Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

I’m on this week’s Techdirt podcast (MP3) talking about my latest book Radicalized — this being Techdirt, the talk quickly moved to DRM, and then to tech policy, monopolism, breaking up the Big Tech platforms, and neofeudalism.

While I was out on tour with Radicalized, I recorded an interview (MP3) with the Left Field podcast (“A couple of socialists with a couple of beers. We talk about Canadian politics and current events around the world”). We covered a lot of ground, particularly around the catastrophic EU Copyright Directive and, of course, the new book.

Another great podcast interview from my Radicalized book tour: this one with My Summer Lair (MP3) where host Sammy Younan and I discussed the book from a Canadian perspective (we recorded in Toronto) and really dug into some of the book’s themes.

During my book tour for Radicalized, I recorded a podcast interview (MP4) with the Security Sandbox podcast (formerly Hacker Culture). Host Sean Sun and I carried on a wide-ranging, hacker-centric discussion that covered everything from the EU Copyright Directive to writing discipline to my recipe for ginger liqueur — and, of course, the new book.

This morning, CBC’s flagship weekend programme Day Six aired its latest episode (MP3), a conversation between host Brent Bambury, me, and Tim Maughan, the author of an outstanding debut novel called Infinite Detail. (Image: Jason Vermes/CBC)) It’s often said that sci-fi’s role is to project the future, but Doctorow is skeptical of that perspective. “What we’re doing is kidding ourselves that we’re projecting a future; I think that at best, we’re reflecting the present,” he told Bambury. “As an activist, I have to think that the future is not predictable. Otherwise, there’d be no reason to get out of bed. The future changes based on what we do.”

I recently recorded an interview with Yascha Mounk for Slate’s “Taming the Net podcast (MP3), whose mission is: “How to preserve the freedom of the internet without letting the internet destroy democracy.” Mounk and I talked about how the internet enables abuses, but also enables us to push back against those abuses.

On Friday, hundreds of us gathered at the Internet Archive, at the invitation of Creative Commons, to celebrate the Grand Re-Opening of the Public Domain, just weeks after the first works entered the American public domain in twenty years. I had the honor of delivering the closing keynote, after a roster of astounding speakers. It was a big challenge and I was pretty nervous, but on reviewing the saved livestream, I’m pretty proud of how it turned out. Proud enough that I’ve ripped the audio and posted it to my podcast feed; the video for the keynote is on the Archive and mirrored to Youtube. The whole event’s livestream is also online, and boy do I recommend it.

This week, I sat down for an interview (MP3) with Terrence McNally for his World That Just Might Work show to talk about information politics, science fiction, oligarchy, resistance, and hope!

The End of Trust is the first-ever nonfiction issue of McSweeney’s, co-edited by McSweeney’s editors and the staff of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; on December 11, we held a sold-out launch event in San Francisco with EFF executive director Cindy Cohn, science fiction writer and EFF alumna Annalee Newitz, and me. Lisa Rein recorded the event for Mondo 2000, producing a partial transcript, an audio recording (MP3) and a video. Cindy Cohn: “The first reason is that there’s a fundamental constitutional question at the centerpiece regarding how we are going to interact with our technology, that can make all the other questions easier. The second reason is that all of the direct actions that you might want to take in order to exercise your self-governance and have your voice heard, requires some kind of legal protection, right? And when we talk about “direct action,” the reason that you can do direct action and not end up with a very long jail sentence is because, in the United States, compared to other places around the world, is because the Constitution says you can. All the hackers who EFF represents, who tell us all the things about the security problems and the surveillance – if we don’t get the law right, they’re not going to be able to do that. So, I often say that about EFF that we’re kind of the plumbers of freedom. We’re trying to get the obstacles out of the way, so that all the other things you can do to exercise your rights in the digital world can really flow freely. And so, I think for both of those reasons, EFF was grounded in the law. But also, at this point, we build technology. We have an action center. We support a lot of people that do a lot of direct action. We support a lot of people that need to protect themselves, that do direct action, and all sorts of other things. So although we are firmly grounded in the law, and that’s my background, the organization has really trying to grown to build a lot of different tools in our toolbox to deal with these problems. Cindy Cohn & Cory Doctorow & Annalee Newitz Discuss “The End of Trust” [Lisa Rein/Mondo 2000]

An annual tradition (MP3)! Poesy is now 10 — nearly 11! — and this year, she’s decided to offer us a detailed makeup tutorial, with some bonus horseback riding advice. There’s even a musical number! MP3