Guest Contributor: Cory Doctorow

If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s nontechnical technothrillers. You know the trope: We’ve got eight minutes to crack this mainframe, but it’s protected with encryption that is rated for ten minutes. We’re gonna have to hack really hard. Come on, hacker, HACK AWAY!

Technothrillers are consumed by an increasingly computer-savvy audience, which means that the kind of technical elision and corner-cutting that dominates the field grows thinner …Read More

If a group of people have been trying to get something done for some time without success, there are two possibilities: Either they’re failing because of bad tactics, or they’re failing because they simply lack the power to achieve their goals. When things start changing in big, dramatic ways, that means that some group in society has either discovered a new tactic, or they’ve found some new coalition partners.

Most …Read More

In my new novel Picks and Shovels, we learn the origins of Martin Hench, my bestselling, two-fisted, scambusting forensic accountant who debuted in 2023’s Red Team Blues and whose adventures continued in 2024’s The Bezzle.

Marty’s origin story starts at MIT in 1982, where he joins the proud lineage of computer science students who flunk out of their degrees because they’re too busy hacking code to do their classwork. Marty …Read More

Let’s start with two obvious facts:

1. The internet is a communications medium, that
2. crosses international borders.

That means that every single policy question related to the internet will have:

1. a) A free expression dimension, and
2. b) A national sovereignty dimension.

With that out of the way….

Late last August, Pavel Durov – the billionaire owner of the Telegram app – was arrested by French authorities after …Read More

There are many ways to cleave the views of the political right from the political left, but none is so science fictional as the right’s confidence in the role of individual self-discipline on one’s life chances. Dip into any political fight about crime and poverty and you’re sure to turn up someone confidently asserting that these social ills are rooted in impatience. Poverty, we’re told, is rooted in an unwillingness …Read More

AT THE END OF MARCH 2024, the romance writer K. Renee discovered that she had been locked out of her Google Docs account, for posting inappropriate content in her private files. Renee never got back into her account and never found out what triggered the lockout. She wasn’t alone: as Madeline Ashby recounts in her excellent Wired story on the affair, many romance writers were permanently barred from their own …Read More

No one was more surprised than I was when the American Dialect Society named ”enshittification” – my dirty little coinage to describe how everything on the internet is (suddenly, simultaneously) getting (much) worse – to be its Word of the Year. But though the news was a surprise, it was a very pleasant one.

My early writings on enshittification focused on its symptoms, the way platforms decay. The progression of …Read More

In conflict, we find clarity.

We all hold contradictory views: We love our families, but they drive us crazy. We want more housing in our cities, but we don’t want our property values to decrease with expanded supply. We want better schools, but we recoil from a 0.1% municipal levy to fund them.

It’s normal to hold contradictory views, but when those views come into conflict, how we act shows …Read More

Of course AI is a bubble. It has all the hallmarks of a classic tech bubble. Pick up a rental car at SFO and drive in either direction on the 101 – north to San Francisco, south to Palo Alto – and every single billboard is advertising some kind of AI company. Every business plan has the word AI in it, even if the business itself has no AI in …Read More

It’s tempting to think of the Great Enshittening – in which all the internet services we enjoyed and came to rely upon became suddenly and irreversibly terrible – as the result of moral decay. That is, it’s tempting to think that the people who gave us the old, good internet did so because they were good people, and the people who enshittified it did so because they are shitty people. …Read More

I was surprised as anyone when I found myself accidentally using a large language model (that is, an AI chatbot) to write some prose for me. I was twice as surprised when I found myself impressed by what it wrote.

Last month, an airline stranded me overnight in New York City when my flight to LA was canceled due to an air traffic control snafu. The airline rep at the …Read More

On June 20, 2023, I will be awarded an Honourary Doctor of Laws from York University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, in Toronto, Canada. The text below is the speech I will give.

Goodness me, it is a gigantic honour to be here today, and to be recognized in this way. I’m profoundly grateful to the faculty and administration here at York, and to my friends and family …Read More

One of the more baffling events of the first quarter of 2023 was the mass protest in Oxford (England, not Mississippi) against the 15-minute city pledge, a movement to get city councils to strive for cities where each neighborhood is a walkable place, with most amenities (groceries, schools, health care, employers, leisure activities) located within a pleasant 15-minute walk from your door.

The 15-minute city is an extremely inoffensive and …Read More

Within the very first year of operation, 1878, Bell’s company learned a sharp lesson about combining teenage boys and telephone switchboards. Putting teenage boys in charge of the phone system brought swift and consistent disaster. Bell’s chief engineer described them as ‘Wild Indians.’ The boys were openly rude to customers. They talked back to subscribers, saucing off, uttering facetious remarks, and generally giving lip. The rascals took Saint Patrick’s Day …Read More

As I type these words, a mass exodus is underway from Twitter and Facebook. After decades of eye-popping growth, these social media sites are contracting at an alarming rate.

In some ways, this shouldn’t surprise us. All the social networks that preceded the current generation experienced this pattern: SixDegrees, Friendster, MySpace, and Bebo all exploded onto the scene. One day, they were sparsely populated fringe services, the next day, everyone …Read More

If the bullies at the school gate steal your kid’s lunch money every day, it doesn’t matter how much lunch money you give your kid, he’s not gonna get lunch. But how much lunch money you give your kid does matter – to the bullies. Hell, they might even start a campaign: The children of Jack Valenti Elementary School are going hungry! Congress must step in to give those kids …Read More

Five thousand quatloos that the newcomers will have to be destroyed.

Quatloos. Credits. Euros. Dollars. Dogecoin.

Wait, Dogecoin?

At some point in your life, you’ve probably asked yourself, What is money? There’s something existential about pulling a bank-note out of your wallet and asking yourself, Why does so much of my waking life revolve around getting more of these slips of green paper? (Outside of the USA, you …Read More

We’re all trapped on a bus.

The bus is barreling towards a cliff.

Beyond the cliff is a canyon plunge any of us will be lucky to survive.

Even if we survive, none of us know how we’ll climb out of that deep canyon.

Some of us want to yank the wheel.

The bus is going so fast that yanking the wheel could cause the bus to roll.

There might …Read More

Greetings from the past.

I write these words six weeks before you will read them. I used to do this all the time, back in the glory days of print. Hell, I spent most of the ’90s writing a monthly guide to interesting websites, which came out two months after I submitted it.

I’ve been writing six columns per year for Locus for fourteen years and I have not missed …Read More

Science fiction has a longstanding love-hate relationship with the tech tycoon. The literature is full of billionaire inventors, sometimes painted as system-bucking heroes, at other times as megalomanical supervillains.

From time to time, we even manage to portray one of these people in a way that hews most closely to reality: ordinary mediocrities, no better than you or I, whose success comes down to a combination of luck and a …Read More

From 1811-1816, a secret society styling themselves the Luddites smashed textile machinery in the mills of England. Today, we use Luddite as a pejorative referring to backwards, anti-technology reactionaries.

This proves that history really is written by the winners.

In truth, the Luddites’ cause wasn’t the destruction of technology – no more than the Boston Tea Party’s cause was the elimination of tea, or Al Qaeda’s cause was the end …Read More

Margaret Thatcher was the least science-fictional world leader in modern history.

Her motto was There is no alternative, a phrase she repeated so often it became an acronym: TINA.

She was referring to capitalism, asserting that there is no conceivable alternative. It was a cheap but remarkably effective rhetorical device, treating a demand as an observation. The true meaning of TINA isn’t No alternative is possible, but rather, Stop …Read More

When I was a baby writer, I obsessively collected career advice from established writers, reading books and essays and attending panels on ”How I broke in” featuring established pros. It’s a testament to the irrational, burning desire to publish that I continued to do this long after it became apparent that there was nothing of contemporary applicability in these discussions.

I mean, it was entertaining to hear a writer describe …Read More

I care about monopolies for exactly one reason: self-determination. I don’t care about competition as an end unto itself, or fetishize choice for its own sake. What I care about is your ability to live your life in the way you think will suit you, to the greatest extent possible, and taking into account the obvious limits when other people’s needs and wants conflict with you realizing your own desires. …Read More

Last summer, the pandemic was in its first wave and the nation was in chaos. A lack of federal leadership left each state to figure out how to interpret the science, and many states punted public health decisions to counties or cities or even smaller units, like universities.

Leaders, left to their own, often winged it, letting wishful thinking trump prudence in the drive to find ways to reopen safely. …Read More