Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 62
June 13, 2015
Man Who Sold the Moon wins the Sturgeon Award!
This weekend, my short story “The Man Who Sold the Moon” won the The Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, a juried prize for the best science fiction story of the year.
The story originally appeared in the anthology Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, edited by Kathryn Cramer and Ed Finn, based on a project started by Neal Stephenson to encourage ambitious science fiction grounded in real technological plausibility that would inspire a new generation of engineers and techies...
June 4, 2015
Context: the DRM-free audio edition of my essay collection
Downpour has published a DRM-free audio edition of my essay collection Context (with an intro by Tim O’Reilly), the companion volume to my collection Content (introduced by John Perry Barlow).
The collection is read by Paul Michael Garcia, who also read Content. As the subtitle (“Further Selected Essays on Productivity, Creativity, Parenting, and Politics in the 21st Century”) implies, it covers some pretty far-ranging ground!
One of the web’s most celebrated high-tech culture mavens ret...
June 2, 2015
New Yorkers! Come hear me speak this Saturday!
I’ll be at the NY Academy of Medicine from 1-3PM, explaining why “Information doesn’t want to be free…but people do.” — tell your friends!
May 18, 2015
Bruce Sterling’s introduction to the Italian edition of Little Brother
Italy’s Multiplayer Edizioni just launched a beautiful new Italian edition of Little Brother with an introduction by Bruce Sterling. It’s the second essay that Bruce has written for one of my books, and it’s my favorite — I was so pleased with it that I asked his permission to reproduce it here, which he’s graciously granted.
Big Brother and His Grandson
This is the second time I have written an introduction to a Cory Doctorow book. However, this is my first effort to explain Cory Doctoro...
April 22, 2015
Google anti-trust action is dumb, but the EU should be worried about online giants
My latest Guardian column, Can anything curb the dominance of the internet’s big guns? points out that everything governments do to tame the online giants has no effect on them — but makes it nearly impossible for new companies to compete with them.
There’s no better example of this than the VATMOSS VAT mess. Amazon, Google, Apple and other e-commerce giants claimed to be headquartered in Luxembourg in order to avoid VAT. This made everything they sold 20% cheaper than the products offer...
April 20, 2015
My Webstock 2015 talk: Light a candle, curse the darkness and win the war on general purpose computers to save the world
If we’re going to solve the serious, existential risks to the human race – things like environmental apocalypse – we’re going to need social and technical infrastructure that can support evidence-driven, public-spirited institutions that can help steer us to a better place. Alas, we’re in trouble there, too. We’re living in a nearly airtight bubble of corruption and coercion. The only policies that states can reliably be expected to enact are those with business...
March 30, 2015
Clean Reader is a free speech issue
My latest Guardian column, Allow Clean Reader to swap ‘bad’ words in books – it’s a matter of free speech expands on last week’s editorial about the controversial ebook reader, which lets readers mangle the books they read by programatically swapping swear-words for milder alternatives.
I agree with the writers who say that the app is offensive, and that it makes books worse. Where I part company with Clean Reader’s detractors is where they claim that it is — or
should be — illegal. If we...
March 12, 2015
A conversation about privacy and trust in open education
For Open Education Week, Jonathan Worth convened a conversation about privacy and trust in open education called Speaking Openly in which educators and scholars recorded a series of videos responding to one another’s thoughts on the subject.
The takes are extremely varied, and come from Audrey Waters, Nishant Shah, Ulrich Boser, Dan Gillmor, and me, and went through two rounds. It’s an exciting way to conduct a dialogue between people who probably couldn’t all get together, and it’s desig...
March 3, 2015
Audiobook of Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
Blackstone has adapted my 2005 urban fantasy novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town for audiobook, narrated by Bronson Pinchot, who does a stunning job.
It’s available as a DRM-free audiobook at all the usual places, including the DRM-free audiobook store Downpour. However, Itunes and Audible refuse to carry this — or any of my other titles — because I won’t allow them to put DRM on them.
Alan is a middle-aged entrepreneur in contemporary Toronto who has devoted himself to fixing up a...
February 27, 2015
Internet-fired elections and the politics of business as usual
I’ve got a new Guardian column, Internet-era politics means safe seats are a thing of the past, which analyzes the trajectory of Internet-fuelled election campaigning since Howard Dean, and takes hope in the launch of I’ll Vote Green If You Do.
The Obama campaigns went further. Building on the Dean campaign, two successive Obama campaigns raised millions in small-money donations, creating purpose-built Facebook-like social networks and using them to recruit highly connected supporters to work...
