I woke this morning to the delightful news that I won Editorial Intelligence’s 2015 prize for Technology and Digital Commentator of the Year for my work on the Guardian. I’m honoured and delighted — thank you to the jury and the organisation, and to Martha Lane Fox for her presentation of the award!
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After my spam hit a point where I couldn’t actually download my email faster than it was arrivingI spent a month clicking the unsubscribe links in all the spams in my inbox. Weirdly, it worked.
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Have you ever wondered why the Internet is always just a little bit too slow to support the kind of activity you’re trying to undertake? My latest Locus column, The Internet Will Always Suck, hypothesizes that whenever the Internet gets a little faster or cheaper, that unlocks a bunch of applications that couldn’t gain purchase at the old levels, and they rush in to fill in the new space that’s been opened up. The good news is that new ways of connecting with one another are always being opened up. The bad news is that this means that the net will always be more-or-less broken for whatever we depend upon it most.
Anika Ullmann, a graduate student in Cultural Studies Leuphana University in Luneberg, Germany, has published a paper on the relationship of my young adult novels to political radicalism, the hacker ethic and the “First Days of a Better Nation.” I found it a great and insightful read, and Annika kindly made a copy available for you to read, too!
We’re launching the new paperback edition of “Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, my book of practical advice and theory for artists trying to make sense of the net (it features intros by Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer, too!) at Santa Monica’s Diesel Books.
I’ll be there (225 26th Street, Santa Monica, CA 90402), from 6:30 to 7:30, talking about the book’s subjects, taking questions and signing copies.
The paperback features several updates, including a new essay I wrote for this edition.
Derek Bruff teaches a first-year college writing seminar in mathematics, an unusual kind of course that covers a lot of ground, and uses a novel as some of its instructional material — specifically, my novel Little Brother.
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It hits shelves today, featuring an essay I wrote specifically for this edition, tying together Korean politics — especially surveillance and censorship — with global mass-surveillance and the themes in the book.
This/next week, I’m speaking in events in Park City, Utah (Future in Review); Boston (The Freedom to Innovate Summit, the Berkman Center and Suffolk University); Toronto (Seneca College); Markham (In Conversation and Storytellers); and the University of Waterloo! Come say hi! (Image: Terri Oda, CC-BY)
Data breaches are winning the privacy wars, so what should privacy advocates do?
My latest Guardian column, “Why is it so hard to convince people to care about privacy,” argues that the hard part of the privacy wars (getting people to care about privacy) is behind us, because bad privacy regulation and practices are producing wave after wave of people who really want to protect their privacy.
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My latest Guardian column, How to save online advertising, looks at the writing on the wall for ad-blockers and ad-supported publishing, and suggests one way to keep ads viable.
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