Sally Kohn: We are on the verge of going from denial to nihilism, right? Of going of that peaked denial. And our job is going from convincing people that there's a problem to convincing them that it's not too late to do something about it. The right wing has suddenly discovered antitrust because for years and years, they're okay with itBecause their paymasters are getting rich from it. But then one day they woke up and they realized that a five tech executives decided they didn't like them so they disappeared from public discourse. All of a sudden Tucker Carlson is sounding like Brandeis; maybe we can get something done.
Like so many technological innovations, the internet is something that burst on the scene and pervaded human life well before we had time to sit down and think through how something like that should work and how it should be organized. In multiple ways — as a blogger, activist, fiction writer, and more — Cory Doctorow has been thinking about how the internet is affecting our lives since the very beginning. He has been especially interested in legal issues surrounding copyright, publishing, and free speech, and recently his attention has turned to broader economic concerns. We talk about how the internet has become largely organized through just a small number of quasi-monopolistic portals, how this affects the ways in which we gather information and decide whether to trust outside sources, and where things might go from here.
Cory Doctorow is a science fiction writer, activist, journalist, and blogger. He is a co-editor of the website Boing Boing, and works as a special consultant for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He is the author of the nonfiction book Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free as well as science-fiction works such as Walkaway and Radicalized. He has been awarded an honorary doctorate from the Open University, where he is also a Visiting Professor, as well as being an MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate and a Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of South Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science.
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