I did a series of interviews with Intel Futurist Brian David Johnson, as part of my involvement in The Tomorrow Project, which resulted in my writing Knights of the Rainbow Table. Here they are!

Supreet Kaur made this delightful C# remix of a pivotal scene in Makers, as part of the coursework for a Game Design degree in London. The remix scored an A+ — congrats, Supreet!

Nemo Folkitz has graciously undertaken a German fan-translation of my short-short story Printcrime. The PDF is here, and the text is below.
more

My latest Guardian column is “Disorganised but effective: how technology lowers transaction costs,” a piece about a new kind of group that has been enabled by the Internet — a group with no formal structure that can still get stuff done, like Occupy and Anonymous.

The things that one person can do define what is “human”. The things that transcend the limits of an individual – building a skyscraper, governing a nation, laying a telecommunications network, writing an operating system – are the realm of the super-human.

The most profound social revolutions in human history have arisen whenever a technology comes along that lowers transaction costs. Technologies that makes it cheaper to work together lower the tax on super-human powers.

Language (which allowed for explicit communication), writing (which allowed for record-keeping), literacy (which allowed for communication at a distance and through time) and all the way up to assembly lines, telegraphs, telephones, cryptography (which lowers transaction costs by reducing the amount of energy you have to expend to keep attackers out of your coordination efforts), computers, networks, mobile phones and beyond.

Decreasing transaction costs means that the powerful can do more. If you’ve already organised a state or criminal enterprise or church with you at the top, it means that you’ve figured out how to harvest and distribute resources effectively enough to maintain your institutional stability.

Disorganised but effective: how technology lowers transaction costs

Click for the huge, full version

I recently turned in the manuscript for Homeland, the sequel to my 2008 YA novel Little Brother. Tor’s going to be bringing it out next February, 2013. I’ve got two more books coming in the meantime: Rapture of the Nerds (with Charlie Stross) and Pirate Cinema (a YA novel). (All three will be CC licensed)

I am absolutely delighted with this cover — a matched set with the cover for Little Brother!

Homeland

Suicide Girls has published an excerpt from Rapture of the Nerds, the novel Charlie Stross and I wrote, which will come out in September. Charlie and I will be touring the book together briefly after Labor Day. The details are still being settled, but there’s going to be some very exciting stops!

Rapture is the novel-length version of the two novellas Charlie and I wrote, Jury Service and Appeals Court. For this volume, we re-wrote those two, and added a long third section, Parole Board, from which the Suicide Girls excerpt is drawn. It’s a comic novel of the Singularity, party mash-note to technophilia and part indictment. As the title suggests, we’re both a little ambivalent on the idea of machine transcendence.

Of course, the sim is far too realistic. A virtual champagne bath should somehow manage to keep the champagne drinking-temp cold while still feeling warm to the touch. And it shouldn’t be sticky and hot and flat; it should feel like champagne does when it hits your tongue—icy and bubbly and fizzy. And when Huw’s nonbladder feels uncomfortably full and relaxed in the hot liquid and she lets a surreptitious stream loose, it should be magicked away, not instantly blended in with the vintage Veuve to make an instant tubworth of piss-mimosa.

This is what comes of having too much compute-time at one’s disposal, Huw seethes. In constraint, there is discipline, the need to choose how much reality you’re going to import and model. Sitting on an Io’s worth of computronium has freed the Galactic Authority—and isn’t that an unimaginative corker of a name? — from having to choose. And with her own self simulated as hot and wide as she can be bothered with, she can feel every unpleasant sensation, each individual sticky bubble, each droplet clinging to her body as she hops out of the tub and into the six-jet steam-shower for a top-to-bottom rinse, and then grabs a towel —every fiber slightly stiff and plasticky, as if fresh out of the wrapper and never properly laundered to relax the fibers—and dries off. She discovers that she is hyperaware, hyperalert, feeling every grain of not-dust in the not-air individually as it collides with her not-skin.

An Excerpt From The Final Rapturous Installment Of Cory Doctorow And Charles Stross’ Rapture of The Nerds