Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 68

OECD predicts collapse of capitalism

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development -- a pro-establishment, rock-ribbed bastion of pro-market thinking -- has released a report predicting a collapse in global economic growth rates, a rise in feudal wealth disparity, collapsing tax revenue and huge, migrating bands of migrant laborers roaming from country to country, seeking crumbs of work. They proscribe "flexible" workforces, austerity, and mass privatization.

The report, Policy Challenges for the Next 50 Years , makes...

Coming to SLC and PDX

I'm heading to Salt Lake City this week for Westercon, followed by an appearance at the SLC Library on Monday. Next week, I'll be in PDX for three library gigs: Beaverton, Tigard, and Hillsboro. See you there!

Podcast: How Amazon is holding Hachette hostage

Here's a reading (MP3) of my latest Guardian column, How Amazon is holding Hachette hostage, which examines how Hachette's insistence on DRM for their ebooks has taken away all their negotiating leverage with Amazon, resulting in Amazon pulling Hachette's books from its catalog in the course of a dispute over discounting:

Under US law (the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act) and its global counterparts (such as the EUCD), only the company that put the DRM on a copyrighted work can remove it...

My talk at the Edinburgh Publishing Conference

Here's my talk at last week's Edinburgh Publishing Conference, called "Information Doesn't Want to Be Free."

How Hachette made the rope that Amazon is hanging it with

In my latest Guardian column, "How Amazon is holding Hachette hostage," I discuss the petard that the French publishing giant Hachette is being hoisted upon by Amazon. Hachette insisted that Amazon sell its books with "Digital Rights Management" that only Amazon is allowed to remove, and now Hachette can't afford to pull its books from Amazon, because its customers can only read their books with Amazon's technology. So now, Hachette has reduced itself to a commodity supplier to Amazon, and ha...

My Tedxoxbridge talk: How to break the Internet

I gave a talk last month in Cambridge at the Tedxoxbridge event called How to break the Internet, about how urgent it is that the Internet is fundamentally broken, and why we should be hopeful that we can fix it.

Homeland shortlisted for the Sunburst Award

I'm honoured and delighted to learn that my novel Homeland has been shortlisted for Canada's Sunburst Award, a juried prize for excellence in speculative fiction. I've won the Sunburst twice before, and this is one of my proudest accomplishments; I'm indebted to the jury for their kindness this year. The other nominees are a very good slate indeed -- including Nalo Hopkinson's Sister Mine and Charles de Lint's The Cats of Tanglewood Forest.

Podcast: News from the future for Wired UK

Here's a reading (MP3) of a short story I wrote for the July, 2014 issue of Wired UK in the form of a news dispatch from the year 2024 -- specifically, a parliamentary sketch from a raucous Prime Minister's Question Time where a desperate issue of computer security rears its head:

Quick: what do all of these have in common: your gran's cochlear implant, the Whatsapp stack, the Zipcar by your flat, the Co-Op's 3D printing kiosk, a Boots dispensary, your Virgin thermostat, a set of Tata artifici...

Interviewing Leila Johnstone about Hack Circus

My latest Guardian column is an interview with Leila Johnston about her Hack Circus project, which includes a conference, a podcast and a print magazine, all with a nearly indefinable ethic of independence and art for its own sake.

The opposite of useful is not always useless, as such. The opposite of reportage is not always silliness, and the opposite of consumer messaging is not always fooling around. Playboy is one of the most successful media enterprises of all time, so presumably people d...

Coming to Salt Lake City and Portland, OR

I'm about to hit the road again, starting in Salt Lake City, where I'll be a Guest of Honor at Westercon (Jul 3-6), and will follow it up with an appearance at the SLC library (Jul 7); then I'm doing a three-day library tour around PDX, with stops in Beaverton (Jul 8), Tigard (Jul 9) and Hillsboro (July 10) (here's a complete list of my scheduled upcoming public events).