The Guardian

In my latest Guardian column, “The internet is the best place for dissent to start,” I look at Ethan Zuckerman’s recent talk on the Internet and human rights, and the way that cute cats create the positive externality of a place for dissent to begin and flourish, and look at the problems this causes:

Zuckerman’s argument is this: while YouTube, Twitter, Facebook (and other popular social services) aren’t good at protecting dissidents, they are nevertheless the best place for this sort of activity to start, for several reasons.

First, because when YouTube is taken off your nation’s internet, everyone notices, not just dissidents. So if a state shuts down a site dedicated to exposing official brutality, only the people who care about that sort of thing already are likely to notice.

But when YouTube goes dark, all the people who want to look at cute cats discover that their favourite site is gone, and they start to ask their neighbours why, and they come to learn that there exists video evidence of official brutality so heinous and awful that the government has shut out all of YouTube in case the people see it.

The internet is the best place for dissent to start

The Hugo Award nominations are open. Attendees of last year’s World Science Fiction in Reno and next year’s WorldCon in Chicago (as well as those who paid for “supporter” status) can nominate their favorite science fiction and fantasy stories, books, movies and other media for one of the most prestigious awards in the field.

Just in case you were wondering, my eligible publications for the year are:

* “Knights of the Rainbow Table,” novella (Intel, 2011)
* “Martian Chronicles,” novella (Life on Mars, 2011)

* “Shannon’s Law,” novelette, (Welcome to Bordertown, 2011)
* “Clockwork Fagin,” novelette (Steampunk!, 2011)
* “Another Place, Another Time, short story (The Chronicles of Harris Burdick, 2011)
* “Brave Little Toaster,” short story (TRSF, 2011)
* “Authorised Domain,” short story (podcast, 2011)
* Context, related book (Tachyon, 2011)
* The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow, related book (PM Press, 2011)

2012 Hugo Award and John W. Campbell Award Nominating Ballot

My latest Locus column, “A Vocabulary for Speaking about the Future,” talks about science fiction’s uselessness as a predictive medium, and its great utility as a medium for thinking about, attaining, and preventing futures.

But the really interesting thing is how science fiction does its best tricks: through creating the narrative vocabularies by which futures can be debated, discussed, adopted, or discarded.

There are innumerable examples of this, but my favorite is George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Before this novel’s rise to prominence, any discussion of intrusive surveillance was singularly bloodless. ‘‘I don’t like how it would feel,’’ you could say, or, ‘‘It would change my behavior, make me self-conscious.’’ These are highly abstract, rather unconvincing arguments, especially when weighed against the technological narrative of surveillance: ‘‘With total information awareness, we will be as gods, our eye upon each sparrow as it falls from the tree. No evil deed will go unobserved and unpunished.’’ After all, it stands to reason that if you can watch everyone, you can see everything, and punish every bad deed.

But a science fiction writer, Orwell, has given us a marvelous and versatile vocabulary word for discussing this: now we can say, ‘‘Your surveillance idea is a bad one because it is Orwellian’’ – we can import all of that novel and its horrors with one compact word. The argument becomes a duel of narratives: the cool, impartial intelligence apparat that catches the bad guys versus the human reality of the corrupting nature of power and the way that our social contract and good behavior are eroded by constant surveillance and a culture of suspicion.

Cory Doctorow: A Vocabulary for Speaking about the Future

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