David Wallace Jackson wrote a script that randomly changes the names of the characters in my 2005 Tor Books novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town — a book in which the characters’ names fluctuate, with only their first initials remaining constant. It’s an absolutely delightful idea!

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (remix)

Source code

Here’s my Guardian review of Chris Anderson’s excellent new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price. As with The Long Tail, Free gave me lots to think about: it does a tremendous job of enumerating the economic and business opportunities derived from the net’s capacity to deliver so much for free. However, I think that, as with The Long Tail, Free stops short of considering one of the most important aspects of the net: the extent to which purely non-economic, non-commercial activity is filling in niches that were formerly reserved for commercial undertakings, or were altogether invisible.

There’s plenty in our world that lives outside of the marketplace: it’s a rare family that uses spot-auctions to determine the dinner menu or where to go for holidays. Who gets which chair and desk at your office is more likely to be determined on the lines of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” than on the basis of the infallible wisdom of the marketplace. The internally socialistic, externally capitalistic character of most of our institutions tells us that there’s something to the idea that markets may not be the solution to all our problems.

And here’s where Free starts to trip up. Though Anderson celebrates the best of non-commercial and anti-commercial net-culture, from amateur creativity to Freecycle, he also goes through a series of tortured (and ultimately less than convincing) exercises to put a dollar value on this activity, to explain the monetary worth of Wikipedia, for example.

And there is certainly some portion of this “free” activity that was created in a bid to join the non-free economy: would-be Hollywood auteurs who hope to be discovered on YouTube, for example. There’s also plenty of blended free and non-free activity

But for the sizeable fraction of this material – and it is sizeable – that was created with no expectation of joining the monetary economy, with no expectation of winning some future benefit for its author, that was created for joy, or love, or compulsion, or conversation, it is just wrong to say that the “price” of the material is “free”.

Chris Anderson’s Free adds much to The Long Tail, but falls short

My latest Internet Evolution feature proposes that the best way for schools to protect their students on the Internet is to assign them curriculum that asks students to investigate all the ways that the school’s censorware sucks — blocks useful material, easily circumvented by students, interferes with teachers, invades privacy and enriches sleazy censorware companies. By systematically approaching the efficacy of censorware, students learn statistics, critical thinking, research skills, civics, and the scientific method — and they help to expose the worse-than-useless solution represented by using censorware on school networks.

Let’s start by admitting that censorware doesn’t work. It catches vast amounts of legitimate material, interfering with teachers’ lesson planning and students’ research alike.

Censorware also allows enormous amounts of bad stuff through, from malware to porn. There simply aren’t enough prudes in the vast censorware boiler-rooms to accurately classify every document on the Web.

Worst of all, censorware teaches kids that the normal course of online life involves being spied upon for every click, tweet, email, and IM.

These are the same kids who we’re desperately trying to warn away from disclosing personal information and compromising photos on social networks. They understand that actions speak louder than words: If you wiretap every student in the school and punish those who try to get out from under the all-seeing eye, you’re saying “Privacy is worthless.”

After you’ve done that, there’s no amount of admonishments to value your privacy that can make up for it.

Beyond Censorware: Teaching Web Literacy

As part of the ongoing serialization of Makers, my forthcoming book (late October 2009, from Tor USA and HarperCollins UK), Tor.com has commissioned a series of 81 interlocking, Creative Commons-licensed illustrations from Idiots’ Books. Each illustration’s four edges line up with any of the other illustrations’ edges.

Now Tor has released a Flash game that lets you arrange the tiles to form new illustrations, with new tiles being added three times a week, as each new installment comes online. Tile away!

Tile Game (Flash)

Behold: The Makers Tile Game, version 1.0!

Anticipation, the 67th World Science Fiction Convention (to be held in Montreal this year) is almost upon us, and the programming committee has put together a kick-ass program, and they’ve put it online. Here’s my program items — hope to see you there!

Friday

10 AM: Intellectual Property and Creative Commons, with Laura Majerus and Felix Gilman (2-032, P-512CG)

12:30PM: The New Media, with Melissa Auf der Maur, Tobias Buckell, Neil Gaiman, and Ellen Kushner (2-126, P-511BE)

3:30PM: Reading, with Charlie Stross and Connie Willis (2-224R, P-512AE)

8PM: Prometheus Awards, with Fred Moulton, Jo Walton, John C. Wright and Charlie Stross (2-349, P-524A)

9PM: Cecil Street Irregulars: A Canadian Writing Group, with Doug Smith, Karl Schroeder, Madeline Ashby, Michael Skeet, Dave Nickle, Jill Snider Lum and Sara Simmons

Saturday

9AM: Stroll With the Stars (a morning walk!), with Ann Vandermeer, Gay Haldeman, Joe Haldeman, Peter Atwood and Stu Seigel, 3-005, Riopelle Fountain

10AM: Autographs, with Ellen Datlow, Jean-Claude Dunyach, David Anthony Durham, Felix Gilman and Robert Silverberg, 3-053S

5PM: Kaffeeklatsch, 4-263K, P-521C

9PM: Gaiman Reads Doctorow (Neil records one of my stories for an upcoming audiobook), with Neil Gaiman, 3-342, 5-511BE

Monday

9AM: No User Servicable Parts Inside, with C Meeks, Howard Davidson and Jack William Bell

Oh, and a note to Montrealers: the convention centre WiFi is CAD$395 a day!, so I’m hoping to rent someone’s 3G modem, like the Fido Stick modem. I’ll pay your whole month’s data-tariff and I promise not to download porn or warez or anything else likely to get you in trouble with your ISP. I’ll need it from Aug 6-10 (and ideally, I’d like to rent two, so my wife can have one.) If you’re headed to the cottage for the weekend or similar, I’d really appreciate it.

Programming