Friedman: to people reeling in crisis, Friedman insisted that the missing oil was somehow the product of unionization, pollution controls, women’s lib, and the civil rights movement. Though this was transparent nonsense, akin to blaming witches for a crop failure, the crisis was so dislocating,...

The Swivel-Eyed Loons Have a Point

This week on my podcast, I read my lastest Locus column. “The Swivel-Eyed Loons Have a Point,” about the unlikely – but undeniable – common ground I share with the most unhinged far-right conspiracists.

The swivel-eyed loons at the anti-15-minute-city protests point out that such a scheme constitutes a form of pervasive location-tracking surveil­lance, and that this surveillance could be leveraged to attack disfavored minorities. They’re not wrong. Just look at London, where a (again, perfect...

The Red Team Blues tour: Burbank, SF, PDX, Berkeley, YVR, Calgary, Gaithersburg, DC, Toronto, Hay, Oxford, Nottingham, Manchester, London, Edinburgh, Berlin

Burbank: Apr 26, 6PM, Dark Delicacies

San Francisco: Apr 30, 2PM, San Francisco Public Library (with Annalee Newitz)

PDX/Cedar Hills: May 2, 7PM, Powell’s (with Andy Baio)

Mountain View: May 5, 7PM, Books, Inc (with Mitch Kapor)

Berkeley: May 6/7, Bay Area Book Fair (with Glynn Washington and Wendy Liu)

Vancouver: May 10, 9:50AM, Open Source Summit

Vancouver: May 10, 6:30PM, Heritage Hall (with Sean Cranbury)

Calgary, May 11, 7PM, Wordfest (with Peter Hemminger)

Gaithersburg, May 20, 3:15PM, Ga...

The Red Team Blues tour: Burbank, SF, PDX, Berkeley, YVR, Calgary, Gaithersburg, DC, Toronto, Hay, Oxford, Nottingham, Manchester, London, Edinburgh, London, Berlin

Burbank: Apr 26, 6PM, Dark Delicacies

San Francisco: Apr 30, 2PM, San Francisco Public Library (with Annalee Newitz)

PDX/Cedar Hills: May 2, 7PM, Powell’s (with Andy Baio)

Mountain View: May 5, 7PM, Books, Inc (with Mitch Kapor)

Berkeley: May 6/7, Bay Area Book Fair (with Glynn Washington and Wendy Liu)

Vancouver: May 10, 9:50AM, Open Source Summit

Vancouver: May 10, 6:30PM, Heritage Hall (with Sean Cranbury)

Calgary, May 11, 7PM, Wordfest (with Peter Hemminger)

Gaithersburg, May 20, 3:15PM, Ga...

How To Make a Child-Safe TikTok

This week on my podcast, I read my recent Medium column. “How To Make a Child-Safe TikTok: Have you tried not spying on kids,” about the bizarre unwillingness of considering a middle-ground between “unregulated TikTok” and “banning TikTok” – namely, prohibiting TikTok from spying on kids.

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(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; Vxla, CC BY 2.0; modified)