My next novel, Homeland (the sequel to Little Brother) is out in a few weeks, and I recently sat down with Nicole Powers from Suicide Girls for an interview about the book and the issues it raises, especially the student-debt bubble:

When it was just rich people going, it wasn’t about just getting a better job, because you were already rich, you already had the entré into the better job. You could already do unfunded apprenticeships and your parents’ friends were the people offering you the unfunded apprenticeships. You had a good five ways within the system. But now it’s a market transaction, and once it’s a market transaction we start applying cost benefit analysis to it. We start saying, well if the university degree earns you so many pounds, then it makes sense to start talking about you paying so many pounds. And if the objective here is to take people whose lifetime income expectancy was so many pounds, and make it a little bit higher –– which is what we call social mobility –– then why shouldn’t that be a virtuous cycle and they pay back into it. That way the university can expand the number of students they take on and all the rest of it, right?

The problem with that is that it’s become a Ponzi scheme, especially in America. We haven’t quite gotten there here. But in America, you have this crazy thing where it is somewhat true and it’s also universally received as true, that you can’t get a good job without a university degree. It’s also the case that universities, including many state colleges –– that are actually owned by the public –– can act as loan originators, which is to say they lend you the money but where those loans are then backed by the federal government. They can lend you any amount of money because there’s no risk to them because the government will take the loan off their hands. Those loans are then further secured by the federal government when they float them as bonds. So you have this weird perverse incentive where the universities, the more they charge the more they get –– which is a bit weird right? Because in real market economies, the more you charge the more you get up to a point, and then people start going, wait a second, that’s not worth it anymore, and they stop paying in. But if I tell you that you can’t get a job unless you get a degree, and then I tell you that no matter how much the degree costs I can get you a loan for that much, all of a sudden you start getting takers for those crazy propositions and that starts to look like a bubble, like a pyramid scheme.

Cory Doctorow: Homeland

Nominations are open again for science fiction’s Hugo Awards — if you attended last year’s WorldCon or have supported/bought a membership for this year’s con, you get a vote. There’s a lively LJ group discussing potential nominees (I often wait for the annual Locus Magazine best-of list to use as a crib for my nominations). My own eligible works are two novels: Pirate Cinema and Rapture of the Nerds (with Charles Stross), both from Tor Books. Here’s Charlie Stross’s list of eligible works, and here’s a wider list instigated by John Scalzi. Feel free to leave your favorites (or own eligible works) in the comments here.

My latest Guardian column is about positive externalities, the value that bystanders get from the stuff you’re already doing:

That’s the crux of this irrational fear of positive externalities: “If something I do has value, I deserve a cut.” It’s one thing to say that someone who hires you to do a job, or purchases your product, should pay you money. But positive externalities are the waste-product of something we were already going to do. They’re things that you have thrown away, that you have thrown off, that you have generated in the process of enjoying yourself and living your life.

The mania to internalise your positive externalities is the essence of cutting off your nose to spite your face. I walk down the street whistling a jaunty tune because I’m in a good mood — but stop as soon as I see someone smiling and enjoying the music. I keep my porchlight on to read by on a warm night, but if I catch you using the light to read your map, I switch it off, because those are my photons — I paid for ’em!

Worse still: the infectious idea of internalising externalities turns its victims into grasping, would-be rentiers. You translate a document because you need it in two languages. I come along and use those translations to teach a computer something about context. You tell me I owe you a slice of all the revenue my software generates. That’s just crazy. It’s like saying that someone who figures out how to recycle the rubbish you set out at the kerb should give you a piece of their earnings. Harvesting positive externalities involves collecting billions of minute shreds of residual value – snippets of discarded string –and balling them up into something big and useful.

If every shred needs to be accounted for and paid for, then the harvest won’t happen. Paying for every link you make, or every link you count, or every document you analyse is a losing game. Forget payment: the process of figuring out who to pay and how much is owed would totally swamp the expected return from whatever it is you’re planning on making out of all those unloved scraps.

Why trying to charge for everything will kill online creativity

This is pretty cool: Berlin’s C-base hackerspace has spawned a theatre troupe called C-atre. They’ve produced a theatrical adaptation of my short story “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth” (from my collection Overclocked) and they’re staging it later this month at Berlin’s Transmediale festival.

Update: Drat. It really looks like this is going to be impossible. Thanks to everyone who wrote in with offers and suggestions, but it just won’t happen. Sorry about this — and sorry, New Mexico, I tried!

If you caught last month’s post on my upcoming tour in February for Homeland, the sequel to Little Brother, you’ll have seen that I’m meant to be speaking in Albuquerque, NM on the evening of Feb 11, and in NYC on the morning of Feb 12. This turns out to be a nearly impossible trick to pull off, because the last red-eye out of Albuquerque airport to New York on the night of the 11th departs at 1930h, too early for me to do any kind of event at the store in Albuquerque.

(Image: Stearman Bi-Plane, Jack Herlihy, Pilot, 1929, PA1968.1.39, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from abqmuseumphotoarchives’s photostream)