Arts

Podcast – Cory Doctorow’s craphound.com

Cory Doctorow’s Literary Works

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Censorship is inseparable from surveillance Mar 12, 2012

Show notes

Here’s a podcast of my last Guardian column, Censorship is inseparable from surveillance:

There was a time when you could censor without spying. When Britain banned the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses in the 1920s and 1930s, the ban took the form on a prohibition on the sale of copies of the books. Theoretically, this entailed opening some imported parcels, and it certainly imposed a constraint on publishers and booksellers. It was undoubtedly awful. But we’ve got it worse today.

Jump forward 80 years. Imagine that you want to ban www.jamesjoycesulysses.com due to a copyright claim from the Joyce estate. Thanks to the Digital Economy Act and the provision it makes for a national British copyright firewall, we’re headed for a system where entertainment companies can specify URLs that have “infringing” websites, and a national censorwall will block everyone in the country from visiting those sites.

In order to stop you from visiting www.jamesjoycesulysses.com, the national censorwall must intercept all your outgoing internet requests and examine them to determine whether they are for the banned website. That’s the difference between the old days of censorship and our new digital censorship world. Today, censorship is inseparable from surveillance.

Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com

John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook.

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What’s Inside the Box? Mar 05, 2012

Show notes

Here’s a podcast of my last Locus column, What’s Inside the Box?:

The answer to this that most of the experts I speak to come up with is this:

The owner (or user) of a device should be able to know (or control) which software is running on her devices.

This is really four answers, and I’ll go over them in turn, using three different scenarios: a computer in an Internet cafe, a car, and a cochlear implant. That is, a computer you sit in front of, a computer you put your body into, and a computer you put in your body.

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Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com

Interview with WNIJ Chicago Feb 13, 2012

Show notes

Here’s a short interview I did last week in Chicago with WNIJ, an NPR affiliate. MP3 link

Digital Lysenkoism Feb 06, 2012

Show notes

Here’s a podcast of my last Publishers Weekly column, Digital Lysenkoism :

Talking with the lower echelon employees of publishing reminds me of a description I once read about the mutual embarrassment of Western and Soviet biologists when they talked about genetics. Soviet-era scientists were required, on pain of imprisonment, to endorse Lysenkoism, a discredited theory of inheritance favored by Stalin for ideological reasons. Lysenko believed, incorrectly, that you could create heritable characteristics by changing a parent organism—that is, if you cut off one of a frog’s legs, a certain number of its offspring would be born with three legs.

Lysenkoism was a disaster. When it was applied to food cultivation it led to ghastly famines that killed millions. So, when Soviet scientists met their Western counterparts, everyone knew that Lysenkoism was an awful absurdity. But the Soviet scientists had to pretend it wasn’t. Not unlike some of the discussions inside today’s major publishing houses when it comes to DRM.

I recently solicited several writers for inclusion in the Humble E-book Bundle, for which I’m acting as a volunteer editor. The Humble E-book Bundle is the first foray into e-books by the Humble Indie Bundle project, a nonprofit that has run several insanely successful video-game distribution events in which customers got to name their own prices for a collection of independent, DRM-free games. Each of the Humble Indie Bundle projects so far has grossed around a million dollars and has made hundreds of thousands of dollars for each contributor . And I’ve recruited enthusiastic contributors from all of the big six publishers for the Humble E-Book Bundle—that is, all except one, which has an all-DRM-all-the-time policy and won’t consider publishing anything without DRM in any of its divisions.

Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com

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Edited Spark interview about the “coming war on general purpose computation” Jan 27, 2012

Show notes

I did an interview last week with the CBC Radio show The Spark (I podcasted the complete interview when they posted it); now they’ve put up the edited episode. MP3 link

Interview with CBC’s Spark on the coming war on general-purpose computation Jan 22, 2012

Show notes

I did a quick interview with the CBC Radio programme “The Spark” last week from my office in London, talking about my idea of “the upcoming war on general purpose computing.” They’ve just posted the unedited audio in advance of airing a shorter excerpt. MP3 link

Martian Chronicles, part two Jan 17, 2012

Show notes

The StarShipSofa podcast has the second installment of Jeff Lane’s reading of my YA novella The Martian Chronicles (here’s part one). Lane does a great job with the reading. MP3 link.

Podcast: A Vocabulary for Speaking about the Future Jan 16, 2012

Show notes

Here’s a podcast of my last Locus column, A Vocabulary for Speaking about the Future:

Science fiction writers and fans are prone to lauding the predictive value of the genre, prompting weird questions like ‘‘How can you write science fiction today? Aren’t you worried that real science will overtake your novel before it’s published?’’ This question has a drooling idiot of a half-brother, the strange assertion that ‘‘science fiction is dead because the future is here.’’

Now, I will stipulate that science fiction writers often think that they’re predicting the future. The field lays claim to various successes, from flip-phones to the Web, waterbeds to rocket-ships, robots to polyamory.

Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com

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“Martian Chronicles” reading Jan 11, 2012

Show notes

The Starship Sofa podcast has produced an excellent reading of my novella “The Martian Chronicles,” which was originally published in Jonathan Strahan’s YA anthology Life on Mars. The reading is by jeff Lane, who’s really talented. Here’s the MP3 (the reading starts around 1:50).

The Coming War on General Purpose Computation Jan 09, 2012

Show notes

Here’s a transcript of my keynote at the 28th Chaos Communications Congress in Berlin over Christmas week, “The Coming War on General Purpose Computation.” Here’re the relevant links:

* Video
* Transcript (Joshua Wise)
* German translation (Christian Wöhrl)
* Subtitles in German, French, Spanish and Italian (you can add more!)

Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com

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