Back in May, we had to cancel a planned benefit for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund in NYC due to illness striking one of the organizers. I promised then that I’d be rescheduling it for some time in August and now, here it is!

I’m really proud to have the chance to serve the CBLDF, which is a model for how an imaginative, vibrant civil liberties organization operates. They raise money to bail out comic creators and sellers (and others in the trade) who face legal persecution for making comic books.

Even better: this event includes DJ Spooky, whom I’ve wanted to meet since I wrote the intro to his new collection of essays on music, and afterwards, Spooky’s spinning a small-venue set, also to benefit the CBLDF.

I really hope to see you there — I’m coming into New York a day early (I’m on my way to 3Pi Con in Springfield, Mass, where I’m one of the guests of honor, along with Randall “XKCD” Munroe) and spending a bunch of dough out of pocket just to have the chance to do this for CBLDF. Tickets are limited — act now!

On August 21, Cory Doctorow, award-winning author and co-editor of the popular blog Boing Boing and experimental writer / artist / musician Paul Miller, a.k.a. D.J. Spooky That Subliminal Kid team up for a multimedia speaking event benefiting the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. Following their respective presentations, Doctorow and DJ Spooky will take the stage together for an open forum discussion about their work and the futurepresent each eloquently addresses across different media.

Cory Doctorow will read and discuss the issues behind his bestselling young adult novel, Little Brother. Addressing internet and government security, censorship, and civil liberties in a post-9/11 near-future atmosphere, Little Brother tackles timely issues while telling a story that’s smart, funny, and jam-packed-with-pop culture nuggets. Doctorow “hopes it’ll inspire you to use technology to make yourself more free.” Doctorow is the former European Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group that works to keep cyberspace free. IDW recently published Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now a collection of comics based on his cyberpunkiest Sci-fi short stories.

DJ Spooky joins Doctorow to present concepts from Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture, his new book / literary mixtape collecting writing by artists and thinkers including Brian Eno, Jonathan Lethem, Saul Williams, Steve Reich, Moby, Chuck D, and more.

Cory Doctorow Meets DJ Spooky: A CBLDF Benefit Mashup!

Last spring I sat down for an interview with Steve Johnson at the Chicago Tribune to talk about Little Brother, copyright, civil liberties, blogging and pretty much everything else. We covered some different territory to the usual interview and it turned out well (I think!).

There’s this broad consensus that the Virginia Tech murders had something to do with violent video games. When you actually read the coroner’s inquest report, video games are mentioned twice. The first is his mother saying he never wanted to play those video games. The second is his roommate saying, “We always thought he was weird because he never wanted to play video games.” Yet it’s still a truism that violent video games must be responsible for Virginia Tech.

We have the capacity to surveil and control adolescents ion a way we’ve never done before. We chase them indoors and then we tell them that all the virtual places they might gather, we need to surveil them because of the ever-present threat of pedophiles and because of the ever-present need to market to them. We’ve really hemmed in adolescence in a way we never have before.

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Tor and Expanded Books have released part two of the video interview/book trailer they shot with me and John Scalzi, talking about our new young adult novels — my Little Brother and John’s Zoe’s Tale, which comes out in three weeks. The Expanded People really cut nice stuff — I laughed even harder watching the video than I did when we were shooting it!

Sci-Fi Juggernauts Meet Up – Part 2

See also: Scalzi and I talk about our latest books — video

The Camerahead Project is a Seattle protest group upset about the growing prevalence of CCTV cameras there — they’re staging a bit of theater tomorrow in Cal Anderson Park, walking around with giant cameras on their heads to get people thinking about what it means to have their public spaces under constant surveillance.

Local artist Paul Strong, Jr. says he’s holding the demonstration, called the Camerahead Project, to remind people that video surveillance cameras are recording their every move at Cal Anderson Park and three other parks around town. “The project not only raises the questions of who is watching who and who is watching the watchers, but also … why we are being watched at all,” he says. “There is so much going on in the news about wiretapping and data mining, all these little thing that happen locally go right by.”

I met Paul at one of my signings in Seattle for Little Brother and loved his camerahead outfit — he says it was inspired by Pablo Defendini’s Little Brother poster.

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Here’s another installment of me reading from the book on BBtv!

I’ve been recording vlogs of me reading from Little Brother for BBtv — here’s the latest installment!

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The flood of positive reviews for Little Brother has been nothing short of amazing, but two very special ones came in today. One is from John E. Cook’s son Ean, left on their kitchen whiteboard last night after Ean finished the book (pictured here), the other from my friend and colleague William Gibson: “I’ve not previously expressed my admiration for Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother. As Wm. Burroughs was fond of saying, “young boys need it special”. In the case of Cory’s book, though, young girls need it special too.”

At the end of my book-tour last month, I stopped at the Google NYC office and did a reading from the book and spoke about general subjects related to it.
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