Available for pre-order from today: The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow, a PM Press “Outspoken Authors” chapbook, including my novella “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow/Now is the Best Time of Your Life,” an essay, a transcript of my U of T iSchool talk on general purpose computing and regulation, and an exclusive interview with Terry Bisson. The paper book comes out on Nov 1, the PDF is available today, and other ebook formats will be available in about three weeks. I’ll be putting up a download site for the whole thing in November.

Here’s a two-part video interview that Ken MacLeod conducted with me earlier this week at the Edinburgh Book Festival for the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum. We chatted gold farming, post-industrial manufacturing, For the Win, UK riots and social media censorship.

My latest Guardian column, “Why CCTV has failed to deter criminals,” looks at the London riots and the way that rioters were willing to commit their crimes in full view of CCTV cameras, and what that says about CCTVs as deterrence. I think that we need to draw a distinction between having cameras on all the time in case someone commits a crime, and using cameras at the time that crimes are being committed — for example, hooking up a CCTV to a glass-break sensor (possibly configured so the CCTV buffers and discards video continuously, but only saves the few seconds before the breakage).

There’s a tiny one-way street on the way to my daughter’s daycare that parallels an often crowded main road, and from time to time, local drivers will get the idea of using it as a high-speed shortcut. There are two schools in this street, and a lot of bicycle traffic, and I’ve lost track of the number of times that I’ve seen near accidents as impatient drivers roared down the street.

But the local council haven’t installed a CCTV camera there full time. Instead, when the problem flares up, they stick one of those creepy CCTV cars at the top of the street and hand out gigantic speeding tickets for a day or two, until everyone gets the message and the street falls quiet again. That is, they locate a camera where there is a problem, use it until the problem is over, and relocate it. They don’t watch everyone all the time in case someone does the wrong thing.

After all, that’s how we were sold on CCTV – not mere forensics after the fact, but deterrence. And although study after study has concluded that CCTVs don’t deter most crime (a famous San Francisco study showed that, at best, street crime shifted a few metres down the pavement when the CCTV went up), we’ve been told for years that we must all submit to being photographed all the time because it would keep the people around us from beating us, robbing us, burning our buildings and burglarising our homes.

A year before the Vancouver Winter Olympics, a reporter from a one of the local papers called me to ask whether I thought an aggressive plan to use CCTVs in the Gastown neighbourhood would help pacify the notorious high-crime heroin district. I said that the deterrence theory of CCTV relied on the idea that the deterred were making smart choices about their futures and would avoid crime if the consequences might catch up with them.

Then I recounted my last trip through Gastown, where the pavements were thronged with groaning and unconscious emaciated addicts, filthy and covered in weeping sores, and asked if those people could be reasonably characterised as “making smart choices about their future.”

Why CCTV has failed to deter criminals

(Image: Riots in Hackney, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from ssoosay’s photostream and CCTV: Church Square, Bedford IMG_3569, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from fotdmike’s photostream)

I’m about to fly to Edinburgh for a gig at the Edinburgh Festival, tonight at 8:30PM. There are still a few tickets left.

From there, I’m headed straight to Renovation, the World Science Fiction Convention in Reno, where I’ll be doing a ton of stuff:

Wednesday, August 17
11.00-11.45am – Author in the Library, Sierra View Library (off site), 4001 S. Virginia St, located in the Reno Town Mall across the street from the Reno Sparks Convention Center — reading, autographing, and Q and A with library community, host: Christine Johnson

2.00-3.00pm – Reading, Reno Sparks Convention Center room A05

Thursday, August 18
8.55-10.00am – Stroll with the Stars, (off site) meet at Stroll Meeting Spot (Walgreen’s parking lot, 3495 S Virginia St, about 5 minute walk north of Atlantis), will stroll down to Reno Sparks Convention Center, with Stu Segal, Bill Willingham, Julie Bell, Boris Vallejo, Lawrence M. Schoen, Lauren Beukes, and Ellen Datlow

11.00am-12.00pm – The Psychogeography of Ideals panel, Convention Center room A04, with Renee Sieber, David Cake, and Ian McDonald

4.00-5.00pm – Futuristic Fashion and Wearable Art panel, Convention Center room D05, with Lauren Beukes and Gail Carriger

Friday, August 19
11.00am-12.00pm – Social Media for Writers panel, Convention Center room A03, with Tee Morris, Tom Negrino, Rose Fox, and Brenda Cooper

3.00pm – Future Media signing, Tachyon Publications table in the Dealers Room

5.00-6.00pm – The Future of Cities panel, Convention Center room A01 +6, with Ian McDonald, Gary Ehrlich, Lauren Beukes, and Kim Stanley Robinson

Saturday, August 20
11.00am-12.00pm – Autographing, Hall 2 Autographs (Convention Center)

1.00-2.00pm – KaffeeKlatsch, KK1 (Convention Center)

Sunday, August 21
1.00-2.00pm – Computer War and Cyber Forensics: Stuxnet – Cyberwar and Cyber Terrorism? panel, Convention Center room A03, with Brad Templeton, David Cake, Howard Davidson, and Helen Umberger

Hope to see you there!