Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

I was incredibly happy to appear on the MMT Podcast again this week, talking about economics, science fiction, interoperability, tech workers and tech ethics, and my new novel ATTACK SURFACE, which comes out in the UK tomorrow (Oct 13 US/Canada):

https://pileusmmt.libsyn.com/68-cory-doctorow-digital-rights-surveillance-capitalism-interoperable-socks

We also delved into my new nonfiction book, HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM, and how it looks at the problem of misinformation, and how that same point of view is weaponized by Masha, the protagonist and antihero of Attack Surface.

https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

It’s no coincidence that both of these books came out at the same time, as they both pursue the same questions from different angles:

How can we change how technology works?

And:

Here’s the episode’s MP3:

http://traffic.libsyn.com/preview/pileusmmt/The_MMT_Podcast_ep_68_Cory_Doctorow_v2.mp3

and here’s their feed:

http://pileusmmt.libsyn.com/rss

Here’s part sixteen of my new reading of my novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (you can follow all the installments, as well as the reading I did in 2008/9, here).

This is easily the weirdest novel I ever wrote. Gene Wolfe (RIP) gave me an amazing quote for it: “Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is a glorious book, but there are hundreds of those. It is more. It is a glorious book unlike any book you’ve ever read.”

Here’s how my publisher described it when it came out:

Alan is a middle-aged entrepeneur who moves to a bohemian neighborhood of Toronto. Living next door is a young woman who reveals to him that she has wings—which grow back after each attempt to cut them off.

Alan understands. He himself has a secret or two. His father is a mountain, his mother is a washing machine, and among his brothers are sets of Russian nesting dolls.

Now two of the three dolls are on his doorstep, starving, because their innermost member has vanished. It appears that Davey, another brother who Alan and his siblings killed years ago, may have returned, bent on revenge.

Under the circumstances it seems only reasonable for Alan to join a scheme to blanket Toronto with free wireless Internet, spearheaded by a brilliant technopunk who builds miracles from scavenged parts. But Alan’s past won’t leave him alone—and Davey isn’t the only one gunning for him and his friends.

Whipsawing between the preposterous, the amazing, and the deeply felt, Cory Doctorow’s Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is unlike any novel you have ever read.

MP3

Here’s part fifteen of my new reading of my novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (you can follow all the installments, as well as the reading I did in 2008/9, here).

This is easily the weirdest novel I ever wrote. Gene Wolfe (RIP) gave me an amazing quote for it: “Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is a glorious book, but there are hundreds of those. It is more. It is a glorious book unlike any book you’ve ever read.”

Here’s how my publisher described it when it came out:

Alan is a middle-aged entrepeneur who moves to a bohemian neighborhood of Toronto. Living next door is a young woman who reveals to him that she has wings—which grow back after each attempt to cut them off.

Alan understands. He himself has a secret or two. His father is a mountain, his mother is a washing machine, and among his brothers are sets of Russian nesting dolls.

Now two of the three dolls are on his doorstep, starving, because their innermost member has vanished. It appears that Davey, another brother who Alan and his siblings killed years ago, may have returned, bent on revenge.

Under the circumstances it seems only reasonable for Alan to join a scheme to blanket Toronto with free wireless Internet, spearheaded by a brilliant technopunk who builds miracles from scavenged parts. But Alan’s past won’t leave him alone—and Davey isn’t the only one gunning for him and his friends.

Whipsawing between the preposterous, the amazing, and the deeply felt, Cory Doctorow’s Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is unlike any novel you have ever read.

MP3

This week on my podcast, I read the first half of my latest Locus Magazine column, “IP,” the longest, most substantial column I’ve written in my 14 years on Locus‘s masthead.

IP explores the history of how we have allowed companies to control more and more of our daily lives, and has come to mean, “any law that I can invoke that allows me to control the conduct of my competitors, critics, and customers.”

It represents a major realization on my part after decades of writing, talking and thinking about this stuff. I hope you give it a listen and/or a read.

MP3

This week’s podcast is a generous excerpt – 3 hours! – of the audiobook for Attack Surface, the third Little Brother book, which is available for pre-order today on my very first Kickstarter.

This Kickstarter is one of the most important moments in my professional career, an experiment to see if I can viably publish audiobooks without caving into Amazon’s monopolistic requirement that all Audible books be sold with DRM that locks it to Amazon’s corporate platform…forever. If you’ve ever wanted to thank me for this podcast or my other work, there has never been a better way than to order the audiobook (or ebook) (or both!).

Attack Surface is a standalone novel, meaning you can enjoy it without reading Little Brother or its sequel, Homeland. Please give this extended preview a listen and, if you enjoy it, back the Kickstarter and (this is very important): TELL YOUR FRIENDS.

Thank you, sincerely.

MP3

For this week’s podcast, I read an excerpt from “How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism,” a free short book (or long pamphlet, or “nonfiction novella”) I published with Medium’s Onezero last week. HTDSC is a long critical response to Shoshanna Zuboff’s book and paper on the subject, which re-centers the critique on monopolism and the abusive behavior it abets, while expressing skepticism that surveillance capitalists are really as good at manipulating our behavior as they claim to be. It is a gorgeous online package, and there’s a print/ebook edition following.

MP3

Here’s part fourteen of my new reading of my novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (you can follow all the installments, as well as the reading I did in 2008/9, here).

This is easily the weirdest novel I ever wrote. Gene Wolfe (RIP) gave me an amazing quote for it: “Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is a glorious book, but there are hundreds of those. It is more. It is a glorious book unlike any book you’ve ever read.”

Here’s how my publisher described it when it came out:

Alan is a middle-aged entrepeneur who moves to a bohemian neighborhood of Toronto. Living next door is a young woman who reveals to him that she has wings—which grow back after each attempt to cut them off.

Alan understands. He himself has a secret or two. His father is a mountain, his mother is a washing machine, and among his brothers are sets of Russian nesting dolls.

Now two of the three dolls are on his doorstep, starving, because their innermost member has vanished. It appears that Davey, another brother who Alan and his siblings killed years ago, may have returned, bent on revenge.

Under the circumstances it seems only reasonable for Alan to join a scheme to blanket Toronto with free wireless Internet, spearheaded by a brilliant technopunk who builds miracles from scavenged parts. But Alan’s past won’t leave him alone—and Davey isn’t the only one gunning for him and his friends.

Whipsawing between the preposterous, the amazing, and the deeply felt, Cory Doctorow’s Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is unlike any novel you have ever read.

MP3

Here’s part thirteen of my new reading of my novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (you can follow all the installments, as well as the reading I did in 2008/9, here).

This is easily the weirdest novel I ever wrote. Gene Wolfe (RIP) gave me an amazing quote for it: “Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is a glorious book, but there are hundreds of those. It is more. It is a glorious book unlike any book you’ve ever read.”

Here’s how my publisher described it when it came out:

Alan is a middle-aged entrepeneur who moves to a bohemian neighborhood of Toronto. Living next door is a young woman who reveals to him that she has wings—which grow back after each attempt to cut them off.

Alan understands. He himself has a secret or two. His father is a mountain, his mother is a washing machine, and among his brothers are sets of Russian nesting dolls.

Now two of the three dolls are on his doorstep, starving, because their innermost member has vanished. It appears that Davey, another brother who Alan and his siblings killed years ago, may have returned, bent on revenge.

Under the circumstances it seems only reasonable for Alan to join a scheme to blanket Toronto with free wireless Internet, spearheaded by a brilliant technopunk who builds miracles from scavenged parts. But Alan’s past won’t leave him alone—and Davey isn’t the only one gunning for him and his friends.

Whipsawing between the preposterous, the amazing, and the deeply felt, Cory Doctorow’s Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is unlike any novel you have ever read.

MP3

Terra Nullius is my March 2019 column in Locus magazine; it explores the commonalities between the people who claim ownership over the things they use to make new creative works and the settler colonialists who arrived in various “new worlds” and declared them to be empty, erasing the people who were already there as a prelude to genocide.

I was inspired by the story of Aloha Poke, in which a white dude from Chicago secured a trademark for his “Aloha Poke” midwestern restaurants, then threatened Hawai’ians who used “aloha” in the names of their restaurants (and later, by the Dutch grifter who claimed a patent on the preparation of teff, an Ethiopian staple grain that has been cultivated and refined for about 7,000 years).

MP3 Link

Here’s part twelve of my new reading of my novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (you can follow all the installments, as well as the reading I did in 2008/9, here).

This is easily the weirdest novel I ever wrote. Gene Wolfe (RIP) gave me an amazing quote for it: “Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is a glorious book, but there are hundreds of those. It is more. It is a glorious book unlike any book you’ve ever read.”

Here’s how my publisher described it when it came out:

Alan is a middle-aged entrepeneur who moves to a bohemian neighborhood of Toronto. Living next door is a young woman who reveals to him that she has wings—which grow back after each attempt to cut them off.

Alan understands. He himself has a secret or two. His father is a mountain, his mother is a washing machine, and among his brothers are sets of Russian nesting dolls.

Now two of the three dolls are on his doorstep, starving, because their innermost member has vanished. It appears that Davey, another brother who Alan and his siblings killed years ago, may have returned, bent on revenge.

Under the circumstances it seems only reasonable for Alan to join a scheme to blanket Toronto with free wireless Internet, spearheaded by a brilliant technopunk who builds miracles from scavenged parts. But Alan’s past won’t leave him alone—and Davey isn’t the only one gunning for him and his friends.

Whipsawing between the preposterous, the amazing, and the deeply felt, Cory Doctorow’s Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is unlike any novel you have ever read.

MP3